On Tue, 2016-07-12 at 20:53 -0400, Owen Jacobson wrote: > As near as I can tell, Agora’s rules, as written, require that the > only hidden state for an Agoran is their state of mind - their > unstated intents, beliefs, and plans. It seems like speculation would > require some level of hidden information beyond that, but I think the > only way to mediate hidden information would be to authorize someone > to know and manage that information. Am I missing something? For a long time, we had "private contracts", which were basically secret agreements that only the participants knew of, and which were enforced by the rules. (In practice, they would only be likely to be enforced if one of the participants complained.) There were various mechanisms in place to increase the chance that in case of a dispute, the text would be available to the player adjudicating the dispute. (Most such contracts were written in such a way that they would become public. Some of them may well have gone down the other route, though.)
> Randomness requires some way to reach consensus as to the results. > How has Agora solved this before? Sending public messages via dice bots (which are basically remailing programs that will send your email to the list, but with random numbers appended, specifying the randomization algorithm used). So long as the dice bot isn't under the control of a player (or is under the control of a player trusted not to manipulate the results), it's pretty effective. Here's an example of a message sent like this: <https://www.mail-archive.com/agora-business%40agoranomic.org/msg21233. html>. -- ais523
