Zefram wrote: > Please don't, that really sucked. The current less direct system, of > buying voting power which can be exercised on all (Ordinary) proposals, > is vastly better.
I disagree that this sucked, I thought it worked reasonably well and was very interesting. Maybe it was more interesting in 2001-2002 when I joined then before that when it was instituted. (One of my top four Agoran moments in the last 7 years was the multiple zombie auction with 4 bidders, who each bid on behalf of 5-10 players representing three Groups, who then formed two cartels, who fixed the price by virtue of their currency controls, then sub-negotiated a split, which fell apart when one of the zombies became active). When you create a virtual currency, and then it becomes substantial enough that you have to create virtual virtual currencies by issuing bonds, you're doing something right! There are two keys to making it interesting, though. The first is Murphy's point: > [...] the tricky > part is to charge enough to make it interesting, but not so much that > people get miserly and stop submitting proposals. I think the system of dynamic money supply in which officers can dynamically adapt the supply to keep the game interesting worked very well, coupled with auction prices which kept the base supply dynamic. So that point can be solved. The second point, though, is plain old critical mass. At the time I joined, the game peaked at perhaps 15 players who were actively participating plus another 10 who were semi-active. That's a vastly different dynamic the current ~10 players. When we dismantled the currency system, the main broken thing (in my mind) was just too much machinery for too few players. For the number of players we have now, the simpler VC concept is probably the complexity level we want to work with. > I think generally currency-based systems don't work well in a nomic. > We have no scarce commodities, so no natural source of money. As you point out, the scarcity is actually time. That's why the salary concept works well: Officers get more salary than non-officers, some bonuses for judging, and perhaps some added bonuses for "creative works" (e.g. the speaker can grant a purse to someone who does something useful like create a website). You say that "expertise can't be fungible", but isn't that what a real life service economy is (trading your specific labor/skills for a fungible commodity)? -Goethe
