On Wed, 29 Jan 2020 at 15:22, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion < agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> 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. -Alexis
