RE: Oliver's Olive Oil Goes Into the Ground
I mean every Magic Dragon account holder.
The Idea is to issue say 500 free tokens to every account holder say every Monday. These are simply tokens issued for the convenience of the account holders, or 'players' in the market. The tokens can only be transferrable between PMD account holders. So the tokens can be either just valueless and meaningless tokens with the only useful quality that they can be securely held and securely transferred, or they can be made useful by the players themselves agreeing on a value.
It is a closed game. These tokens are nowhere to be found on other exchanges in the open market. And if the 'whitepaper game description' that comes with the account says that the tokens each has a nominal purchasing power for a unit of electricity or anything of equivalent value amongst members/account holders, these tokens can serve as a very handy means of exchange amongst themselves, especially if they are short of money otherwise.
There are examples of community exchanges functioning as closed 'members only' systems, but with a central server handling all transactions and a different currency convention that have been running successfully for many years, for example the Cape Town Talent Exchange.
PMD will be different in running a in decentralized fashion with a slightly different currency, a currency with a universally recognizable nominal value that can deployed to function in service of local communities anywhere, simply by prospective members opening PMD accounts all on the same blockchain.
I think I don't quite understand still. You couldn't arbitrarily keep printing money and expect the value to hold, so there will need to be something to prop the value of the tokens up, no?
I hope to post more on this shortly. I respectfully don't think the phrase "arbitralirally printing money" applies here. The idea is to issue a carefully considered equal number of tokens to each account holder every week, with the total number of tokens in circulation limited by resetting all accounts to zero every seven years, when an equally thoroughly considered total volume has been reached.
This method of protecting the assigned specific value of the currency is not cast in concrete though. Players may perceive the seven year reset cycle as being too disruptive and it will eliminate the long term value storage potential of a coin like this, thus limiting its function to being a means of exchange only. A variation of this could be to put an upper limit to the amount of wealth that can by accumulated in an account, which boils down to the same as taxing the wealthy. I am open to suggestions.
My first consideration was to create a SmartCoin with a purchasing power of one unit of electricity. The bitUSD trading on the Bitshares exchange is a derivative of the USD, the value of which in turn is controlled by government / the Fed.
The practical value of an amount of energy, on the other hand, is governed by the laws of physics and is constant in relation to volume of production - one unit of electricity can for instance be used to cook on a one kilowatt stove plate for one hour today and in a hundred years from now one unit of electricity can still be used to cook on a one kilowatt stove plate for one hour.
This fact alone should be a strong motive for users to adhere to the convention. A means must however be devised to limit the volume of tokens in circulation to a level beyond which, I agree, the value of the token will be corrupted. If the means of limiting the number of tokens in circulation can also serve to prevent an unfair distribution of wealth, so much the better.
Okay yes, so there is some mechanism needed to preserve value, it sounds like. I await your post about it, because I don't have good ideas about how to accomplish it :).
I don't really know how Smart coins work, would have to do some digging on it.