On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 15:24:10 -0700 (PDT) Kerim Aydin <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Tue, 8 Sep 2015, ais523 wrote: > > On Tue, 2015-09-08 at 09:36 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > > > meanwhile, a random thought: how hard would it be to make and > > > support an Agoran cryptocurrency? > > > > No cryptocurrency I know of can continue to act as a currency if > > someone has 50% or more of the mining power. Agora has a > > sufficiently small userbase that that would be a trivial condition > > to achieve (with modern VPSes, you can rent out a very powerful > > computer cluster for a very short time for a pretty reasonable > > cost, and have well over 50% for whatever scam you're trying to > > pull; defending against this would require other people to be using > > similarly powerful clusters /continuously/, which would be > > financially unsustainable). > > I was actually thinking more of the "independent of email traceable > transfer system" part rather than the mining part. Could the actual > mining be restricted to a sanctioned entity (e.g. a bank)? > > -G. In that case, we wouldn't need the mining -- ergo, "creating currency by expending processor power" -- part anyway. A good ol' SQL database to store balances and transfer history would do. Or how about a git repository tracking a single "transfers" file? Every player would have push access and make transfers by appending a new line to the file, something like "me: transfer 50 zorkmids to foobar". This way, we wouldn't have to trust the player who hosts the git repository, because everyone has a local copy of the repo. -- aranea
