In crypto we hear a lot about "market cap", yet it is in many ways a rather silly, even basically fictional, value.
If you issue a million tokens, and a buy offer exists offering to buy one millionth of one token for one dollar, presto its "market cap" is a million million dollars!
Silly?
Absurd?
That is an extreme example, but all others are much the same, it is a spectrum ranging from cases in which the entire buy-side order-book across all venues does not add up to enough offers to buy all extant tokens (or even one entire whole token) through cases in which every extant venue's buy side order-book is offering to buy millions of times as many of the token as actually exist.
In the
Galactic Milieu the reverse of such a "market cap" calculation is used to implement "treasury based assets" in order that the game can compute the relative values of treasury-based assets simply by dividing the total value of each "treasury" by the number of coins, tokens, shares (etc) issued.
It is as if we are taking the total value of the "treasury" to be the "market cap" and computing backward from that to find the value per coin, token, share etc (instance of the asset).
This enables the game economy to keep on keeping on even if few or even none of the players bother to keep busy constantly scanning spot markets for arbitrage opportunities and constantly making use of those opportunities in order to provide the backdrop of "efficient markets" that would otherwise be required, wanted, or desired.
Keep in mind also that in cases where the tokens represent some actual coin on some actual blockchain if its own, the tokens are only minted in the first place at a "200% reserve" level of quantity, so that for example if there are only three hundred million DeVCoins on hand only one hundred and fifty million DeVCoin tokens are minted so that even if the 150M of them that are "tokenised" (represented by tokens) are "deep frozen" in some way (super-cold cold wallets etc) the other half is still available to be used to "redeem" (buy back) the tokens without having to go dig up the 150M DeVCoins the tokens represent.
That makes it feasible to have the "frozen" actual-coins be extremely severely frozen, even in some way that could be very awkward and time-consuming to "unfreeze".
It also makes it feasible, if desired, to wait not only for X number of blocks, but also for hard-coded "checkpoints" to be coded into the actual-coin's clients, to provide security versus potential re-orgs of the actual-coin's blockchain.
That helps improve the feasibility of coming to the rescue of "dead" Proof of Work based coins by adopting them into the
Galactic Milieu.
In addition to enabling the game to compute values directly without reference to "spot markets", the treasuries of "treasury based assets" also serve as a mechanism for keeping assets off of the "spot markets"; basically by locking assets into "treasuries" the game leaves less of those assets "out in the wild" where they might conceivably come into the hands of "dumpers" who could, and if they truly are "dumpers" actually would, use them to "dump down" the spot market prices by selling to the buy offers thereby consuming (destroying, taking) the buy offers.
In addition to its "treasury", each "treasury-based asset" has one or more "slush funds" whose contents do not enter into the calculation of the value of its "treasury".
Also, an entire panoply of game assets controlled by the civilisation or Corp or guild or clan or whatever ("entity") whose currency the "treasury based asset" is also does not count toward the value of the treasury.
So for example no matter how many armies or fleets or deathstars or magic swords or blasters or graviton cannons etc etc etc a civilisation has, and no matter how many square miles it controls of how many planets, or even for that matter entire galaxies or clusters or superclusters of galaxies, none of those things are counted in the game's calculation of the total value of their currency's "treasury".
This does of course introduce a whole additional sub-game as it were, of how much of your assets will you lock away into your official "treasury"...
-MarkM-
