Bitcoin Forum

tl;dr modded libertarian/anarchy version of SecondLife based on Bitcoin instead of $L, to experiment with libertarian ideas in virtual space similar to what Seasteading wants to do on the ocean.

Long version:
I'm considering setting up a modified SecondLife server,  where the currency is bitcoin, the rules/laws are set up by the people, and administrator duties are only to keep it running, allowing the inhabitants to create their own contracts and settle their own disputes. Thoughts/ideas?

Some of mine that come to mind:
- Ideally this could be run through Tor/I2P, to help it exist entirely outside of any nation's laws (allow gambling, self-regulated financial markets, total freedom of expression, etc)
- Would like to have the server and client open-sourced (like the official one) in order to let people add features to deal with the unique issues, such as lack of "official" moderation
- Obviously since no one can be killed or hurt for real, or (in current client version) have their property seized, trolling will be a major issue that will have to be dealt with in more creative ways (customized ignore/ban lists, software enforced property contracts, etc?)
- Being completely unrestricted in design of the client, and the world itself, I could see this progressing technologically very quickly, if even just to create weapons, defensive systems, and contract enforcement software to protect against trolls and scammers.
- Things like property would have to be defined, i.e. are there copyright protections and do you pay for a copy of someone's creation, or is copying freely available, and you just pay for the physical storage needed to hold it in your inventory on the server. Currently LindenLabs runs all the servers from their own server farms and does not allow people to run personal servers out of fear that anyone entering their server can have all their stuff (clothing, gadgets, animations) copied and stolen. Without IP that wouldn't be an issue, and people will compete for the best private servers with most reliable and cheap inventory storage (which still needs physical storage). If copy protections are non-existant, then issues of running a lot of distributed personal servers as a connected mesh won't be a problem.

At the least this could be an interesting experiment/test bed for libertarian/anarcho-capitalist ideas. At most, it may end up creating it's own unique businesses and communities that exist as their own sovereign nation with its own bitcoin-based economy in the interwebs (what SecondLife was SUPPOSED to be, before the mods turned it into a totalitarian chat room). The best thing is that it won't require $100's of millions of initial investment for a floating city.

Thoughts/ideas/interests?

1)  Second life is a game, and cannot have the kind of real incentives to have any real meaning to political philosphophies.

2)  Secon life is, from what I understand, already almost an anarchy.

If by incentives you mean money, before the mods banned a slew of activities, SecondLife was quickly growing an economy based around entertainment and service businesses, as well as financial systems. There were casinos, clubs with paid performers, trivia games with cash incentives, escort services, meeting places with custom architectural designs and services, theaters where people could watch streamed movies together, security groups, sophisticated property defence weapons, banks, networked retail/POS systems, financial service providers such as lenders and accountants, and even the beginnings of an in game stock market, similar to the GLBSE. People were making real money in the game (I bought my $750 smart phone back in 2004 entirely from financial service business gains). In short, it was almost like a 3D version of bitcointalk.org with its own Bitcoin, before the mods reminded everyone that the forum and the currency are centrally controlled.


Only in regards to what you can build and sell, and even then only to a point. Rules and regulations are still strictly enforced by the mods, all in game content and activities are regulated by US laws, and all gambling, financial services, and interest bearing accounts, as well as certain programs, are banned. That pretty much cut the beginnings of its economy just as it was about to explode. Having the place user-modded as opposed to whining to and depending on the mods, plus allowing people to set up their own laws and rules, should make it much more interesting, too.

Maybe that's what Web 3.0 will look like. A virtual simulated environment.

The problem though is that tor is way too slow.

If you haven't already, check out Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. The Metaverse is pretty much exactly that.

SecondLife was in fact inspired and based on Snow Crash, but I guess ran afoul of some laws and regulations when it grew too big.


It would be annoyingly slow, but not impossibly so. Any ideas for how to get around that issue? Maybe have an open Tor node in every client to help increase the number of active nodes?
On that same topic, I really wish I could help the Tor project by running my own node, but I don't want FBI beating down my door cause someone used my server to access CP :( Anyone have any recommendations?

Something like I2P is probably a better model for such an Internet 2.0.

I haven't used it much, but my understanding is that it's a lot faster than Tor, and more secure as well.

Just realized, a lot of bitcoiners would likely not use the system, using their graphics cards to mine instead  ::)

So, project closed due to non-interest!  >:(


Nah, kidding  ;D. I'll likely play with it as a hobby whether there's interest or not. Keep the ideas/suggestions coming!

No I don't.  Monetary incentives are the easy part.

Building reputation? Accumulating wealth-producing businesses? Acquiring property? Establishing markets and commerce?Setting up a secure residence where you can do with friends what you want without government interference? Aside from owning physical items (though if a black market like Silk Road forms on there...), and having physical interractions, I can't think of other incentives. But I would see this project as a sort of simulation, where the libertarian ideas can be tested out without threats or huge initial financial risks. Sort of like play money used to learn about stock markets.

I play games to get away from reality, not simulate it.

Again, not saying this will be a game (neither is SeconLife, really). It's a simulation of a political society and economy, where you are free to experiment with your ideas and creativity in a more safe environment, same as on this forum, but with more true-to-life simulation possibilities. I think as a platform it really can be a cheaper online-only alternative to seasteading. (Besides, plenty of non reality in current SL already). I actually quit playing SL a while ago because it really did just turn into a glorified 3D chatroom. I'm hoping something similar with more freedom and real money would be more interesting.

I really think the only thing that draws people to platforms such as that is that they do not simulate reality. Do you want to go to your job for 8 hours every day and then go home and do your simulated job for another few hours?

Considering reality is a government run and regulated world, being a place where you can escape statism and hang out in a virtual libertopia will sort of be the point here. And since I would want it to run on bitcoin instead of centrally controlled game money, maybe if you're good enough, your second, in-game job is all you'll need? For me, it would be fun just to explore the possibilities we've been talking about here. Setting up some sort of contract and reputation system, debating and establishing our own system of legal arbitration, seeing what kinds of creative ways people can make money off of their IP, figuring out how property can even exist in a virtual digital environment, writing software to protect or attack people's property and privacy to outwit the competing security groups, or even just hanging out in a totally lawles Wild West environment. A chance of seeing how the Seasteading project may evolve without the risk of a real city sinking in flames. Really just a forum like this, with more possibility of implementing the ideas. Kinda far from reality...

I don't think you can build virtual freedom on top of real slavery. At the end of the day, you're still subject to the whims of whatever state you reside in. I just think our time is better spent trying to live as free as we can in the real world, instead of a virtual one.

Then again, this says I who argue about the nature of the state with strangers on the internet.

SecondLife has little appeal to anyone anymore besides furry sex roleplayers


The latency implications of this and how much it will choke your CPU's time made me cringe.

Even building on older open-source options, this is a hell of an undertaking.


Sounds like a mess, just being honest

Yeah, pretty much this; escapism is fun as a distraction but this is just too much, technical limits non-wthstanding

I'd love to see I2P support on something like this, at least for the experimental value. Also, how about OpenSimulator (don't know much about it, just asking)?

I don't get it. Who would use such a frivolous piece of internet-waste?

It will not be an experiment in anything, because it is not real life. I would have no qualms about getting on your bitlife servers and raping and pillaging and scamming as there are no implications. I would never consider such behavior in the real world, as it is not some imaginary libertopia.

Self governance doesn't work. Look at somalia or any other warlord controlled nation.

*facepalm*

So, what is the reason you "would never consider such behavior"? Do you forego rape and pillage because the government forces you to? Or perhaps it's that you think yourself superior in your lack of desire to do so, when in fact most people feel the same way. Those "rape and pillage" types, guess what they're attracted to - power. The same centralized power you say we need in order to protect us from rape and pillage.

Government beauracrats already play this game of rape and pillage without any repurcussions.

Wow, Somalia again, as the glaring symbol of self governance.

I know you're trolling, but in SL basically you control the land you own (correct me if I'm wrong). This "right" comes pretty natural, since owning land is analogous to owning space+bandwidth, so think of your land as a web page. There are only technical and regulatory limitations to the laws you can define. With Rassah's proposal, I'm guessing all regulatory limitations will be removed.

I think this can be pretty useful. SL has minimal utility as a chat server but if you are into the virtual thing it can get very creative. It would appeal to me if I will be able to find enough live performance. Live lessons, live music, that sort of thing. Organizers are essential.

What puts me off about SL is the real-life simulation aspect: costumes, emotes and whatnot. I have my real life already, thank you very much. ;) (It would be more appealing to me if it was an ASCII roguelike, though I'm not your target audience.)

I don't have any new ideas unfortunately. The best thing would be if this had competitive features of its own, Bitcoin being only one of the features. Otherwise it would get stuck as yet another service exclusively for the Bitcoin community.

I'm going to piggy back on your comment and quote myself from the previous page, because I don't want the point to be missed and I think it's relevant to your own:

Dude, I don't know what you are going on about. I am saying that overall, behavior on the internet is fundamentally different than that in real life and as such, this 'experiment' has no context.

To address your rant, would you rather have your neighborhood gangs squabbling over who you pay your taxes to while your children are gunned down in the fray, or would you rather just pay the man and go about your day?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Read up and then get back to me with a question that doesn't consist entirely of fallacy.

Btw, an idea i think would be awesome to have implemented in SL, and wouldn't be any less awesome in this FreeSL thing your proposing; don't limit asset storage just to the sim hosts or other centralized options, let people choose to host their shit anywhere they want, anything from a choice of free and paid third party web storage services even hosting it on their own machine, having their shit only avaiable while they're online and getting downloaded by other people only as fast as their upload pipe allows. And make it easy to switch hosts, for things that are present on sims, disconnected from your av, store the asset URL on the sim not the asset itself (if the sim managers want they could just restrict the URLs to their own hosting service if they want); similarly for assets on your avatar, the client informs the server the URLs it wanna use and the servers decide if they wanna allow everything or restrict to specific hosts, or even only specific URLs under their control.


Of course, sim managers (and  any clients) might decide it's a good idea to cache assets locally; i don't see anything stopping them from doing that.



edit: Of course scripts would need to be stored on the sims in order to run, but if people want, they should be allowed to save the scripts elsewhere and have the sim automaticly (or when told so) update the cached copy of the sourcecode and respective bytecode. And if it finally comes with clientside thirdparty scripting (obviouslly sandboxed etc), similarly clients will hold a cached copy of the source and locally copiled bytecode (though if you gonna add client side scripting, it would also be great to have a separated type of them, "rooted" scripts, things people choose to install, kinda like Firefox's extensions, things that can do pretty much everything the user can plus twiddle with the internals directly. Obviously people should only install those they trust won't do bad things against their will.)

Oh, and it would be nice if you make it trully peer to peer, make sims be hostable anywhere instead of inside a self-contained grid, and the client capable of hosting a (possibly reduced capacity) full fledged sim if the user desires, so they can carry their own home wherever they go (to put sims together, instead of considering grid coordinates, have each border come with a URL for the intended neighbor sim; if the sim on the other side of the border links back, and the two sims are running compatible backends, things like shared physics over the border and moving/sharing assets (links and cached copies) seamless etc would be enabled, otherwise the border would work one way, and the client would connect to the neighbor sim when it's in drawing (or hearing or whatever) range to show what is there before the avatar crosses the border, and to make the crossing smoother.



edit: obviously for more intensive things like multisim racing etc, having the two machines close, measured in terms of speed, bandwidth and latency, would likely be quite close to top priority.

edit2: oh, and you shouldn't need to limit the intersim gateways to just the borders, you could also add arbitrarily positioned and shaped gateways kinda like the "portals" in Croquet (the two way negotiation between the sims might be a tad more complicated in this case i guess, but i think it's worth the effort)

(i promise this is the last post of this burst, if i think of anything that won't be suited to be just edited in i'll write it down and wait for replies here)

Btw, i think you might be interested in this idea i suggested some time ago; the thread's Just throwing an idea out there: Distributed decentralized MOO/Second Life hybrid virtual universe?  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4184.0)

Holy crap that's a lot of ideas/suggestions! Lucky for me, apparently OpenSim does a lot of this stuff already, so I won't have to learn how to mod the thing from scratch...

Regarding Randy's issues, that'll be part of the fun experiment. Sure, there won't be real life punishments, but seeing how people end up being able to deal with trolls such as yourself should be interesting. Perhaps there will be a reputation system, where being a douche damages your reputation and restricts your mobility to travel over people's territory. Maybe just a weapons system that automatically recognizes trolling behavior and blasts you our of the area. Who knows. I just want to see what pople would do if left to their own devices.

Also, awesome to know that the only thing keeping you descent in life is the threat of police authority.

The fact that many people express the sentiment that the only thing keeping them from stealing, raping, and pillaging is the threat of police force (or for many Christians who claim God is the source of all morality that only the threat of hell) is indeed a troubling idea

I believe that concept was first brought up by BitterTea. I intended to say that a virtual environment is no basis for comparison to the real world as it lacks depth and consequences. People will not behave in a manner natural to a society because it lacks the REAL societal implications. Your libertarian second life is just another unmoderated forum -in a pretty dress- that will eventually draw the dregs of society.

o nos, i got negatives xp

We just gotta make it interesting enough for those we wanna keep and boring enough for the people we wanna distance from and i expect things will get quite decent.

Maybe you should just try running SMF, only with more elaborate avatars

Can you, for example, build a house where the rooms are the faces of a tesseract, which allows you to walk from room to room going 'round and 'round the warped space, with just SMF + fancy avatars?

Indeed.  Its true though - when a area loses police protection, the looters and rapists emerge very fast.  Look at Baghdad in 2003, London in 2011 and endless examples in between.  Just because its "troubling" that people do bad things doesn't mean you can pretend we are all angels.

Basically, it's the same thing keeping people from pissing and crapping all over where they live and eat so their home is full of waste.

The curious thing is mice and some other little critters do that.  Mice find food and then eat a little bit and then crap huge volumes, more than they even ate.  Anyone who has had them invade your home knows this.

So it's basically this.

It'll get caught up in the whole day trading of bitcoin and you need something super popular to stabilize the price.  If Diablo 3 had decided to use only bitcoin instead of only PayPal, then that would've done it.

Hmmm... considering your avatar is a furry, perhaps you should play on that.  The ideal furry place is where they can roleplay, yiff, and then do really disturbing & bizarre yiff stuff, and then they can leave the world and claim they merely like the art and only 1% of furries are into yiff and they're just a dignified furry not into that.

That would not -stabilize- the price. First it would move it way up as people discovered the development. Then up more as people speculated on how many other large games/companies would accept coins. Then down if time passed and more did not or up if even more if others were getting in.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for stability.

You only see what you want to see. If people want order, it means there is a demand for services which keep it, which means there is money to be made supplying it. What about examples like Egypt where the community formed groups to police itself, when the police no longer would?

People are just so used to relying on the state for such things that it takes longer than a short period of chaos for people to self organize. Remember, anarchy is not chaos, anarchy is self order.

Egypt is in the midst of a crime wave.  I think you need examples from the real world.

+1

Are you claiming that it is not possible to provide private defense of persons and property?

I am, at least on a global scale.

Obviously, some rich fuck can afford some executive security and get driven around in a bulletproof escalade, but that isn't exactly the status quo, is it...

Can you expound on this point? What does "global scale" defense look like? Do we have that today?

The private defence becomes the new state.  The chaos is usually an intermediate state.

Thanks for the assertion, now provide some logic to back it up. Start from assumptions and build to the conclusion.

Private defense can be as simple as everyone owning a gun. How does that become a monopoly on violence?

We've done that in the Fire-fighter thread.  Why repeat it?

Can a new "state" version of private defence emerge on something like a virtual world, where everyone who can afford to can just buy their own defensive weaponry I wonder?

You decide - you make the game so you make the rules.

If i make this, I wont make any rules. You would have to decide.

Because, apparently, you don't get it.

Or you do, and simply don't wish to hurt your head with arguments & logic you cannot refute.

http://openmetaverse.org/
https://www.virwox.com/omc-open-metaverse-currency.php
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/05/should-opensim-use-bitcoin-as-its-virtual-currency.html
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/06/bitcoin-opensim-fail.html

Wow, thanks!

Also see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49310.0

I have refuted them.  Why repeat it in every thread? 

Nor is it particularly effective if you are too much of a fuck, is it...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49276.0

Citation please?

I can accept that you believe that you have refuted them, but you have done nothing of the sort.  Most of your readership is either amused by you, or agrieved.  I doubt that even those who agree with your positions would agree that you have 'refuted' much of note.

It should.  Make online games that are item based where you have to treadmill for items and gold.  Then have a system where they buy and sell virtual items, real estate, and characters with bitcoins.  The more it is used for commerce, the more buffers keep the Gox stuff from controlling the price.

That's because the designers don't care or understand how real economies work, and mostly care about the game being fun and keeping people playing. You sound a bit like Krugman or Greenspan saying that destroying the excess houses built during the housing bubble would have solved our financial problems (kept home prices propped up).

I recommend reading this very interesting article: http://www.pathofexile.com/news/2011-02-08/dev-diary-currency

Designers absolutely care and know how economies work, which is exactly why things like gold sinks exist - to offset the imbalances that simple supply/demand can cause. They have to pull a certain amount of gold from the environment to make it playable and control in-game inflation, CPIs, most importantly compensate for uneven and unpredictable player base growth or shrinks

SL is not a game. To make something a little more like a game, I propose adding the concept of raw resources. Whether you copy or build from scratch, you need to buy materials first. Not to design though. This would also help with creativity and enable better in-game relations.

Some years ago SL used to charge people for the components of the objects they create; not a new idea, and they moved away from it already.

I don't think making it a game should be a goal at all, it should be a platform, where if people want they can create any sort of game they feel like creating, but if they wanna do other things they won't be restricted to working within and around "game rules".

Perhaps something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_massively_multiplayer_online_games#Free_play_with_micro-transactions ?

FWIW, I was imagining a game mechanic rather than a revenue stream. So these resources need to be gathered somehow. This would make the system more of a simulation than an interface. Then we'd see which economic/social model would survive. :) Not a new thing of course and probably not suitable for the topic.

I was actually thinking of charging for actual resources. CPU cycles cost electricity, and storage of textures and objects requires physical disk space, so costs hard drives. In a way it's like virtual world real estate and resources. Actually it's exactly virtual world real estate and resources.

I think, at least at first, pricing should be modeled after webhosting, VPS services and things like Amazon's EC². Makes more sense than trying to come up with formulas to convert inworld abstractions into real life costs.