From the article by David Irvine Safecoin, why it’s safe and what it means for us all
Safecoin is a cryptographically secured digital asset. This sounds like a small issue, but in fact it is far from a small thing. One thing bitcoin was able to do was to find ways around the Byzantine Generals problem.
This same problem is solved in the SAFE network. Unlike bitcoin though this is not a ledger type single piece of information copied multiple times for safety. This is a fully decentralised approach. This has several advantages.
Many of the bitcoin technologies rely on adding to the blockchain and using it as proof of something or evidence of an event. These things in SAFE are non transferable digital assets. There can be billions of these systems at very little cost, certainly not bloat.
This gets interesting now.
We can have transferable assets and non transferable assets. So we can have auditable events locked in the network and transactions locked in the network with ‘network atomicity’. This means that with some clever work by app developers we can emulate almost every system imaginable, including contracts and laws etc. Add this to the capabilities of SAFE already and we can see what the future holds!