I had forgotten about @polpolrene post which I had participated in. I must give credit to him as it must have at least started this thought process in my head even if I didn’t consciously remember it while working through this solution.
The main difference is credits vs. “hard money”. A strange concept for something entirely digital, however, I am inherently against the idea of IOUs.
If we’re not going to use “hard money” (direct file access means you own the coin) then safecoin divisibility is really a non-issue and could look like:
Every user has read only access to a network owned appendable data file. When a farmer mines a coin, their appendable data file gets a +1 to the balance.
When Alice sends value, it tells the network to subtract that balance from its file and add it to Bob’s file.
When a coin gets burned to the network, it updates it’s ledger. It knows its ledger balance and can keep it from going over 4.3B
Obviously it’s a little more involved than that. but I feel like we either need to pick a hard money solution or a ledger/IOU system and stick with it. Trying to combine the two just seems to be adding unneeded complications.