I believe I understand the basics of how a safe coin works, but am still a little confused about some of the details. Please let me know if I have understood the following correctly.
- A safe coin is a piece of data like a file.
- Safe coins are not all stored in a central ledger, but the files are stored with the owner (and possibly the quorum of nodes who last signed for the transfer of them to a new owner).
- Safe coins contain data stating who the the previous owner and current owner are.
- Transfer between owners is done by the owner signing the coin over to the next (public key?) and the quorum of nodes arriving at consensus as to the new ownership being valid. The previous owner and current owner list in the coin is then updated.
- There will be a maximum of no more than 2^32 safe coins.
- Different safe coins are reserved for specific distributions. e.g. developers, crowd sales etc.
- Some safe coins were not sold into circulation so will be burned/destroyed, meaning the total in circulation will be less than 2^32.
So my questions are:
Q. What is to stop people creating their own coins for use on the safe network? Is there some kind of coin genesis address for new coins?
Q. What is to stop a quorum creating fake coins whcih then look like genuine coins because there is no form of centralised ledger?
I’m pretty sure this is a fairly well covered topic but I can’t find a satisfactory answer, so apologies for the possible duplicate post.
No, it’s an address in the network. It can be owned or not owned. So if you are node “ABC” in the network you might own Safecoin “XYZ”. You prove with a crypto sign that you are the owner of the address. So you tell your close nodes > hi there, I own Safecoin “XYZ” and want to move it. Your close nodes connect to the group responsible for Safecoin “XYZ”. If they agree you’re the owner you can do the transactions. It looks something like this:
You sign request > Your close nodes sign and froward to responsible group > responsible group signs as well > Safecoin is now owned by someone else or un-owned (“burned”). When not owned a new user can become the owner when the address is farmed.
Safecoins are in 32 bit address space, so 4,3 billions at max.
This might give you a better understanding of SAFEcoin
It is a reserve SD that is recognized network wide. I’m too lazy to look it up, but if I can still remember it SD number 7. You can try to create SD number 7, but the network won’t accept it, because it knows that that is SAFEcoins.
No, it’s an address in the network. It can be owned or not owned.
It is both! Each coin is a piece of data with an id/address in its own xor based address space. Rene is right that it isn’t like an ordinary file, and not held in the wallet, which will just contain a list of addresses for clubs that you own).
To spend a coin you must sign a message/transaction with a private key but this will be invisible to the user, with authority established just by logging into your account.
The coin data is controlled by the group of nodes closest to a particular address, and only these nodes can modify the data (issue/change ownership). To see why this is secure search for “group consensus”, but it is very very hard for someone to gain control of enough nodes to modify a coin they don’t own, or to issue a coin that has not yet been assigned, or a coin that has been returned to the network in payment for storage (recycled).
Coins can only be issued:
in exchange for MaidSafecoin when the network launches.
in exchange for resources (initially storage, but later also compute) being provided to the network - a similar “group consensus” mechanism is used to ensure “proof of resource” before issuing a coin.
as a reward to developers whose apps are putting data to the network
to fund core development
possibly also to reward producers who post popular content (pay the producer, aka PtP)
The further you go down the above list the less detail I have about the “how”, and in the case of the last item it is still open to debate whether this (PtP) will happen, depending on testing.