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I have seen similar ideas posted by you for a long time now but I do not think I have yet seen any specification of it precise enough to permit actually coding it. Is there an implementation-specifics details document yet or is this all just pie in the sky handwaving?
-MarkM-
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That is what Open Simulator is.
It is more than that. And sadly, it is also less. OpenSim sims do not have a common currency. Accordingly, no real functioning economy. The centralized control that LL has over SL allows for common asset servers that let you carry your identity across sim boundaries. This allows for portable assets. This in turn allows for a system of commerce. Last I looked OSGrid had no expectation of an av carrying their inventory and being able to rez it in any arbitrary region. At least and hope that it is discernible in its true form by others. Is my impression outdated? I have taken gear from OSGrid out onto the hypergrid, picked up items out on the hypergrid and brought them "home" in my inventory to OSGrid. It is apparently true though that Open Simulator deliberately does not force a particular implementation of currency. I have heard there are various currency modules or plugins but I have not investigated them yet, partly because someone else is already looking into using Open Transactions somehow for that. There is at least one open currency though that supposedly works, is exchangeable and so on, supposedly it is simply up to people who run regions whether to choose to enable it. (Maybe having to go get that module and include it somehow; it does not come with the "standard" mainstream Open Simulator releases.) -MarkM- |
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Hmmm. Imagine an open source virtual world protocol with no central authority?
That is what Open Simulator is. You can run it yourself on your own machine, I can run it myself on my own machine, we can visit each other's "worlds". No central authority, if you want me to be able to manipulate your world you can let me, if I want you to be able to manipulate mine I can let you. There is no need to just imagine it, you can run it, visit it, it already exists. -MarkM- |
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How about a colony/wild-west type of game where people can have roles/shops (farmer, rancher, miner, blacksmith, shopkeeper, etc.)?
The idea is that each player can produce only a limited subset of goods and needs to trade with other players to get everything they need.
I imagine you start as a "worker" and can help an advanced player produce goods in his business (e.g. farm, mine) in exchange for pay.
As you accumulate money/goods/experience you can eventually run your own business.
The key is you can't do everything yourself because have limited time/manpower/opportunities.
When each "role" is filled in a town, then a new town is founded. Towns can also trade with each other, and that is another kind of business.
The actual mechanics of this is part of what the CoffeeMUD platform provides. You can think of CoffeeMUD as an API server, anyone who wants graphics, music or whatever on top of the actual game-mechanics can add them just like various GUI front ends have been built for hiding bitcoind from people who prefer a GUI. From an economy-game and fund-raising perspective the mechanics are the important part, especially if you take a larger view in which individuals labouring in the fields and mines or crafting floors and walls and doors or hammering away at metals to make armour and so on are basically lower classes, labourers, doing grunt work wondering how one ever actually works up from that to being lord of a nation or empire. CoffeeMUD also has useful government stuff, like clans guilds fellowships gangs and such, whereby people can organise and assign various privileges based on position in the group, and some players have found it thus much more useful than (for example) the Crossfire RPG platform as a place to meet and organise. The challenge at this scale is how much can you as an employer afford to pay these "mere worker" players? Where will the wherewithal with which to pay them come from? This is the challenge the Galactic Milieu players forming their groups on/in the CrossCiv and CoffeeMUD platforms are currently dealing with... -MarkM- |
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I only participate in crowd-funding if I have a reward for it (in this case, a free copy of the completed game), and when I see a project already partway to completion, with "something to show for it". So, if I were to help crowd-fund your endeavor, I'd want to see you complete it partially in your own spare time, then ask for further funding to focus on it full-time and bring it to completion. Have some screenshots, a basic demo of it, a really detailed design doc, or something of that nature.
So here's my idea:
Multi-player sim city with satoshi's as the base currency, you have to pay to start your city (i.e., fund it with 0.01 BTC or something to get 1,000,000 credits to start building with). Cities are placed on a world map. People can view each others cities. Cities are constantly in motion - in other words, the gameplay doesn't pause just because you exit the game.
Here's where the money-maker for you comes in, and the challenge/reward for the players comes in:
- A base tax is levied over real-world time. This is a fixed credit tax. 500 credits/day or something.
- A land tax is levied over real-world time. This is a variable credit tax, dependent upon how much land you use. 5000 credits/sq mile or something.
- The experienced player must attempt to build a city large enough to sustain itself while paying the taxes. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake, monies that they can actually withdraw if they like.
It should be difficult to successfully create a large, thriving city, but this is the only way that a person would actually be able to "make money" in the game. Those monies would come from taxes on cities who don't turn a profit. The difficulty should automatically adjust according to how much money is brought in from failed cities vs how much money is given out from successful cities.
Hmmm, this actually turned into an intriguing idea as I wrote it. I kind of like it.
I have wanted to plug in a Lincity or similar free open source simulated city component for a long long time. Over the decades though I have ended up taking a top down approach to universes instead of the bottom up approach simply because starting at the bottom always leaves too many undefined holes/edges. Basically instead of starting out with, say, an inn for players to live in an a dungeon from them to adventure in then having to wonder what the rest of the world outside their little area is like, I now start at the large scale and work down. Thus, I start with a vast panoply of galaxies. (I had a cube 1.0E11 x 1.0E11 x 1.0E11 parsecs in size, containing billions upon billions of galaxies, back when the Apple IIe was new.) I get down to cities using Freeciv. Freeciv off the shelf runs one planet, with nations and cities and politics. That gives me a backdrop in which I don't need every city to have to be controlled in Lincity/Simcity level of detail, there can be a world fully populated with cities even if no players ever choose to delve down into a more detailed view of any particular city. It would be great to be able to plug in a Lincity type module to let people do that kind of detailed play of their city. Right at this moment though it is looking like maybe an Open Simulator representation of a city might actually be easier, except maybe for the sheer size of such a representation. (A Freeciv map tile is probably 160,000 or more Open Simulator "regions" in size...) 160,000 "regions" would be quite expensive to host if you did it the simple way of just actually putting that many regions online. So a Lincity/simcity type representation would if nothing else have an economic advantage in that more players would more likely find paying for such a represenation to be hosted to be within their budget. But when we start at the planet scale, simply looking to finance the hosting of the Freeciv scale planet representation with enough funds to allow starting into the more detailed - and thus more resource-intensive - scales, a nation/civilisation having only one city seems quite affordable, and also has the virtue of making a large nation with a few hundred cities far more costly than individual players usually find affordable for just their own personal control/use/play. This helps encourage nations to actually "consist of" more than one player, which in turn provides motivation for various clan, association, political party, guild etc etc type groups to organise/grow/develop. What I have to show so far has begun to be documented at http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu and also at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0(The latter because I want banks and stock exchanges that people build in cities to be able to be detailed out as fully functional so each can itself be an embedded economics/finance game within the larger game, allowing people only interested in speculation etc to have fun doing their thing while still thereby contributing to the depth and detail and variety of the larger game.) -MarkM- |
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Check out Open Simulator, OSGrid and so on.
Basically, virtual worlds compatible with Second Life (you can use a Second Life client to visit them) are now free open source software.
If you try to build large grids, the grid servers of course become the centralisation spot of vulnerability, the place to close down to try to shut it all down.
But everyone can run as their own entire grid if they wish, and there is a hypergrid system allowing people (avatars) to move from grid to grid.
So radical decentralisation is ready to deploy.
Personally I find the whole three dimensional graphics thing far too much computing resources to have to deal with just to do simple things I can do more of better with less resources by avoiding the 3D and avoiding even the (also bloated and resource-hungry) browser and going back to good old text mode.
But there is no reason why the things nerds prefer to do in text mode cannot be done in three dimensional virtual worlds by those who are willing to load down their machines with all the overhead involved in displaying such worlds.
It might take the flocks of sheep a while to adapt to radical decentralisation if their flocking is not based on real connectedness among them; many of them might not actually have hundreds of friends, depending on mass-meeting spots/mechanisms to find a flock at any given moment instead of having a rich personal connections network that keeps them in touch with their flock regardless of which universe they feel like playing in.
We have the technology. Second Life is not dead, it has simply priced and regulated itself out of the market...
-MarkM-
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A lesson that EVE Online seems to have taught is that, unfortunately, self-improving tycoons does not seem to be a good model from the point of view of investors. It is great for the tycoons themselves, running around ripping off people who are fool enough to invest in them, but not great for any stock markets that trade in the "securities" such tycoons offer.  Thus I have been examining the possibility that one might be able to relieve the tycoons of much of their ability to rip off investors at the same time as, and by the same mechanism(s) as, one might be able to simplify the system, at least initially. given that initially financing the game is important in order for there to be a game at all. So I have been looking at ways to allow "tycoons" some sense of being at the tiller of a Corp while at the same time presenting to them only such choices as are not inconsistent with the best interests of stockholders... -MarkM- |
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The nice thing about an economic/finance game is that it dangles the tantalising idea of being self-funding. Basically the funding of the game itself can be part of the game itself. That is the main reason really why the whole "implement actual banks and stock exchanges for the cities using Open Transactions" focus came about really: hanging around bitcoin made me realise that speculating is a very popular game in and of itself thus just having the financial markets up and running might well go much farther toward financing the game than any amount of 3d graphics development, combat system implementation, client and server adaptation and so on and so on and so on that the overall Milieu ultimately calls for. -MarkM- |
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Heh that is basically what General Financial Corp has been doing. They borrowed a huge lump sum at half the interest rate they charge to debtors then obtained debtors by refinancing them at half the interest rate they had hitherto been paying. A win for everyone except the creditors who lost their debtors to GFC. It was a major moneymaker for the folk who bought GFC at its IPO price of 20 DeVCoins per share too because basically they are making money off of other people's money far far more than they are making anything directly on that tiny token amount they paid at the IPO to form/launch the Corp. In essence what they really invested in was the diplomacy skills and diplomatic clout they obtained by getting a bunch of heavy hitters to all join forces to form such a Corp. -MarkM- |
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Many people seemed to give him a lot of money once everyone started telling ponzi.
That kind of makes sense, since once you know it is a ponzi you can figure a way to try to profit from it, such as by sending in lots more lambs to the slaughter, whereas when you didn't know what it was it was maybe harder to see why (or even how) he would ever give you any of your money back... -MarkM- Part of this IMO is that once people yelled ponzi people wanted safe investments and bought insrued operators wanted to send in more lambs to the slaugher so sold "insured" pirate stuff. However it turns out most of the insurance money was also sent to pirate :/ -MarkM- |
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Many people seemed to give him a lot of money once everyone started telling ponzi.
That kind of makes sense, since once you know it is a ponzi you can figure a way to try to profit from it, such as by sending in lots more lambs to the slaughter, whereas when you didn't know what it was it was maybe harder to see why (or even how) he would ever give you any of your money back... -MarkM- |
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I think this is part of why I always thought having lots of alternate blockchain currencies should increase the value of bitcoins. Basically the actual original genuine bitcoins would be the heavy duty most-valuable specie, with the greatest tendency to be hoarded, and the various alternate-chain coins would be used in preference wherever possible but with the number of bitcoins they can buy being used by most people as their method of guessing how much the altcoins are "worth" they would in effect be backed by bitcoins, thus the more value the proliferating altcoins manage to represent or channel or aquire the more value the fundamentally limited number of bitcoins that are in effect basically "backing" them all should aquire. I guess this is also a large part of why I continue to think bitcoins are massively undervalued right now... There is more money tied up in various alternates than all the bitcoins in existence could buy unless bitcoins go up in value a lot. Maybe other people are seeing it the other way around though? Like, maybe some of you are thinking the grand total value of all altcoins of all altchains all adds up to less than the value of all the bitcoins that so far exist? Driving many of the alternate chains underground by attacking them might help you maintain such a view, however when I look at the valuation tables at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html I have to wonder... -MarkM- |
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Oh good, so the original adopters/developers can simply keep the add-node queue full so it will be forever before any newcomers get to the top of the list. Brilliant.
...I guess that is where the randomisation comes in. No top of list, just flood it so you have highest chance of being randomly selected?
-MarkM-
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I didn't realise before that there is actually software for this, I thought it was vapourware.
It looks like you can run thousands of instances and thereby get to generate more coins?
-MarkM-
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I'm still with i0coin! Hope you don't let them die  It seems to be near impossible for an alt coin to die. Even coiledcoin is seeing mining power applied to it and that has no exchange or any infrastructure. Oh is that you that is out there running a coiledcoin client? I have it in my Massively Merged Mining lineup. -MarkM- |
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I recall Pirate claiming to have about 500k BTC in discussing playing the market, but I do not recall his saying that amount was owed? Wasn't he supposedly earning half or more as much himself as his depositors were?
-MarkM-
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Sounds like you are re-inventing Open Transactions. Probably worth your while looking at it anyway as its a lot of already written code that does a lot of the kinds of things you are suggesting...
-MarkM-
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It says bitcoins plainly now: The group demands $1 million worth of the online currency Bitcoins. It also says that people who want the documents released can send money as well, and whichever side sends $1 million first will win.
Bitcoin is a digital currency not overseen by any government or bank. Various merchants accept the currency for goods and services.
-MarkM- |
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I've been watching the #opentransactions channel and it looks like FT & co. are still working out the bugs. Are you sure it's stable enough to "widely deploy"?
All balances have been kept perfectly. I don't think I've actually seen that before, its amazing to me with all we've been through. Seems to me over the decades I got used to financial software always screwing up balances here and there so correcting entries of some sort always ended up being needed. So to me it is amazingly robust. Forcing every change of any balance to have to be signed off on seems to be a very good system. That said, I want first off lots and lots of test clients deployed so more and more people can test it... The recent bugs have been to do with scaling up; I have been doing load testing, in effect, running lots of scripts automatically placing lots of offers in the markets and, it turned out, mostly without downloading the outcomes thus letting people's account-inboxes grow huge, running into limits of string buffers. So basically, testing to destruction, driving the thing to its limits, yet still all balances remain correct. -MarkM- |
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