Custom digital tokens

I was wondering what the technical restrictions/difficulties on implementing custom tokens will be at launch? With that I don’t mean a new general crypto-currency, but I would like to create certain digital tokens to be used in a service I intend to provide. The goal is to have these tokens as actual property of the owners, so they can transfer them to others without the service acting as an exchange that handles the trade. The main reason for this is to absolve the service from legal responsibility/regulation concerning these tokens/assets.

Each token’s name would need a unique ID, which would be cryptographically signed by the service as a sign of authenticity at the moment of issuance. The name would also have previous and current owner ID fields, the latter signed by the previous owner, just like SafeCoins.

I guess the difficulty is the lack of transaction managers. Since the service is a trusted party already, would it theoretically be possible for the service to function as the transaction manager? Like transaction managers, the service could make a read-only transaction object for exchanges to verify the transaction was made. If necessary, it could also re-sign the token.

If anyone could help me wrapping my head around this idea and it’s details, I would really appreciate it.

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There is no responsibility for the service.

Not if it has the responsibility to stay away from those coins.

Otherwise it potentially could, but it would sound to me like a watering down of MaidSafe (if there’s no responsibility and since these meta coins couldn’t do anything more than SAFE coin can, what would be their role)?

Their role would be representation of objects in a game. Some of them would be directly sold to players, others would be won in the game. The players should be able to transfer them amongst themselves, either as gifts or as a trade, potentially through a third party exchange, without the game service having responsibility for such trade.

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Of course SafeCoins could be used as representations of game objects, but it would require storing SafeCoin ID->GameObjectType relationships in a giant table, plus at some point the SafeCoin itself could become worth a lot more than particular types of game objects. New customized tokens with custom data fields would be neater.

Actually, maybe it’s possible to use the first Escrow field for this. The game service could sign a SafeCoin as a different escrow for each GameObjectType? I can find little info about how the escrow system works exactly, if anyone has more info that would be great.

Edit: Probably not: “Each time prev / curr owner field get updated, the version_number must
be increased by 1 step, and all escrow fields shall be erased”

Maybe a SafeCoin “wrapper” is possible, i.e. the object data structure has a reference to a SafeCoinID and thus inherits the ownership of that SafeCoin.

If Safecoin division is possible, particularly down to the level of 4.3 Billion divisions of a single Safecoin, then presumably you could have each user of your service, simply subdivide down to the smallest possible amount and then, assuming that you set the maximum items limit per User at or under 4.3 Billion, a single Safecoin would suffice to track all items for that User.

It is my understanding that SafeCoin division needs to be enabled for the entire network at some point to allow a particular amount of divisions.

Yeah, that was my understanding as well, but the Safecoin Paper and the discussion @dirvine and I had afterward seems to suggest otherwise.

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@Seneca you’re right that having custom tokens can be a great thing. This is why “custom tokens” abound in our current system, though most are in the form of gift cards, in game tokens, currencies of various countries, etc. There’s no reason why Safecoin should be the be-all-end-all money of the future. Might it be the best kind of money - Bitcoin, Gold, Cash and whatever-else-is-great mixed together - maybe. I think it sounds pretty great. But like you I still want a solid, built in, fool proof, easy-to-use way to create other tokens - preferably based on the same principles/technology as Safecoins, and preferably with a way to exchange them with Safecoins without a third party (think Bitcoin/altcoin exchanges with the sidechains proposal).

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It’s a somewhat confusing subject, discussed in several threads several times already, so let’s not redo that here. Regardless, I guess if divisions won’t immediately be possible, some sort of mechanism could be created to let players swap full-SafeCoin objects for sub-SafeCoin objects at a later date.

What is important is that it’s possible for someone who is not the owner of a SafeCoin, to GET that SafeCoin regardless to read it’s current_owner field. I’m pretty sure it is, but some confirmation would be nice. Perhaps @dirvine would be so kind to shine his light on this matter?