I am finding that bitcoin seems to be turning out to be not so great for micro-payments.
At first blush the idea of having eight decimals sounds great because it brings to mind conversion rates such as those of World of Warcraft gold (less than a dollar for several million WoW gold), and sounds as if it could be useful if players of
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ thought a mere 100,000 or less units (intended to represent on the order of a ton or more per unit probably) of metal or crystal or deuterium should similarly sell for less than a dollar.
For individual character scale items that probably should cost less than a ton of crystals, being able to send someone just one of that very last decimal-place sounds useful.
World of Warcraft gold is awkward not only because of rules they might have against trading it but also because it is hard to hold as a speculator who has no interest in playing the game nor in paying a monthly player-fee to maintain a character in the game to hold the gold.
Thus I figured something like bitcoin would be great. Various games could be built with the "satoshi" unit of currency in mind - that last decimal place of the eight decimal places.
In Crossfire RPG there is already so much implicit inflation that they don't even bother with coppers they use silver as the lowest denomination coin, ten of those to a gold, five of those to a platinum, 100 platinum to a jade and 100 jade to an amberium. So an amberium is 500,000 silver. It seems quite likely that an amberium might well sell for less than a dollar, let alone less than a bitcoin.
The new default fee is what, 50,000 satoshis? How useful is one satoshi if you have to pay 50,000 satoshis to send it to someone?
So I think I need a design that will specifically favour using it as dirt cheap, even throwaway, money.
Deliberately encourage it to be considered worthless by anyone other than gamers and speculators-speculating-that-gamers-might-be-mad. (Mad as in holy moly who the heck would fork out real money for a virtual "magic sword" for gosh sakes?!?!)
Some speculators might also speculate that it could be a sleeper, sneaking up on the world by appearing to be maybe worth even less than world of warcraft gold until some day when all 21 million are in circulation and the fact that this distinguishes it from the normal run of the mill MUDflation-currencies (that are created out of nothing by falling from the pockets of goblins that, it turns out, are themselves created from nothing, possibly not even needing to be bred in vats using limited resources by wizards who might, being wizards, maybe themselves have been created from nothing in the beginning when the universe was created and might even, being wizards, be able to eventually even defeat death) really starts to "hit home".
These coins would not only provide an item that players, speculators, market-makers etc need not even be aware of the game (or of any specific game) in order to use, but that also is a glaring exception to the MUDflationary creation of goods resources items currency and so on in so many games. Thus from an in-game perspective it seems reasonable they should be so valuable that one might even be able to buy tons of mass of materials with them. But depending on how addicted one might or might not be to any specific game they might nonetheless seem worthless to anyone who happens not to know of some market where they could sell them for something they do consider quite valuable, maybe for example some coin or other that is of notable use in some game that they *are* addicted to. (Possibly even with the term game here including "the game known by some as 'real life'"...)
I have all along thought that it would probably turn out to be better to have a separate currency intended and possibly even designed for use in/with games rather than to try to impose upon bitcoins requirements that would make them more useful in games (such as being able to readily and standardly use that last decimal for small purchases without outrageous-by-proportion transaction fees even maybe?)
By starting out with a multiple-galaxies setting as one of the first settings considered, I do have the option of claiming that obviously propagating your transactions across many galaxies probably will cost at least a much as a beer and quite likely more than a beer. So even within indvidual games it might make sense to have multiple blockchains, one (or more: not only the original Hacker-nation "bitcoins" but also Martian Botcoin, United Kingdom Britcoin and maybe even CZech Bitcoin) propagating intergalactically but at least one "local to one solar system or a small group of relatively close to one-another solar systems or even just to one world" blockchain useable for buying beer and pretzels without incurring intergalactic transaction-propagation fees.
There is also a feedback loop to consider, because Earth is considered mythical by most places in those galaxies so instead of thinking Earth currencies are vastly more valuable than galactic currencies the tendency is to assume any talk of Earth is probably by roleplaying gamers playing games involving the mythical/fictional planet earth and that earth currencies are actually roleplaying game currencies.
Characters in the game are maybe about as likely to value earth currencies as earthlings are to value game currencies, thus opening vast possibilities for arbitrage. You might not even be willing to pay one dollar per million game-goldcoins for yourself yet be able to discover players willing to pay significantly more than a dollar for some item that some shop somewhere routinely sells for a lot less than a million game-goldcoins. You might be able to buy one game-currency dirt cheap from players met in some game that does not directly honour that particular game-currency or does not value it highly and sell it to players met in some other game where that specific game-currency is the main unit of value used in trading valuable metals or crystals or even fuel for fusion powerplants.
How can one prevent a currency almost identical to bitcoin zooming up in earthling-currency exchange-value or is it, as some seem to be claiming, sufficient merely to not be the original bitcoin? Maybe no changes whatsoever are needed in the rules in order to achieve this goal? Would a new blockchain using the same rules as the original one be well able to maintain an exchange rate as low as or even lower than testnet's even though unlike testnet it is intended as an actual store of units of account not as a doomed to be erased record of units intended to be erased?
I do not favour creating far far more than 21 million coins as the game economies might well in total be smaller than the entire planet earth economy that bitcoins are intended to serve so using 21 million should seem like more of an oversupply of coins, or less of an undersupply of coins, than bitcoins seem relative to their target service-volume.
So in summary I am not yet sure exactly what needs to be changed, maybe nothing if those theorists are correct who claim that a second blockchain based on the same rules as the original blockchain would automagically find itself enjoying a far lower valuation than the original.
Since the original question is about restarting, I guess what I would do differently would be to make an extra *persistent* (unlike testnet's non-persistence) blockchain from the start, maybe by having a -game switch as well as a -testnet switch. (Maybe with use of both switches meaning to use the game testnet not the main testnet?)
If the game and non-game blockchains were thusly both created from the outset though, neither would be "the original", so we are back to the question of what might need to be different in the rules in order to lean the non-game blockchain toward real world valuability and the game blockchain toward being dismissed as a mere roleplaying game currency by short-sighted speculators who fail to see the value in games and/or game currencies?
-MarkM-
