On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 12:32 PM Alexis Hunt via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > 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.
Apropos to the ruleset I just posted, we had a ruthlessly pragmatic system in 2001. Almost nothing happened "automatically" (e.g. the creation of monthly salaries), it all needed an officer or player propagate it. And we had is the concept of Debt. If you transferred something you didn't have, you incurred a debt and were under a SHALL to pay it in a timely fashion. If you, for example, tried to perform a fee-based action, but the action wasn't POSSIBLE for other reasons, you still paid the fee even if the action failed, but then Agora incurred a debt back to you for the fee. I don't think there was a hard lower limit, I do remember the penalties for non-payment - blots for every week you were delinquent I think - were severe enough that it wasn't a good game strategy to stay in debt). And even the debts were pragmatic - a debt wasn't actually created until someone announced it (e.g. said something like "Since CFJ XXX found my fee-based action failed, Agora incurs a debt of Y to me.") This was so debts couldn't be created "in secret" or automatically and used to punish people for not paying, when they never heard about the debt. However, we couldn't pragmatize completely! This system still gave you the "ability to create a debt" when trigger conditions were met (e.g. following the aforementioned CFJ). This was instrumental to the Town Fountain scam. A reset proposal was written to "set all currency holdings to 0 and cancel all debts." This would seem to catch everything. However, with the Assessor in on the scam, the scammers attempted to perform a set of (not POSSIBLE) fee-based actions just before the proposal took effect. So their funds were transferred to Agora. But they didn't announce the failures, so no debts were created. Then the proposal took effect destroyed the whole economy, cancelling all existing debts. THEN the scammers said "because those fee-based actions failed, Agora now incurs a debt back to us." (Since those currencies increased voting power, that resulted in enough voting power to create the Town Fountain). This isn't to suggest I'm against trying it again, but maybe it's a cautionary tale? -G.
