The
Galactic Milieu seems to be facing a large platform-migration problem thanks to the fact that Open Transactions did eventually get around to making breaking changes in how it does things.
These changes in Open Transactions mean that all contracts (including server contracts and asset contracts), accounts and pseudonyms ("users") that we have been using for years are not going to work in the new version(s) of Open Transactions.
So it all has to migrate, even if sticking with Open Transactions.
Thus this seems like a good time to re-think whether in fact Open Transactions remains the ideal platform for our needs.
As you can see from the various links at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html there are a number of assets involved.
Those links show much of the relative-price history of the assets but luckily one of the features of Open Transactions is that it does not need history.
Once both parties to a transaction, and the notary server (Open Transactions server) sign off on a transaction, the past is no longer needed as all relevant parties have agreed, bindingly, upon the new balances involved. That is great for games because really, in games all we care about is what is in our pockets, not how long it has been there, who put it there, or why they put it there. (Nor even whether it is proceeds of crime, afterall some characters are probably intentionally criminals, thieves, etc, so what, what is in their pockets is in their pockets.
) Keeping years of historical records of who gave what to who is just not really very useful or relevant in games, and indeed could be undesirable.
One key feature of Open Transactions is that your balance cannot be changed unless you sign off on the change. Thus for any change of balance there is a signed, notarised receipt proving (cryptographically) that you agreed to the resulting balance. So basically, the players and the game-master agree, so what else matters, in a game?
Another nice feature is scaled markets. Markets exist not only by asset-pair but also by scale, so you can have egg markets for trading single eggs, hundred-egg-markets for trading boxes/bundles of 100 eggs, and so on. This is great for issuing large chunks of currency/assets to nations, megacorporations and other whales while leaving room for smaller scale asset/currency merchants to re-sell at retail prices to smaller folk.
(Like, you can offer blocks of 100,000 of a coin on a 100,000 scale market, at prices that allow your customers to re-sell each block of 100,000 they buy from you as blocks of 10,000 coins at a higher markup to their own customers.)
I have taken an initial look at Bitshares, NXT, NHZ (Horizon), but I expect I am missing other similar systems as once the annoucements got split off from the main altcoin discussion section I only recently got around to taking a look into the announcements section. (It moves so incredibly fast due to spammers bumping their coin ass a marketing technique that even if I had tried to follow that section I would have been constantly missing things as they popped to the top and got scrolled off the bottom so fast I missed their rise and fall...)
-MarkM-
NOTE: Also up for discussion is cloning something instead of using its existing network, such as making yet another NXT-clone to run this stuff instead of just putting it on an existing NXT-or-NXT-clone network.
NOTE2: Horizon looks interesting because all players/nations/guilds/etc who wish to could fire up nodes right now to start getting free NHZ to eventually use to pay transaction fees with for transacting on that network, so it could maybe be used as is instead of making our own clone network.)
