As you might or might not already be aware,
General Holding Corp administers the interface between the
Galactic Milieu and the underlying bandwidth, hosting, software development and so on that the game runs on.
A large part of the Corp's income is the fee per square mile that
Freeciv scale civilisations are charged for the privilege of running a civilisation.
In casting about for some way to rationalise this "hosting etc" cost in game terms, the idea of having it be a cost incurred by the ruling political party, aka the government, rather than the civilisation being ruled, was somehow hit upon.
The idea here is that the accrued backlog of fees incurred by a nation that lies idle for many game-turns would cripple the nation if it was an expense incurred by the nation itself rather than by those who wouldst fain govern that nation.
Doing it this way means that the nation can continue to stumble along itself thanks to the "artificial intelligence" provided by the Freeciv software, without any worries about paying the fee.
Meanwhile though the task of getting one's political party (such as the Royalist Party, the Despotism Party, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Fundamentalism Party or even, if such a thing exists, the Anarchism Party) into power in that nation would become more and more daunting, thanks to the continued amassing of these fees plus the interest charged on outstanding fees.
So the upshot is that ultimately the hosting fees for hosting the Freeciv based worlds are being charged to groups, specifically the type of group that is known as a Party, as in a Political Party.
With this in mind, it is proposed that we tie these fees to GRouPcoin.
Initially the fees will continue to be computed in the same way they always have been, which is to say, in terms of "units of Deuterium", as listed at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.htmlSo far it has been customary to allow these fees to be paid in any of the listed currencies, since of course Deuterium itself is a resource that exists in galaxies far far away and thus is not actually available, at least not in significant quantities as a commodity resource, among the Freeciv worlds.
(In fact technically that Deuterium pricelist page does not refer to the isotope itself wherever it may be found but, rather, to delivered units of it delivered to depots located among a certain set of Galaxies Far Far Away.)
However the plan is to first move to insisting that the hosting fee be paid in GRouPcoin, and then possibly, later, to computing it in the first place in terms of GRouPcoin instead of in terms of Deuterium.
Basically we convert Freeciv scale (terrain tiles 100 miles by 100 miles in size or thereabouts) into OpenSimulator scale ("Regions" 256x256 metres) by generously allowing a square mile to be represented by a four by four block of "Regions", thus 16 "Regions" to the square mile, which is where the factor of 16 comes from that leads to the hosting fee being 1.6 units of Deuterium per "square mile".
Political Parties thus pay thousands of thousands of units of Deuterium per real life month to control a large civilisation.
This could thus have a decent impact upon the perceived value, thus the price per coin, of GRouPcoin.
It should be noted, for Parties who might consider taking control of large civilisations, that of course the more shares one owns of General Holding Corp the less of a burden these fees might appear.
One little detail remains to be looked into though, which is whether there even exist enough liquid GRouPcoins to enable them to work for paying fees? Are there enough in circulation that it is practical for folks to be paying many millions of units of Deuterium worth of them every month? What will General Holding Corp need to do with them in order to ensure the coins taken in get back into circulation to be used again the next month to pay the recurring fees again? Hmm... Maybe in light of that thought it is a good thing that GRouPcoins continue to be minted at a constant rate?
-MarkM-
