Updated: RFC 0061 — Safe Network Token Distribution

The real number of unique tokens in the system is 4,525,524,120,000,000,000. The value 4,525,524,120 is obfuscation (jedi mind trick) to make people believe there are fewer than there really are… intended to affect human behavior.

The same is true with bitcoin and other cryptos of course. And one can well argue it is just semantics.

What I’ve come to believe though is that when it comes to a money system, obfuscation is a bad thing in all its forms (eg central banking, fractional reserve, etc) and transparency is a good thing that leads to clear thinking by the greatest number of individuals and clear thinking (good information) ultimately leads to the most efficient and functional economy.

Obfuscation of a money system tends to give more power/privilege to those who understand how things really work vs those who do not. eg: wall street vs man-on-the-street.

A person new to bitcoin who is told there are only “21 million” bitcoin in existence will likely behave differently than a person who is told there are 21 quadrillion bitcoin tokens in existence. likewise pricing BTC by “whole BTC” rather than the fundamental token/unit (satoshi) makes a person think that BTC price (in fiat) is really high. So, is this “clever marketing” or is it lying by obfuscation? I think it is the latter, and that this confustion by the majority of market participants distorts markets.

So what am I saying? I’m saying that Safe Network has a chance to be different. There is a chance to be clear and transparent in the marketing and messaging by making the integer unit (satoshi equivalent) the fundamental, indivisible “SafeCoin” token, and everything else is a power of that unit.

Thus whgt is called “1 SafeCoin” in this RFC would have a different name that clearly reflects it is a sum of many fundamental SafeCoin.

In discussions long ago I proposed using the SI units for this purpose. I still think that is workable and quite clear.

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Representations VS base units.

It is totally acceptable to say that a token is 1,000,000,000 base units

The human brain works better this way since we have all been taught decimal numbers and money is decimal too.

Do you buy food by weight in terms of moles or atoms? Would you even want to??

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But then, see the notes on subdivisions. We don’t quite know where this will land yet, nor do we know if in future more divisions will be needed. If we plump for a floor now, what do we do in future? Rebase? That could be considered by some to be a form of obfuscation too.

I think most will see this just a question of linguistics, ergonomics (and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good) rather than lying.

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Yup, and if the units are too tricky to work with, people will naturally rebase informally too.

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I realize I am probably in the minority on this point. Very few people have ever even thought about it, it seems.

I also happen to think I’m right. hehe. Before ending this discussion, I’d like to see someone address the point that a newcomer may well act differently if informed of the true number of tokens in existence rather than the “marketing number”. And that this is then “bad information” ie a market distortion.

At the end of the day, I will be somewhat happy/contented if the “intro to safecoin” type docs clearly include the two numbers, not just “XX SafeCoin divisible to 9 places”. Because avg person doesn’t understand what that divisibility means/entails.

Anyway, I just wanted to get this idea/discussion into the record.

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IOTA coin tried this and it didn’t go well for them.

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Are the “Company Shares” talked about in this post the things that were marketed via Bank to the Future?

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Bank to the Future were shares in a special entity company. That company held shares in Maidsafe itself.

As to distributions then i am uncertain but they would not be a 1:1 (shares in special entity and Maidsafe)

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The shares in the BTTF special entity are I believe equivalent so the issue of SNT will be the same for both.

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I vaguely remember that a share in BTTF was a fraction of a MaidSafe share. But I am not sure of this and I wanted to check this on BTTF site, but I can’t connect to it anymore because there is a new KYC procedure (well, not really new because it appeared several years ago but I didn’t really looked at it).

Does anyone know the conversion rate of a share on BTTF to SNT? (just to decide if the new KYC is worth the hassle).

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Not all food, but my Avogadro’s for sure.

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If I’m not mistaken these were the terms for the Bank-To-The-Future sales back in 2016:

2000 UK pounds bought 94 shares of BTTF. At any time after launch, each of these shares could be redeemed for 105 SNT if you didn’t want to hold on to your BTTF investment. There was a bonus of 2000 SNT offered for an early purchase of 2000 pounds worth of these shares and, later, another bonus of 250 offered for a subsequent purchase of 2000 pounds worth.

Edit: 4000 UK pounds worth of investment in BTTF got you .0138% of the company, which amounted to 187.9657 shares.

Data payments at inception (Resource Supply Reward)

70% remaining after implementation (Resource Supply Reward)

So the emission will be increased payment to the node operator or subsidized payments for uploading? . . or . .

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Yes, an upload would trigger an emission which would be paid as a supplement to the node op

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Are you thinking at a static rate or fluctuating to help attract new nodes if need be?
Kind of like POS inflation moves in bounds to target a desired stake ratio.

Would that be possible.

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Better to ask @dirvine or @oetyng I think, but IIRC most of the routes discussed were schedule based rather than dynamic, simplicity and stability in mind.

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Yaaay for KISS :slight_smile:

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I think it would require human intervention unless there was a network metric that knew it needed to attract more users. It knows when to attract more farmers, i.e. when it’s running short of storage, but users are not a metric known yet. Perhaps there is some way, but then I suppose it needs to know how many folks are in the planet and when it’s got them all :slight_smile:

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Yes I mean additional incentive to attract more farmers/node operators.

So the emission goes up increasing rewards to attract more nodes to be spun up if storage space is low.

IDK it may be redundant but it could be a little boost too.

I like that it provides a concrete reason for emissions, incentive to reach network requirements for storage.
Not sure there is currently a reason for emissions, it could run just fine on the genesis supply, or am missing it?

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It’s really to satisfy the original whitepaper where we did state there would be 2^32 coins and what was to be released in the crowdsale was 10% of that. So there is a lot of coins to give out in some fashion that is fair (there was 5% for investors and 5% for core dev over time and 10% app devs).

It’s all a bit of a chore and @JimCollinson and Andrew have been working at it for months now to try and make sure it’s all fair.

They have done that with not too much help from devs, although @oetyng has given a ton of input. It’s always strange in MaidSafe as devs are just keen on launching a technically strong foundation network. Money is always the last thing :slight_smile: I kinda like that really, but we all know the importance of economic security etc. It’s just our focus is technical.

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