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I would really love to use a stellar token for a game to track e.g. ownership of different areas/land?

Is this possible with stellar?

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Yes. You will have to create a separate asset for each item (kitty/land/area). The key part is that you currently can't change number of decimal places for assets on Stellar which are, by default, divisible to 7 decimal places. If you want your asset to be non-divisible, 0.0000001 of your asset will represent a single item. You will have to present it correctly in your user interface.

Examples

Divisible asset (ex. area/land)

If you want to allow your users to send a fraction of unit of your item (up to 1/10,000,000) you don't have to do anything special in your user interface as they are divisible by default in Stellar. You can create a new issuing account and send the following assets to your distribution account:

  • 1 LAND1
  • 1 LAND2
  • 1 LAND3

Then you can create a new offer to sell part of your land like: Sell 0.5 LAND1 Buy 1000 XLM.

Non-divisible asset (ex. kittens)

Things get a little more complicated for non-divisible assets because you need to update your user interface to interpret 0.0000001 of your asset as a single item. Again, you can create a new issuing account but this time you only send 0.0000001 of each asset what represents a single item:

  • 0.0000001 KITTEN1
  • 0.0000001 KITTEN2
  • 0.0000001 KITTEN3

Now, because assets on Stellar are divisible only to 7 decimal places you can't send/sell a part of 1 kitten (this would hurt!). So creating a following offer: Sell 0.0000001 KITTEN1 Buy 1,000 XLM means you are selling KITTEN1 for 1,000 XLM.

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  • its a planet as big as our earth.. and tracking each square meter by creating a token for every single square meter seems to be too complicated and will lead to other issues ;)
    – kannix
    Jan 25, 2018 at 10:52
  • @kannix From the code point of view I don't think it complicate things much as it falls under "Non-divisible asset". However there is an obvious scalability issue here. Earth surface area is 510.1 trillion m2. (according to Google). So if you used only 1 byte for each square meter (and it's obviously not enough to store all the ownership info) you'd need 510 TB of storage. I don't any blockchain solution out there can handle this. Even centralised solution for such application isn't trivial.
    – Bartek Nowotarski
    Jan 25, 2018 at 11:25
  • @BartekNowotarski do you have a feel for how many LAND* assets could be currently supported from a single issuing account in Stellar? I'm concerned about the scalability of things like trustlines and Stellar.toml. For the use-case above, we'd potentially want thousands or millions of LAND Assets.
    – Symmetric
    Apr 18, 2018 at 16:37
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Short answer: right now it's not possible as the way assets are represented is done using trust lines that by design don't distinguish between tokens.

Convoluted answer: you could do it by issuing an asset per unique token (and you would issue only 1 of each). From a data set point of view it's workable (you would use the ASSET_TYPE_CREDIT_ALPHANUM12 asset type), where this solution breaks down is on usability as transferring tokens would require creating a trust line per token. For somebody to transfer a token to somebody else, the parties would have to cooperate on a multi-sig transaction that does something like:

  1. operation1 - create trustline in destination account
  2. operation2 - send 1 token to destination
  3. operation3 - delete trustline in source account
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