On Tue, 20 Jun 2017, Owen Jacobson wrote: > The sentence specifically addressing negative payments is required, > and cannot be similarly elided, as it serves a different purpose: > it stops people from “paying” someone in order to take all of the > “payee”’s Shinies for emself.
There's a precedent (that I can't find right now, I can't remember the statement context) from a past economic system where this scam was tried, and the precedent says that in common English, it's nonsense to 'decrease' something by a 'negative' amount, so you can't pay someone in negative currency. This may mean we treat currency unit values more like common sense exchanges, rather than translating words piecemeal to mathematical equivalents (by, say, 'multiplying' two words for negativity to get a positive transaction). [V.J. Rada, that's the only precedent I can think off hand, so I think you're safe judging straight from the current rules text and first principles/common sense, no delving required...]