Search the Community

Hi Everyone, This is my first post here, and like many new people here, I discovered Dual Universe through the E3 trailer this week. I'll go ahead and apologize ahead of time for this lengthy post. I originally came to the forums with questions about the Market system, how the economy would scale, what kind of features the market will provide, how the market system would be secured against counterfeiting (which in this case would be cheating, hacking, etc), if there would be competing currencies and if there would be a Real Market Trading (RMT) system put in place to allow people to profit from their gameplay in much the same way that Second Life or Project Entropia operate. For the most part, my questions were answered by simply reading around on this forum. So it's a nice feeling knowing that other people have the same concerns that I do. From what I've gathered, there will be no RMT system (aside from being able to pay for your subscription using an ingame tradeable item, like PLEX in Eve Online), and there will only be one universal currency (to keep things simple). Without getting into the details of the different types of markets that will be available, how they are created, how goods are moved, etc. (gameplay mechanics) , I'd like to focus this discussion more on the features that one might expect from a digital sandbox market (or markets), and how that can be accomplished securely from a technical perspective. Which leads me into Open-Transactions. My Background Full disclosure here, I was formerly a developer working on Open-Transactions, however I'm not currently involved the project anymore. I contributed about ~200k lines of C++ to the project over 3 years, but I don't measure success in terms of lines of code, I just want to be as transparent as possible. I originally became involved in the project due to my interest in trading digital currencies through exchanges like MtGox or BTC-E, and my interest in bringing those types of technologies into a market that would naturally embrace them, Video Games. To be clear however, I'm not advocating in any way through this post that Dual Universe adopt Bitcoin or any other Cryptocurrency. There are too many issues to consider before even taking on that task, and there's little benefit from doing it other than to have an easy avenue for RMT. None of this discussion has anything to do with Bitcoin other than they both use Cryptography to accomplish their goals. I don't profit in any way from Open-Transactions anymore, as I no longer work with any of the companies that use it. I have no stake in any of the companies currently using it either. I'm the Lead DevOps Engineer for the company I work for now, and OT has nothing to do with our products in any way, nor do I ever see it becoming relevant in my current day job. My only motivation in making this post is that I see a need that can be filled in a way that benefits both Novaquark and prospective players of Dual Universe. What is Open-Transactions? http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page https://github.com/Open-Transactions/opentxs/ Open-Transactions is a financial digital contracting system (software library) that was original developed to allow for gold to be traded on an international federated digital market securely. It (and its forks) has been used in many ways, from handling mobile payments sent through the postal service for Tunisia, to being used as the market backend for OpenSim (an open source clone of Second Life). Right now there is even discussion taking place involving using it as a contracting platform for Texas's state gold depository (which is currently in development, with the end goal of establishing a state-backed currency). It is open source, written in C++, and was originally developed by cryptographer Chris Odom. If you don't want to read through all of this, you can get a feel for what it provides based on his own presentations here: Open-Transactions (or OT as I'll refer to it from here on) can be seen as "PGP for Money", or rather, a suite of encryption tools that come together to create a secure market platform suitable for virtual currencies (hence the emphasis on Bitcoin in many of the discussions about it). It is built on the principle of Ricardian Contracting, as outlined here: http://iang.org/papers/ricardian_contract.html To summarize for those that don't want to read that whole page: "A Ricardian Contract can be defined as a single document that is a) a contract offered by an issuer to holders, for a valuable right held by holders, and managed by the issuer, c) easily readable by people (like a contract on paper), d) readable by programs (parsable like a database), e) digitally signed, f) carries the keys and server information, and g) allied with a unique and secure identifier." - Ian Grigg Better summarized as, "The Ricardian contract is a means of tracking the liability of one party to another when selling goods to each other". It is also the core principal on which things such as OpenBazaar use to operate securely. Open-Transactions provides, what the developers like to call, censorship resistance. In that all of the features that were created for it follow the principle that an asset issuer (a bank, a game company, the post office, whoever), cannot modify the account balances of its users. Nor can an asset issuer prevent a user from being able to transfer ownership of their own assets to whomever they want. Hypothetically speaking, this means that if I were to have a bank account operated in this system, the bank would never be able to alter my balance (empty my account) without my explicit manual approval first. Or, in the case of a Bitcoin Exchange, an exchange wouldn't be able to steal my Bitcoins and disappear randomly one day. Because of the cryptographic proofs involved, there are also inherent protections in place for the asset issuers as well. Such as the inability to counterfeit assets (cheating, hacking, duping, etc. in terms of Dual Universe), or users altering their own account balances fraudulently. No more money could be introduced into the economy than the issuer of that currency would allow. Whether that's (just throwing a name out there) 100 intergalactic credits, or 100 trillion. This doesn't necessarily require the use of a massive database storing all of those account details either, as those details are part of the digital contracting system that tie the whole platform together. To list just a few market features that OT provides: - Transfers: An atomic movement of funds from one account to a different account, like a bank account-to-account transfer. - Cheques A payment which is not deducted from the sender's account until the recipient claims it. - Vouchers: A payment which is deducted from the senders account at the time of creation. - Invoices: A payment request which the recipient can opt to pay from any of his accounts. - Cash: Anonymous cryptographic tokens which can be securely redeemed by the recipient without revealing the sender. - Market Offers: Open agreements to exchange a given quantity of one instrument type for a given quantity of another instrument type. - Smart Contracts: Customizable agreements between multiple parties, containing user-defined scripted clauses, hooks, and variables. - Bearer Securities (Bonds): The negotiable instruments created by Open-Transactions can be used as the basis for financial products such as loans. - Stocks What are the benefits? For Novaquark: - Leveraging Open-Transactions, Novaquark would be able to create a sandbox market platform that provides many real-world features that users might expect. - They would also be relying on a financial platform that is used in the real world for holding real assets (gold, silver, dollars, swiss francs, etc.), without having to develop one completely from scratch for virtual assets. This includes potentially over a billion dollars worth of gold bullion that the State of Texas may soon be repatriating. - OT is still under constant development from cryptographers worldwide, and Novaquark could see their market platform as more of an open-source shared library to interface with rather than a whole subsystem to develop independently. - If Novaquark ever decided to pursue RMT features, OT provides ways of making that work. Both on a technical and a regulatory level. - OT is completely free. If Novaquark decided to fork the project to work on internally to suit their own needs, they certainly would not be the first company to do that. For Players: - Users would be able to rest assured that no item duping could ever cause the value of their assets to drop drastically. - Stock markets for our ingame player-run corporations. - Ingame nations/guilds/whatever would be able to issue bonds backed by their own ingame assets. - Smart Contracts. Players could write up contracts that are self-executing depending on outside events. To get into why this is useful goes way beyond the scope of this post, but a quick google search for "Smart Contracts" should provide you with more than enough use cases. - Player-run banks. In the scope of OT these would be referred to as "asset issuers". Not sure if this really fits into the scope consider that there doesn't seem to be a huge push from players regarding competing currencies. - Cheques. Anyone who uses a Cheque from day to day knows why these might be useful to players. - Cash. The option of being able to transfer vast amounts of money by having to fly cargo containers full of cash somewhere sounds intriguing, although I'm sure many would disagree with me here. - Users would be protected from an overzealous Novaquark employee modifying their account balances without their permission. I don't mean to point fingers here prematurely, but it has happened in other games and is always something that could happen. - For the programmers among us, we can audit the source code of OT and any improvements we make to it would be seen by all of the people who use it. Okay, but what about the negatives? - OT is not a simple platform to use. It was built by cryptographers for cryptographers, and I don't mean to knock on Novaquark in any way by saying this, but game developers are not necessarily the most versed in cryptography as opposed to someone coming from a financial background working on Wall St. I'm confident Novaquark's developers are extremely competent, but this may be new territory for many of them. - OT can be bloaty. The shared library size is quite large on its own, I don't want to think about what the static library size looks like nowadays. - OT is peculiar about the way it stores its data on filesystems. This may not work for everyone, however people have written their own storage engine implementations for it. One of my last OT related projects was building a HyperTable backend for it. - OT is not always intuitive from a developers standpoint. If you come into OT without knowing much about digital contracting, you will be left scratching your head as to what the various API calls actually mean or do. There is a community that is willing to help, but again it's probably not an overnight task. - OT may be way beyond what Novaquark wants to accomplish regarding their market features. From a game development standpoint, not everyone is going to want Stocks or Bonds, and not many people have the time to figure out how to use Smart Contracts (or what to even use them for). - Dual Universe's pre-alpha likely already has a market implementation, and (I don't know why you would even do this) if the system wasn't developed with an abstract interface in front of it, it may be extremely difficult to swap out one subsystem/service for another. - OT is not currently multithreaded across the board, although it's on the roadmap the last I checked. I don't anticipate it will be for several more years. Summary If you've gotten this far, thank you for taking the time to read what I've written up here. I know that there's not a very good chance of Novaquark even seeing this post, let alone taking it seriously, but I believe that OT can fill a gap for them that no other piece of (free open source) software can currently provide. I also believe that even if Novaquark doesn't use OT, that they should consider implementing some of the features it would otherwise provide; such as Checks, Bonds and Stocks. These would only work to supplement the types of gameplay that players are inevitably going to end up doing anyways. For a persistent game on a universal scale, we should have feature-rich markets. I'm not the best at writing these long types of posts, but I look forward to being part of this community going forward from here regardless of the reaction to this first post of mine :-)

Hi all, i m new memeber.I play Eve Online for 4 years and now i play Entropia Universe 3 years.Is posible to insert the Globals and Hof all Fame in the game and real microeconomy?And is posible to testing the game free to play? Thanx for your work the screnshot game is very nice i like the game mmorpg.And your grafic i see is beatiful.Cryengine is number one for develope games. Thanx so much for your work Dual Staff.Piero Cambiaggio