ELI5: double spending on maidsafe

Hello

Is there an ELI5 on how maidsafe solves double spending without a blockchain?

Thanks in advance!

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The network is autonomous, it follows rules. A transfer of digital info is atomic and uses a cryptographic signature to show the last person who owned it has singed the coin over to the current owner. When the current owner spends, then he asks the network to accept a signed message transferring ownership to the new owner. Imagine a coin looks like this

----------------------
CurrentOwnerID
----------------------
Previous owner ID
----------------------
Signature of previous owner

(signs whole coin)

This coin is kept in several groups who are all calculable (groups close to coin name, hash of coin name and hash of that again). Each group mus syncronise the ownership xfer (only one winner) and then the groups sync themselves (again only one winner).

Anyone reading the coin from the network get the current owner as all groups return what they believe is current owner (majority rules when syncronising, otherwise they all match). Any non collaborating group is reported and deranked. effectively moving bad nodes away. To attack a single group requires circa 3 times the current network size of nodes of rank capable of forming a group. Network picks ID for you so no targetting of where you get on the network. So attack becomes much higher than 80% and the more attackers the more safe it is (as each attacker prevents others getting majorities), more users achieve the same thing.

tl:dr
Its all a kinda magic :slight_smile:

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Dirvine, thank you for your time explaining this. It may be useful for others I am sure!

Seems it needs a big picture of issuance and everything in order to understand double spending, but it seems you are confident and thats important.

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No prob, we went over a few implementations that all can work before the crowd sale given the current network rules. We did register a patent in 2007 to protect the idea being killed of by some large corp, but dropped it as it is illegal in the UK to have patents for currency or voting systems, which is good as it meant we were OK and could not be challenged. I had not realised the USA would allow such things or I would have filed there to stop these large corps trying to patent around this stuff. We have plenty covered though and perhaps even enough to help bitcoin and others if they are challenged.

Until testnet3/beta we will likely not publish the final design for safecoin farming/spending, it will be very close to what I described above and in the white paper we did, but we are leaving some wiggle room as we want to make 100% sure we cover all bases. With the SAFE network design though there are some great options, All good though and thanks for the question, it will help others for sure.

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Here’s a link to David explaining someone making a safecoin transaction, this should give you some additional context.

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