Following up on the proposed changes for the Mutable Data RFC. One such use case is an application of the third use case is safecoin divisibility. This brings many features to safecoins:
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Payments are not forced to be rounded to multiples of whole safecoins and can use fractions of a safecoin.
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Concept of put balance can be suppressed because fractions of a safecoin can be recycled.
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Farming attempts are not a whole or nothing matter anymore: if the selected random address is the address of an existing safecoin then the farmer gets the fractions that have been recycled (though sometimes there can be none).
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A safecoin can play the role of a wallet by itself. To be useful as a wallet its value must be higher than 10 cents. Many here hope that its value will explode one day, but let’s be realistic: there are potentially 4 billion safecoins and 21 million bitcoins. That means that even if Safecoin market cap reaches Bitcoin one’s then one safecoin would be worth 900*21/4000 = $4.70, that not enough for a wallet. To increase Safecoin value, a possibility brought by divisibility is to reduce the number of potential safecoins and correlatively to exchange one Maidsafecoin for less than one safecoin.
Let’s take a numerical example to illustrate these features. For simplicity I take here an u8 pair as key instead of an u64 pair. Imagine also that the put cost is seven 256th of a safecoin.
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User A farms a whole safecoin, the generated safecoin has then one key: (0, 255) belonging to A.
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A wants to pay thirty-one 256th of safecoin to user B. First, A makes a division and generates 2 keys (0, 30) and (31, 255). Then A transfers ownership of the former to B.
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A wants to add a new file in an existing directory. Its size is more than 3072 bytes but less than 3 MB so the cost is three puts. A division of his/her remaining fraction is done that replaces (31, 255) with (31, 37), (38, 44), (45, 51) and (52, 255). The first three are then recycled (deleted). A only owns (52, 255) now.
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User C farms the same safecoin. He/she only gets the recycled fraction, which is (31, 51).
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User D farms the same safecoin. He/she gets nothing because no fractions have been recycled since the last farming of this safecoin.
At the end of these operations: A owns (52, 255), B owns (0, 30) and C owns (31, 51).
Another possibility (optional): The lottery (probability of triggering a farming attempt) can also be replaced by farming of a safecoin fraction. This provides more regular revenues to farmers and avoids creation of farming pools like in the Bitcoin network. Both can also be used simultaneously (a lottery to farm a fraction of a safecoin).