Why does a safecoin need previous owner’s signature?

If the system is already secure, why does a safecoin need the previous owner’s signature to be saved there? Why not just have the current owner?

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You have to know who sent you the coin.

For instance I pay for something by sending you coin. How are you to know who sent the coin without that previous owner info. If you say send a message then I could fake one and the business is then unsure who paid for what and who did not pay.

If you want to be totally anonymous then create a new ID and create a wallet under that ID and send your coins there first. Then send the coins from that wallet and no one will ever know who that ID belonged to. It will just be random and you retain your anonymity. I can imagine that someone will create a wallet APP that will perform this action for you if you ask it to.

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Yeah, for payments to work it should track which address paid, at least.

Kind of like a pseudo-anonymous receipt / proof of payment

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As said by others a signature is needed to prove ownership of safecoin by sender. But your wish might be fulfilled if the signature isn’t saved.

This will come true if safecoins are implemented as Mutable Data because this structure doesn’t have a field to store the signature. Vaults check MD ownership by verifying message signature and then this signature is disgarded.

(but, as I already said many times, this works for one owner and I don’t see how this could work with multi sig).

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Interesting, so receipts could be opt-in

Receipts were another thing David talked about where you can get the send api to return a MD that holds a copy of the coin as a receipt.

In all the discussions by Maidsafe the coin will contain the new owner as the owner and also contain the previous owner. So I expect that however safecoin is implemented it will include the previous owner.

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This is a good question I’ve also wondered about. Seems like there are some cases where
it might be nice to have a record of who sent you a safecoin, but I’ve wondered if it is really
necessary to have it baked into the network protocol, rather than just let an app manage that info.
So in single owner mode, the current owner has permission to change the current owner field
in the MD to the individual they would like to send the coin to. As soon as they do this, they lose
control of the MD.

safe-cli:/home/me/purse $ chown you:yours myfavoritecoin

Isn’t this more secure?

Also, how does the balance method of divisibility fit into all of this? Transfer of ownership of a wallet/purse MD rather than a unit safecoin?

Maybe it would be OK for the sender to decide whether their ID is included, so you could send a coin with our without a “from” / previous owner entry.

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Can be spoofed, see my post above. This is insecure.

Anyone can create a throwaway ID which means the previous owner is random and anonymous. See my post above for how it would work. The wallet APP could do all the work for you.

Don’t transfer wallets since that means a wallet is needed for each balance method transfer. The network simply includes the previous owner in the message it sends. Yes in addition to sending a coin the network messages the receiver they have received a coin.

While the sender might choose to leave off their ID, it would allow avenues for gaming.

EG a person is selling 10 of the same item.

5 people send them the coins with no ID and sends the message saying they paid
3 People send them the coins with ID and sends the message saying they paid
2 people just send the message that they have paid but did not pay.

Then we have mayhem

At least with the throwaway ID it is still possible for each person to verify they paid and the 2 scammers lose out.

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Not that bad I think, but a good point nonetheless. We can expect that sellers will require people include an ID so they can match the payment to an order.

In your example the analogy would be somebody sending an anonymous envelope of cash (no name address or details) after placing an order by phone.

So I wouldn’t say this can be gamed, but if somebody sends coins without ID, they are going to have to persuade the seller it was them, and the seller may choose to ignore them. Without proof, what can they do?

It reduces to a customer relationship issue of the kind where somebody sends coin to the wrong deposit address on an exchange.

So I don’t think this should necessarily rule it out, but it’s probably better to use throwaway IDs as you suggest.

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@happybeing with money/crypto it’ll be a case that if it can be stuffed then (some) people will stuff up.

With the simple option of holding coins in anonymous wallets using throwaway IDs means that we can both provide the (immediate) money trail without losing any anonymity. And only having the previous owner then there is no history.

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