On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 2:48 PM Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > So this judgement actually extends the concept of physical reality quite a > bit, by saying "even though no rule outright forbids this, we're still > saying it's R106-prohibited due to our (unwritten) precedents about assets." > I'm not saying it's wrong, but I think it's important enough that it should > be brought into the judgement directly.
I'd say it's not prohibited so much as logically meaningless. The rules don't explicitly define "transfer", but by the ordinary language meaning, if you transfer 5 coins from yourself to A, you must end up with 5 fewer coins. Creating 5 coins out of thin air in A's account is logically possible, but it's not a "transfer", so it's simply not what the proposal would be requesting. Now, in ordinary language, we sometimes treat currency as a sort of abstraction for an account balance. "I have 5 dollars" might mean I have 5 physical objects that are dollars, or it might mean that my account balance is $5. This matters because account balances can go negative; if you have $0 and try to transfer $5, it might succeed and leave you with $-5 (and an overdraft fee). But Rule 2166 defines an asset as an "entity", albeit one which according to Rule 2578 is "fungible". Thus, account balance is an abstraction for the number of entities with you as their owner; ownership is not an abstraction for account balance. I think we've had rules before that defined currency balance as a switch, which would accomplish the latter, but not currently. As such, while the proposal is requesting that it end up with 5 fewer coins than it did before, there is simply no possible change to the state of asset holdings that would actually accomplish that goal. It may as well ask for 2 + 2 = 5.
