On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 12:31 PM Alexis Hunt <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Wed, 29 Jan 2020 at 15:22, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Oh, light, no. Last time we tried to store money as accounts it was an >> infernal mess. It lead to a never ending series of bugs and >> counterintuitive results. >> >> For the implementation, please in the name of all that's holy >> implement it on top of assets. This is simple; you just have to set a >> rule that the Treasuror's ruling on who has which transactions >> succeeded is dispositive, and the coins platonically update themselves >> so they are distributed in the manner e says they are. >> >> I think I prefer the current system personally; the platonic nature of >> reality and need for convergences keeps things interesting. However, >> my concerns about the implementation are much greater than my >> objection the content. >> >> -Aris > > > I think that Warrigal's concerns are valid. The only reason that the asset > rules work so well is because they've been well-tested and worked out. > Changing the base away from them to something else is entirely viable; it > would require care and likely plenty of time while things get worked out, but > there's no reason it couldn't be done. And more importantly, perhaps, a > highly pragmatic system would make this less of a concern. > > Warrigal's proposal of pragmatic validation is an interesting one, and one > that I haven't really seen Agora use before if memory serves. The one I'm > familiar with is having actions be POSSIBLE but ILLEGAL where they would > create platonic problems. For instance, with Coins, we could imagine a world > where everyone has a ledger that can go negative freely. But if a player is > caught with a negative balance, then they can be put in the Penalty Box and > suffer consequences for it (including the inability to spend Coins until they > have a positive balance again). Perhaps there could be a hard lower limit > where things start to fail. > > I agree that the need to handle platonic analysis of actions is interesting, > but I also think that it can get in the way of other gameplay. It's hard to > build a fun game system on top of something when that thing keeps breaking > regularly and that's considered a feature.
Meh, I think that the asset system has some conceptual features that make it less vulnerable to bugs. But, as twg points out, that may just be testing. Regardless, there are simple ways to implement Warrigal's proposal on top of assets, and I'm simply saying that I'd prefer that we use those instead. For allowing negative balances, for instance, we could declare that a person who transfers nonexistent coins creates them but also incurs a debt. This is a bit less obvious than it would be in the other model, but it's still doable. In this way, we would keep using the asset system, which is already thoroughly tested, decreasing the chance of bugs. -Aris
