Mark, you’ve been talking about this galactic Milieu stuff for years but I don’t really get it.
- Isn’t it just some online game?
- How or why would anyone be obligated into repaying any debt?
- How can the debt exceed the total supply?
Weren’t they were also using IXcoin and i0C? I wonder what the debt is there.
It is kind of a meta-game, also an "alternate reality game". Basically I took as many as I could find of free open source online multi-player games that actually seemed to work, and used them as interfaces onto one multiverse, and the fact that cryptocurrencies are not tied-in by their software to any particular game means they can act as part of the "glue" that weaves it all together.
Two things can help "obligate" a debt to be paid; one is "collateral", the other is "guarantees". The two also can work together, such as when a player who controlled a intergalactic mining operation vanished and didn't log in for a (Sol III: the mythical "
Planet Known as Earth") year the mining operation, which was the collateral for the loan, gets "repossessed" by a "Repo Corp" set up by the government(s) who "guaranteed" the loan.
The common case was that a random internet passer-by would log into the intergalactic mining game, causing thereby a mining colony to be established for them to control, and they would maybe not even order the building of some initial buildings before vanishing never to be heard from again.
Because simply having mining colonies appear "out of nothing" is not conducive to a reasonable economy, the backstory for that particular game was that somehow the Galactic Mining Corp and the Galactic Retirement Funds had collaborated with some unspecified advanced civilisation to enable colony ships to be send out to "galaxies far far away" to establish mining colonies, at a cost per such colonisation of 1000 GMC coins plus 1000 GRF coins; and that when a player joined the game GMC and GRF were thus lending the newly created mining corp created for that player to play 1000 GMC plus 1000 GRF, at an interest rate, originally, of 1% per (Sol III aka "The Planet Known As Earth") day, compounded hourly.
Thus by the time a player had failed to log in for an entire year, at least 365% interest (more actually, because of the compounding) had accrued.
It eventually became apparent that opening a game to random passers-by on the internet was not conducive to establishing reasonable economies.
However, in addition to being "secured" by the "collateral" of the actual mining colony or colonies (a colony can go on to build more colony ships itself), the loans were "guaranteed" by the Brits, the Canucks, the (galactic) United Nations, basically by the major cilvilisations of the primary inhabited galaxy of freeciv-based planets, the civilisations who were the issuers of some of the original "big seven" galactic currencies, some of the very earliest "altcoins" back before GRouPcoin, DeVCoin and such, back before merged mining. (GMC and GRF coins are also themselves two of those "big seven" galactic currencies).
In the backstory, a large part of the rationale for the "guarantee" on the loans was the perceived need for intergalactic defenses, to protect the (freeciv-based) civilised worlds from potentially hostile intergalactic aliens, given that freeciv is itself only a planet-scale system and that so called "O-game clones" clearly demonstrated that the vast majority of entities controlling vast fleets at intergalactic scales online seemed to be extremely hostile.
So although the Galactic Mining Corp and Galactic Retirement funds corps handled the initial finance and logistics of setting up intergalactic mining operations in galaxies far far away, it was and is the entire set of civilisations living on freeciv-based worlds in the primary inhabited galaxy that wanted and potentially very much needed to get out to faraway galaxies to start building some kind of defensive cordon around the all-important "home galaxy".
So, when the intergalactic mining game had been closed to new players to prevent even more debtor corps from being created, and a year or more had passed with it becoming clear that random passers-by on the internet did not make responsible Chief Executive Officers for Intergalactic Corps, much discussion and politics took place among the politicians of the various civilizations living on the freeciv-based planets, and eventually it was determined that it ought to be somehow possible for some kind of "repossession" to be implemented.
This led to the creation of FGR (First Galactic Repo), SGR (Second Galactic Repo), TGR (Third Galactic Repo) and, over time, eventually GR4 (Galactic Repo 4) through GR38, repossessing all 38 mining corps that had not been logged into for a year or more.
Part of the politics for accomplishing this involved the desire of more and more politicians, political parties, corporations, clans, associations, guilds etc etc etc to get into the potentially lucrative business of "compound interest", and part of it also involved arguments that however feasible it would have been for the original loans to have been serviced had the CEOs actually logged in regularly and kept up with telling the colonies what to build and so on, the 365 or more days of accumulated interest already accrued without any attempts having been made to build up the mining operations made the size of the debts too large to reasonably be required to continue to pay 1% per (Earth) day interest.
Competition came into play too of course, and various factions wheeled and dealed trying to get fingers in the pie by offering lower interest rates.
I think currently the interest rates being charged by General Financial Corp might be the lowest extant rates, as they managed to secure an excellent deal with the Martians, as chronicled in their Bitcoin Talk thread (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61557.0).
General Financial Corp is the Corp that issued DeVCoin-denominated loans, and it obtained its customers by offering lower interest rates and by pointing to the at that time low rate of growth of the cost of DeVCoins, basically arguing that oh sure you might be able to get a loan from the Brits, denominated in United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB), or from the Canucks, denominated in Canadian Digital Notes (CDN), or from the (galactic) United Nations, denominated in United Nations Scrip (UNS), but if you look (at that time) at the historical trends of asset values, didn't it look like those currencies were going up and up and up in value way too fast for any sensible Corp to want to take on debt denominated in such fast-rising currencies? Surely a debt denominated in DeVCoins would be much safer?
So we come to the present time, with various intergalactic mining corps having their debt denominated in various of the "big seven" galactic currencies but a number of them having their debt denominated in DeVCoin, and the total number of coins owing having accrued using compound interest, having long ago exceeded the number of coins actually minted. This actually happens a lot by the way, look up the types of money-supply, I think for most nations the total dollars pounds yen or whatever far exceeds the number actually printed, it is quite the normal state of affairs apparently.
More information about the game can be found on Devtome starting at the page "
Galactic Milieu".
The Ixians and whoever it is that uses I0Coin have not yet gotten involved in loaning out their coins it seems. Indeed I am pretty sure "IX Corp" and "I0 Corp", with manadates similar to DeVCorp and long term goals maybe like DeVCorp of becoming the "treasury" or "warchest" backing their respective coins, have not yet officially been created. Though I expect the Ixian clan, active in the text-mode (CoffeeMUD) interface into the Milieu, do plan at some point to get IXCorp off the ground if they manage to do well get rich etc in the aspects of the game they have so far gotten involved with.
I think the Ixians are also trying to generate interest in SPICE coin too, being as how that harks to the Dune mythos and that mythos also had in it a people know as Ixians.
-MarkM-
