Kerim Aydin wrote: >When you create a virtual currency, and then it becomes substantial >enough that you have to create virtual virtual currencies by issuing >bonds, you're doing something right!
I think if you got to such a level of derivatives trading then you must have had an interesting game. Maybe this really was better in the 2001-2002 period that you're talking about than the ~1997 period that I'm thinking of. The most interesting things that occurred in the currency game that I recall were when we found bugs in the currency rules. For a start, confusion over whether Kelly/Scott's "Pragmatic Currencies" proposal had passed led to a most unpragmatic mess regarding whether the next two months' proposals had passed. Then it turned out that Kelly/Scott didn't actually grasp what e'd defined a currency to be. Oh how we laughed. So, anyway, I don't know. Maybe you did have a playable currency game. I'd like to see mail logs for it. I maintain that currencies fundamentally don't work in a nomic. >I think the system of dynamic money supply in which officers can >dynamically adapt the supply to keep the game interesting worked very >well, Eww, sounds nasty to me. Officer discretion bad (for the most part). Shades of fascism, and other authoritarian governmental systems. > coupled with auction prices which kept the base supply dynamic. We didn't have auctions in my era. Maybe that's a significannt component. >The second point, though, is plain old critical mass. At the time >I joined, the game peaked at perhaps 15 players who were actively >participating plus another 10 who were semi-active. That's more than I ever saw. From my records I see that during the Risho-Agora war there were 19 registered Agora players, which is the most I recall there ever being. I understand there was a surge of interest after Agora got slashdotted. The roster of watchers certainly increased a lot. >As you point out, the scarcity is actually time. That's why the salary >concept works well: Officers get more salary than non-officers, some >bonuses for judging, I don't think this is actually the aspect that works. I think if there were no salaries then there would still be volunteers for the work. Salaries are, nevertheless, a sensible recognition of the time and effort that people put into the game. What makes them work is the system they go into. The old Mil scheme involved a multiplicative increase of the Mark supply, which made officer salaries the main driver of hyperinflation, rendering the salaries actually relatively worthless. The present VC scheme needs some tweaking for balance but is mostly OK. An AIMD scheme akin to the Beads proposal would give salaries the right significance, I think. >You say that "expertise can't be fungible", but isn't that what a real >life service economy is (trading your specific labor/skills for a >fungible commodity)? That's what a service economy tries to do. If you want, say, an accountant who can translate your business records into GAAP form, that's a pretty standard service and you can to a large extent exchange one accountant for another. But what we do? No. Our offices are not so mechanical. Sure there's an open market for all sorts of services, even artistic ones such as portrait painting. But it doesn't follow the standard free-market analysis. Get an artist to paint half a portrait today; you can't then throw it open to the free market and get a different artist to paint the other half tomorrow. Or if you do then you'll end up with a rotten portrait. In the IT industry I work with the same issues. For legal reasons, if you hire some of my friends then they come with a contract clause that says they can be replaced at any time by another person of similar skill. But if they ever try to use that clause then they don't expect to keep the client very long. Programmer time, like artist time, is not fungible. The service economy is overextending itself to reach these domains. These (unlike some simpler services) don't fit into the capitalist model. The fact that there is an apparently-capitalist market in such things is not a sign that these are sane areas to have markets but more that the capitalist approach dominates all. This is the interface between the capitalist world and the creative world. So, in conclusion, you can't outsource nomic activity, and I remain convinced that any attempt to build a capitalist economy within a nomic is doomed to failure. -zefram
