New Tokens on SAFE

Project specific coins narrow incentives around that project. “Why wasn’t SAFE designed to do all payments in Bitcoin?” for example.

Yes, many different flavored salts to suit ones taste. But why not just accept SNT directly in order to perform a function or use an app? I can think of only three reasons. 1) Divisibility, 2) Speculation, 3) Trendiness/Hype/“Look at me I support XYZ”.

Because Bitcoin is stupid :wink:. Really though, salts use the same infrastructure but stand alone as their own datatype no? More like Omni, but independent of SNT transactions.

I see your point though. Essentially it becomes an analogy to markets in the real where SNT is a universally accepted currency and salts are a commodity (within the network, metaphorically speaking of course). Narrowing incentives with salts would be an easy way to do PtD on the network, without requiring the network core to manage PtD in any way.

There are major problems/challenges with this imo. One of the reasons for Safe is to make things simple and secure online. Having a Safe and single sign-on with a simple interface to manage your private and personal data/transactions. Once you introduce salts, then every single app is going to have it’s own token coin that a user will need to buy in order to do anything. ApplepieToken, AmazonBootsToken, GugleToken, FrenchFriedChickenToken, etc… then we’re back to square one and the complicatedness goes parabolic. It defeats one of the major benefits of the whole project imo.

Another reason might be to decouple from outside economics - so an in app/game token that can only be created and transferred through operations within the app rather than at will of one owner to another.

3 Likes

Yes, this was essentially the concept I’ve been toying with and mulling over the past few days. I’m conflicted though about what this type of implementation means for the network as a whole. It seems like a pandora’s box. Please convince me I’m wrong.

No idea if you’re right or wrong.

Instead I observe that a characteristic of resilient adaptive (evolutionary) systems is diversity, which requires acceptance of, in fact profits through getting things wrong. In other words it’s a concept with limited use!

Put another way, why not?

This can be abstracted away such that the user doesn’t see this. The transaction would just run through a DEX/AMM on its way to interacting with the project in question.

Isn’t this something an app-builder can do for themselves - if they decide they critically need to have their own token, let them create one on their end and then just distribute it via their app on SN … Why should SN take on the overhead when they can do it themselves?

I have considered those examples before. The issue I keep coming back to is this: why not just use SNT directly?

We’re not talking about or asking for that.

1 Like

@happybeing

Assuming beneficial gain is derived from the error, otherwise it only accumulates damage.

This kind of misses my point. If you want to be able to reward behavior etc to use SN you would have to have a way of making sure you had a constant supply. So how do you do that? You would likely need a reserve and potentially a massive one which would be a lot of upfront capital. That is restrictive to innovation imo.

Think of it in terms of learning, or of evolution. Do you accumulate damage through mistakes, or do you learn through the experience.

Simple economics. Charge a fee for some uses, payout rewards for others.

Usually both.

@jlpell

My perspective on the topic:

@happybeing

My point was that merely making mistakes does not guarantee the results of learning from them. One must intentionally invest effort in that process of deriving beneficial gain from the mistake. While it seems intuitive to me to link making mistakes with learning from them, in my experience that can’t be practically assumed of people.

I agree. I have less of a problem with massive tokenization of things on Safe Network because at least they all are interchangeable or swappable atomically that is all one ecosystem. To contrast that the problem I have with tokenizing everything outside of Safe Network is each network is incapable of being a full blown ecosystem (eg relying on another network for storage or having too high gas fees for useful dapp ecosystem) and because of their shortcomings or advantages/disadvantages they have to be stitched together somehow. It’s a never ending cycle of trying to add on less complex layers to overly complex base layers etc etc, not a great explanation but I think you catch my drift.

2 Likes

That’s one approach but I bet people would rather not be charged and still be rewarded for the target behavior. If it’s possible then why not?

Can you give an example, this statement sounds too Dr. Evil / Zuckerbuck.

Safe’s storage tech isn’t kept internal, it’s exposed through a public API and is a feature of the network.

Similarly the token and possibly any other tech of the network should be made available to application developers. It’d be great to be able to extend SNT ala colored coins/OMNI, attach ‘smart contracts’, etc.

The one caveat is it should be done in a way where it’s no more costly to generate and manage meta tokens than it is to manipulate data on Safe. The reason is that for an indie game from a poor dev, they should be able to reuse SNT tech for an in-game token, without it being expensive or even subject to fluctuations due to the real-world fluctuation of SNT value if possible?

Tornado cash (a zkp mixer on Ethereum) has a TORN ERC-20 token. It is used for governance of the project, and users earn TORN for providing liquidity, which increases the anonymity set of the mixer.

Ok, you’ve almost convinced me. It doesn’t make much sense to use SNT as the virtual currency inside a medieval strategy game. So salt as a form of “themed SNT” as @anon57419684 was alluding to is logical

I disagree here though. This is a feature, not a bug, and a good middle ground. Making sure that issuers need to stake at least some SNT when “the salt” is created would seem to be a good way to minimize the noise and eliminate spam. It doesn’t need to be much, but at least something, determined by a simple rule, when the salt is made.

I see what you mean about the “freemium” option, but “freemium” doesn’t really work anymore on Safe. Every write operation of your app or game will require SNT payment to the network. The user will need to pay something no matter what unless they are a passive observer in read-only mode. The only way around this is to have a local user cache on the user’s device, that isn’t stored on the network.

2 Likes