Haven implements a great idea in a clever way, but I have a few questions about how it is going to work in practice, mainly around the issue of TRUST, which is very important for this coin
- When retrieving from offshore, how will the exchanges be chosen to calculate the correct number of coins to mine? I can imagine that this coin is not exactly government-friendly, so what if it has been 6 months and all the original exchanges were shut down, and now there are some new exchanges?
- Presumably in answer to the above question there is some sort of registration system for incorporating new exchanges into the protocol. Who gets to decide which exchanges are bona fide exchanges to be incorporated and which not? There seems to be some issues of third party trust here, which blockchain is supposed to avoid. How will fraudulent or potentially fraudulent exchanges be handled? What about exchanges set up by governments explicitly to manipulate the price? Very likely if the coin is perceived as an actual threat - which it will be if it is successful.
- What if all the original exchanges were shut down and there are no more exchanges at all when funds are brought back? What would the fall-back position be to decide on the number of coins to mine? Or would all funds simply be irretrievable in that scenario?
- Cryptoasset prices can be very volatile. What about the delay between issuing the command to retrieve funds, and the completion of all the mining? The price could change in that time, perhaps significantly, especially if manipulated by governments (if considered an actual, real threat). Will the amount to be mined be continually updated throughout mining? Won't there be the danger of mining too much? Or too little? Does the coin holder simply take on some price risk here? I thought the coin was supposed to avoid that?
- How will the mining pools to be used decided on? Pools come into and go out of existence. Would the coin holder simply be able to decide which pools? Or will the protocol itself set up virtual pools on chain as the need arises?
For someone interested in sending a significant amount of money offshore, these are very live questions. Although the coin implements a really nice, clever idea, I think it will be hard to build a robust offshore storage system that people can really trust with significant quantities of funds.
When retrieving from offshore, how will the exchanges be chosen to calculate the correct number of coins to mine? I can imagine that this coin is not exactly government-friendly, so what if it has been 6 months and all the original exchanges were shut down, and now there are some new exchanges?The Haven decentralised orcale, which will determine the current price, will be updated to include the new exchanges. The current thinking is that this wont be apart of the Haven core code, so its not like we'd need to hardfork Haven just to add more exchanges.
Presumably in answer to the above question there is some sort of registration system for incorporating new exchanges into the protocol. Who gets to decide which exchanges are bona fide exchanges to be incorporated and which not? There seems to be some issues of third party trust here, which blockchain is supposed to avoid. How will fraudulent or potentially fraudulent exchanges be handled? What about exchanges set up by governments explicitly to manipulate the price? Very likely if the coin is perceived as an actual threat - which it will be if it is successful.The devs will decide which exchange API to reference, same as how we update Haven Core, so we aren't going to reference those exchanges. We can also reference other pricing api's where Haven is listed. i.e. CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, LiveCoinWatch, Blockfolio etc
What if all the original exchanges were shut down and there are no more exchanges at all when funds are brought back? What would the fall-back position be to decide on the number of coins to mine? Or would all funds simply be irretrievable in that scenario?The protocol will just use the last known price (each block has the current price) although its pretty unlikley we'd lose all exchanges at once. We'd utilise decentralised exchanges which can't just be shut down.
Cryptoasset prices can be very volatile. What about the delay between issuing the command to retrieve funds, and the completion of all the mining? The price could change in that time, perhaps significantly, especially if manipulated by governments (if considered an actual, real threat). Will the amount to be mined be continually updated throughout mining? Won't there be the danger of mining too much? Or too little? Does the coin holder simply take on some price risk here? I thought the coin was supposed to avoid that?The new coins aren't mined, they are 'minted' instantly. This is treated just like a regular transaction so it will need to be in a block too and thus would take the same amount of time.
How will the mining pools to be used decided on? Pools come into and go out of existence. Would the coin holder simply be able to decide which pools? Or will the protocol itself set up virtual pools on chain as the need arises?Addressed above, the new coins aren't mined so no need for a pool