Ensuring everyone gets their share.
Curious about how this works? Want to clarify a detail? The following are common questions and their answers regarding The Big Guy service.
The service is not custodial and does not hold, or exclusively control, the funds sent to each generated address. Anyone could spend those coins with the necessary technical knowledge because the project is open source, and the required information is publicly available.
The reason this is safe is because the script behind each generated address only allows for a single way of spending the funds. For each coin received, there's only one way of spending it that will be accepted, make the transaction valid, and accepted by the network. Either the funds remain unspent or are sent to one of the parties.
If you select the same parties, shares, and fee you will get back to the same address. These addresses are not generated randomly, like wallet addresses, and instead depend exclusively on the mentioned parameters.
Yes. The parties can be any valid eCash address from any wallet. There's no wallet support needed for the distribution.
If the value is too low to ensure the minimum network fee (1 sat / byte) then the coin is not shown in the outputs because spending it is not yet supported. Any value above the chosen fee will already appear in the table.
There's no way to change any of the parties, shares, or even the fee without changing the address. In other words, the generated address depends on these parameters.
This happens because the address is not something stored by the service but represents a script that will be validated by the eCash network. Since the script includes these parameters, any change to them will require a different address to be used.
The underlying script has not been independently audited but, before deploying changes, the service performs several tests with values that go from tens of XEC to tens of millions of XEC. These unit tests but tests using the latest node versions and consensus rules providing assurance that all values are spendable according to the rules and not lost to an error in the script logic.
As an additional measure, once a script has been tested and deployed, it's never changed. Instead, future changes and potential optimizations are provided as a new version which can be ignored by users that prefer to keep use the previous version.
The chosen fee is the minimum fee that will be paid to the network. But the effective fee can be larger due to rounding in the division of funds between shares, and because some shares can become too small to be distributed.
Before calculating the share for each party, the value is split into portions of 10 XEC. The remainder, up to 9.99 XEC will add up to fees and not distributed. If a share is smaller than 6 XEC then it will also be added to fees because the network imposes a limit on how small a coin can be.
The eCash network imposes a limit on how small a coin can be. This means that if someone tries to transfer to an address a value that is too small then the network will reject the transaction. Currently that value is 5.46 XEC. If the value, after taking the initial fee, is only 40 XEC and you have share of 10%, then you won't receive any funds. Instead, your portion will go to miners as fees.
For values above 21 million XEC, the amount cannot be distributed directly to parties. Instead of distributing, the button splits that amount in half and sends both halves back to the same address. Instead of receiving funds you will see both coins appear in the list of output coins. When the value is 21 M of lower, then distribution will occur.