On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 4:14 PM omd via agora-discussion <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 2:48 PM Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion > <[email protected]> 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.
I find myself in agreement with omd here. This isn't a matter of our precedents regarding assets, this is a matter of the proposal trying to specify an operation that's simply inapplicable to reality as it presently exists. There are two interpretations that would give the proposal what its asking for, and there are problems with both of them. First, we could say that the coins are created in the proposal's possession before being transferred. This is incredibly problematic. It's the equivalent of saying that a proposal that tries to amend a nonexistent rule must be implicitly creating that rule so it could be amended. Now, I know that's expressly prohibited for rule changes, but image a contract or a regulation, which isn't so protected. The other problem with this approach is that it's explicitly prohibited by the rules, since they forbid ownership of coins to proposals. Secondly, we could say that the proposal transfers the coins into existence. Imagine that the proposal had said "The normal definition of the word transfer notwithstanding, I transfer 5 previously non-existent coins..." That probably works; it has the effect of overriding the normal definition of transfer, inserting an entry into Agoran history that could not otherwise be achieved. However, the only reason it works that way is because it's being specific about the fact that it wants transferring to apply to nonexistent entities. The normal definition of transfer would not allow this; the proposal is explicitly specifying that it wants to apply the transference operation to a type of entity that it would not normally fit, and asking us to apply it anyway, modifying the definition of transference to make it possible. The operation that's being performed is a different operation than the one that's being requested here. -Aris
