Discussion: Transfer operation vs Credit / Debit operations

[syuan100]

Primers:

• Rosetta Operation Schema
• Rosetta Principles on Low-Level Abstractions

Currently, token transfers are specified using two operations in this order:

• A debit operation (- amount, account A)
• A credit operation (+ amount, account B)

I decided to do this as a form of strongly "typing" the operations so that I can ensure a Debit occurs before a Credit, which also makes parsing Construction requests a little easier. However this forces the user to adhere to a stricter standard than other implementations.

Some implementations have a simple "transfer" operation, where the only difference is the signed "amount" for the operation. So for a token transfer, you would have two transfer operations like so:

• A transfer operation (- amount, account A)
• A transfer operation (+ amoun, account B)

This allows the end user to be more flexible when defining a token transfer, but error checking becomes a bit more tedious than having explicit debit and credit operations.

Would be happy to hear thoughts on what people think would be the best path forward.