On Sun, 19 Nov 2017, ATMunn wrote: > On 11/19/2017 1:57 AM, Reuben Staley wrote: > > > > [ No more shinies, everybody! ]
[...] > > and the minimum bid is 1 shiny. > You got rid of shinies, so you should specify the currency it is conducted in > and change the minimum bid to that currency. [...] > > Bars are the official currency of Agora. > I think I'd rather call them coins, instead of bars. So let's talk about why we need an "official" currency. In my mind, the purpose is for changing basic participation/work time into game advantage (stuff to buy and use). To that end, I'd say an official currency needs a few properties: 1. It's distributed as a direct reward for participation (a minimum income plus officer rewards); 2. Is fairly granular/divisible (I mean, we count our monthly salaries and costs in 10s or 100s of units, not 1s). So people can use small fractions of "pend units" or "CFJ units" to trade and auctions can turn on small bid differences. 3. Buys the more advanced stuff (either directly or by auction). 4. Is effectively unlimited (we control "supply" by controlling salaries, costs, and maybe taxes, not through the arbitrary amount we print). For shinies, #4 is broken but there's at least one proposal out there to repair that. As the Land is written, bars/coins do not fill that role at all. My feeling is that if we repair #4, there's no need to re-invent the wheel and come up with shinies all-but-in-name. If we ditch the whole *concept* of shinies, then auctions no longer work and we need to have another base distribution mechanism for land, which this proposal doesn't have. We can't use an auction currency that's a product of land to buy land, without significantly different bootstrapping - I'm open to that, but it's a whole additional layer to add - and importantly, to debug! This is the main reason I'm thinking "repair the broken parts, which really aren't that big" rather than re-invent...? -G.
