Cryptographically Secure Market Features using Open-Transactions

[yamamushi]

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 :-)

[CodeGlitch0]

I'm not 100% sure if this is an advertisement or a feature suggestion for in-game?

 

Either way, I do not believe NQ is intending to have any real-money transactions in DU.  Someone can feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that real-life (RL) money transactions would almost instantly break the game by making it Pay To Win.

[MasteredRed]

Well done. Well done indeed. I understand your point of implementing this system for an in-game currency, but to be honest, I can't see them putting effort and work into something like this. I mean, it is very impressive and would provide the real-life aspects, but as well, in terms of managing this monstrous software, it probably wouldn't be worth it.

 

One vulnerability that came to my mind as well is to check if anyone is cheating the game in any way. An example would be a massive increase in money. You said there would be practically no way to counterfeit, but this does not stop exploiter, hackers, etc. If Novasphere wanted to look for this player, they would have to implement a system that allows them to track this.

 

I think it's a cool idea, but I'm not sure that it would work out for them. I can only say as a member but I think that it's not quite going to to work.

[yamamushi]

 

One vulnerability that came to my mind as well is to check if anyone is cheating the game in any way. An example would be a massive increase in money. You said there would be practically no way to counterfeit, but this does not stop exploiter, hackers, etc. If Novasphere wanted to look for this player, they would have to implement a system that allows them to track this.

 

 

Well there would be no way to counterfeit it in the same way that there is no practical way to forge a PGP signature on an email, especially if the recipient is already aware of the real signature, and I'm not sure anyone has ever actually done that. So for someone to increase the money supply would require the issuing server contract (signature) to sign off on that, which would ultimately mean that they breached the company's network and there would be much bigger issues at stake. 

 

It's all probably overkill though, and they are probably too far along in development to make a change like this. 

[yamamushi]

 

Either way, I do not believe NQ is intending to have any real-money transactions in DU.  Someone can feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that real-life (RL) money transactions would almost instantly break the game by making it Pay To Win.

 

I don't think they have any intentions of making real life money transactions work, but if they did, the fair way would be to only allow one way transfers. ie, ingame money being converted to real money being allowed but not the other way around. 

 

Another good analogy would be the Blizzard Diablo Auction House, which ultimately didn't work out for them though because of their security issues. 

 

I don't think DU is necessarily the right game for that kind of feature though, RMT games generally pan out better if there are a small number of players/subscribers on a small scale. Project Entropia surely doesn't have a massive following, nor does Wurm Online, or (this one could be debated because of the type of game it is) Second Life. 

 

Plus with RMT comes all sorts of legal issues, and without the massive regulatory budget, sometimes those hurdles are insurmountable especially depending on the country you're operating from (in this case France). 

[MasteredRed]

Well there would be no way to counterfeit it in the same way that there is no practical way to forge a PGP signature on an email, especially if the recipient is already aware of the real signature, and I'm not sure anyone has ever actually done that. So for someone to increase the money supply would require the issuing server contract (signature) to sign off on that, which would ultimately mean that they breached the company's network and there would be much bigger issues at stake. 

 

It's all probably overkill though, and they are probably too far along in development to make a change like this. 

Well agreed. My idea was that there are possibly some exploits or breaks in the game that might allow something like a currency leak. If such exploits were to happen, it might be possible to stop those responsible by monitoring, but they would have to design an interface for that, which would cost more time and resources that could be spent otherwise. I see no point into getting into this further but I do like your ideas. Even though they aren't probably going to get through. I hope to see you around the forums since this is your first post.

[yamamushi]

Well agreed. My idea was that there are possibly some exploits or breaks in the game that might allow something like a currency leak. If such exploits were to happen, it might be possible to stop those responsible by monitoring, but they would have to design an interface for that, which would cost more time and resources that could be spent otherwise. I see no point into getting into this further but I do like your ideas. Even though they aren't probably going to get through. I hope to see you around the forums since this is your first post.

 

Thanks 

[Astrophil]

Wow...very lengthy first post. All I can say is, welcome to DU, because about 85% of this I can't understand

[Shadow]

Hi yamamushi,

 

That is an interesting post I enjoyed reading.

Thanks for the info and the quality of redaction.

 

However, I think you're trying to use a bazooka to tackle a mosquito here. It's probably too much for what a game needs and will require a lot of time to understand and implement, isn't it ?

 

Regards,

Shadow

[yamamushi]

Hi yamamushi,

 

That is an interesting post I enjoyed reading.

Thanks for the info and the quality of redaction.

 

However, I think you're trying to use a bazooka to tackle a mosquito here. It's probably too much for what a game needs and will require a lot of time to understand and implement, isn't it ?

 

Regards,

Shadow

 

 

I would compare it to using a sports car as opposed to building a golf cart by hand. 

 

It's not that the library itself is extremely difficult to use, it's that the concepts behind the library can be somewhat difficult to grasp. You have to know a bit about cryptography, ricardian contracting and a bit about virtual currency. 

 

To roll out an Open Transactions server would only take a day or two, if you're familiar with the process, and because there are python, java, C#, lua, perl and php bindings, writing client software that uses the system is somewhat trivial. Here's an example of what a python script using the interface looks like (and it's heavily commented):

 

https://github.com/yamamushi/opentxs/blob/develop/scripts/demo/python/python_ot_test.py

 

 

To be fair, I don't anticipate the need for a system that pushes thousands of encrypted transactions per second. However, I do foresee the need for a currency system that prevents counterfeiting (which is a big part of the reason OT was created). I believe that if Blizzard had been using a similar system in their Auction house for Diablo 3, that it would still be around and usable as opposed to have turned into the duplication filled mess that it was. 

 

I can go over it much deeper in private with you if you'd like, since I end up sound more like a salesperson on the forum when I talk about it, and it's easier to understand if you can ask questions at the same time. 

[Cornflakes]

I have a question: why would a game that runs the actual transactions only between trusted server instances inside their own infrastructure need a hard crypto currency system thats designed for exchanges between non-trusted parties?

 

If the game would run at least partially peer to peer, with transactions being able to be executed on non-secure clients then i could understand it.

But as far as i have seen runs everything on the servers and the game clients are only GUI terminals which only request transactions and not execute them.

[Shynras]

Hopefully not. A lot of people would be way more carefully buying stuff in game, if they knew the rl money counterpart in price. The economy would be way more slower. People wouldnt want to buy stuff. They wouldnt feel rewarded. They would stop playing. That's why planet entropia and secondlife are niche games (a really small niche).

Another negative consequence is the fact ghat new players have hard time to gain any currency, since veterans usually are more willing to capitalize everyhing they can. Bots, muktiaccounts, hacks, would ruin completely ghe game too.

 

The most important for a game to be succesful, is the fun part. What you're saying it's not fun in any way

[yamamushi]

Hopefully not. A lot of people would be way more carefully buying stuff in game, if they knew the rl money counterpart in price. The economy would be way more slower. People wouldnt want to buy stuff. They wouldnt feel rewarded. They would stop playing. That's why planet entropia and secondlife are niche games (a really small niche).

Another negative consequence is the fact ghat new players have hard time to gain any currency, since veterans usually are more willing to capitalize everyhing they can. Bots, muktiaccounts, hacks, would ruin completely ghe game too.

 

The most important for a game to be succesful, is the fun part. What you're saying it's not fun in any way

 

I think you are completely misunderstanding, there isn't anything that would require any currency to be tied to a real market price. The feature is there for systems that allow for people to transfer their digital assets into real assets. Ie, if you ran the software to run a Bitcoin exchange or Ethereum exchange. If you run the server software for use in video games, you have the option of doing it (for games that have those features, like OpenSim, the Second Life clone) but you're not required to. 

 

People are going to RMT no matter what NQ tries to do, it has happened in every single MMO. The question is whether or not they want to take a piece of those transaction fees, or instead spend money trying to stop people from doing it. Blizzard has never tied WoW gold to real values, but for a period of time the value of WoW gold competed against many national currencies. There's arguments that could be made for either side.

 

Again though, OT doesn't require any of that, it's simply one of the many options it provides. 

 

 

 

I have a question: why would a game that runs the actual transactions only between trusted server instances inside their own infrastructure need a hard crypto currency system thats designed for exchanges between non-trusted parties?

 

If the game would run at least partially peer to peer, with transactions being able to be executed on non-secure clients then i could understand it.

But as far as i have seen runs everything on the servers and the game clients are only GUI terminals which only request transactions and not execute them.

 

I'll preface this by saying OT isn't peer to peer, It's made to work just like any exchange system is meant to work with the caveat that outgoing transactions need to be signed by the sender first. When I talk about "signing" in this reply, I'm referring to things like PGP signatures. 

 

The reason for the security isn't to guarantee trust between the servers that NQ runs, but to guarantee trust between the clients and the servers. If I hit 'send' on my client to send money to someone, my client would need to sign off on the transaction before it's sent off the client. That involves taking my private key, signing the certificate with the transaction details, and sending that off to the server to process and move assets around as needed. Part of the reason for requiring the key signing mechanism is to be able to cryptographically prove that an amount of assets really exist, as opposed to invalid transactions being approved (saying you have more money than you really have, trying to duplicate an asset, or counterfeiting). 

 

If we lived in a perfect world with perfect systems, we wouldn't ever need to worry about client software doing things nefariously. However, as games like Diablo 3 have shown us, client vulnerabilities lead to disastrous consequences on ingame markets. Because of that, you can't really look at a client as a trusted party. While everyone tries to argue for clients only being thin clients, and servers doing all of the work, in reality that never happens. Even things like player positioning are probably not completely tracked by the server, as it's more likely that a client will allow someone to move somewhere and show the animations, while the communication happens on the backend to actually verify that a user can move there from the server side. When a server can't keep up, that's when we see the rubber banding effects we call "lag". That was probably a bit off on a tangent there, suffice to say that you shouldn't ever completely trust a client for anything but there is a balance between security and performance that has to be made.

 

With any currency system that you write from scratch, you have to take into account client authentication, counterfeiting, duplication, account security, etc. What I'm suggesting is that they use a (free open source) system that has been tested and used by several companies already, rather than trying to write one from scratch. Not only would this provide the security features, but it would have the added bonus of bringing in features like Cheques, Escrow, Smart Contracting, Bonds, Stocks, etc. All without having to write those things from scratch.

 

I'll leave this with a real world example of why systems like this are important, and this one just so happens to have been caused by the 'trusted client' analogy:

 

http://www.ifc0nfig.com/dominos-pizza-and-payments/

[Shynras]

@yamamushi so are you saying to me that you want to legalize goldselling? With all respect, that's the stupidest thing i've ever read on a forum in my life.

People will rtm anyway? Which effects could have 10 players on the economy vs thousands? Because that's the proportions pretty much, between legal and illegal gold selling.

Novaquark could make cash from it? This game is not wow, is not going to have the same playerbase, nor the same amount of illegal goldsellig.

Giving the possibility to sell in game gold will make the economy so much more competitive, because of veterans/bots exploits, that new players would not have a chance to play the game. This would make the farming much less rewardig and grindy too.

If that's not enough, that would make the game p2w, rich guys rl would rule the universe, and consequentially, they would ruin the gameplay and economy, as if we will not already have to pay a sub.

Lastly (but there could be a lot more suff abot this), the only reason wow is not p2w is the fact that you can't buy most of your gear (pvp or pve) with gold, but with curreencies or loot earned ingame. In other words, using bound items. Ofc adding a large amount of bound items in du wouldnt make sense, because this would kill the economy pretty obviously, like wow's one.

 

Just my opinion tough, sry for the bad writing, i'm on the phone.

[SledgeHammer]

I love the idea of open transactions (for ingame currency only thow).

The fact you could have smart contracts, different currencies, or just different valuables (equivalent of gold) traded is amazing. Also you can issue bonds etc.

Not only you could have player banks with real bank like functionality but you could even set up a stock exchange of sorts!

[Anaximander]

I don't think using a currency meant for hitmen and ordering goat-blood from the deep web should have its place in a video game. It's a neat idea, but it ain't worth on NovaQuark's side of business to meddle in a currency BANNED in many countries around the world. That could mean them having no access to a certain market, perhaps many more markets.

[SledgeHammer]

I don't think using a currency meant for hitmen and ordering goat-blood from the deep web should have its place in a video game. It's a neat idea, but it ain't worth on NovaQuark's side of business to meddle in a currency BANNED in many countries around the world. That could mean them having no access to a certain market, perhaps many more markets.

Prety shure they are not talking about bitcoins and alike rl currencies. They way I understood this would be for ingame "things" purely.

[Anaximander]

Prety shure they are not talking about bitcoins and alike rl currencies. They way I understood this would be for ingame "things" purely.

Well, my instinctual response to cryptocurrency is bitcoin. In any case, cryptocurrency sounds bad. Sounds like people can hoard it and win by default.

[SledgeHammer]

Unfortunately you completely missed my (and thread outhors) point, it is not for cryptocurrencies! Title is prety clear actualy.

It is the system they are offering to handle in game transactions and so on. Nothing to do with bitcoin or dolar or any other rl currency...

[yamamushi]

@yamamushi so are you saying to me that you want to legalize goldselling? With all respect, that's the stupidest thing i've ever read on a forum in my life.

People will rtm anyway? Which effects could have 10 players on the economy vs thousands? Because that's the proportions pretty much, between legal and illegal gold selling.

Novaquark could make cash from it? This game is not wow, is not going to have the same playerbase, nor the same amount of illegal goldsellig.

Giving the possibility to sell in game gold will make the economy so much more competitive, because of veterans/bots exploits, that new players would not have a chance to play the game. This would make the farming much less rewardig and grindy too.

If that's not enough, that would make the game p2w, rich guys rl would rule the universe, and consequentially, they would ruin the gameplay and economy, as if we will not already have to pay a sub.

Lastly (but there could be a lot more suff abot this), the only reason wow is not p2w is the fact that you can't buy most of your gear (pvp or pve) with gold, but with curreencies or loot earned ingame. In other words, using bound items. Ofc adding a large amount of bound items in du wouldnt make sense, because this would kill the economy pretty obviously, like wow's one.

 

Just my opinion tough, sry for the bad writing, i'm on the phone.

 

You do realize that it's already legal to sell game currencies and items for real money, depending on your jurisdiction, right? If it was "illegal" as you claim, then how is it that Blizzard got away with it for their Auction house, or Wurm Online, or Project Entropia or Second Life even?

 

The whole point of having a ricardian contracting system and digital assets is that you don't have to tie them to any particular currency or unit of value. If they wanted to have a cash shop selling in game clothing and other cosmetic items, those could also be represented as digital assets. Everything that you "own" in the game that is tradeable on the market could be represented as an asset. 

 

I've said multiple times in this thread that I don't think NQ has any intentions on making RMT work, and I've also said multiple times that RMT is just one of the options that OT allows, it's not mandatory. There are plenty of good reasons why RMT works well in some games, and the closest example to DU would be Wurm Online.

 

Everything in Wurm Online can be sold for real money, even characters, and they've yet to deteriorate into the "rich people rule" scenario you've laid out. The mechanics of their game don't allow you to benefit from the real world money you're spending easily, without first needing to actually spend real time playing long enough (sometimes months) to actually feel those benefits. They are a full open world sandbox game too. 

 

It also works in Wurm because the only way to get the currency is for someone along the way to spend real world money on it. If you want to buy a plot of land, you buy some silver coins through their store or another player to pay for it. If you don't want to buy any coins, you build something to trade for some. Regardless of how you end up with your silver coins, ultimately the only way they ever got into the game was through the company that runs Wurm Online. 

 

That likely won't work in DU, as I've said before. But you can't just dismiss RMT outright when there are numerous examples of companies making it work for their players and themselves. 

 

I might also suggest not coming in here and calling people stupid, as the last thing we need on the forums is a flamewar breaking out. 

 

 

 

 

Well, my instinctual response to cryptocurrency is bitcoin. In any case, cryptocurrency sounds bad. Sounds like people can hoard it and win by default.

 

 

OT is currency-agnostic. It doesn't matter what assets you want to represent with the system, the only thing it cares about are assets and contracts. What you decide to have as an asset within those contracts is up to you. 

 

It's worth pointing out, OT has no concept of "Bitcoin" or "Dollars" or "Gold" or whatever. In OT you issue assets, that you can call whatever you want (bitcoin, cash, gold, etc.). The semantics of converting those representations of assets into the real thing (ie, taking a asset from an OT exchange and withdrawing it into your bitcoin wallet) would require someone actually write a software interface to do that. I've worked for several companies that have written those types of interfaces for OT.

 

Without real value backing up those digital assets in the OT system, they are effectively just monopoly money. Which I guess is a good way of explaining it. Assets are just digital representations of whatever you choose them to be. 

 

If we were playing monopoly, the money would be worthless. But If said, every dollar in our monopoly game is worth 1 dollar of real world money (and had a briefcase full of cash to back it up), and we played a game that way, it may change the dynamics of how you treat that monopoly money in your hands. 

 

That's how you can imagine an asset. Now just imagine digital monopoly money, only with layers of encryption that make it impossible to forge it. To clarify, you don't need real value backing up an asset, they don't actually hold real world value until you do though. For DU, there's no reason to have real world value backing up the assets.

 

Only the server operators can issue more assets, and the semantics of how that works is somewhat dependent on the situation which isn't worth getting into here.

 

 

The reason people talk about Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) and OT together is because OT can solve the off-chain transaction issue (not going to get into all that here either). Rather than having to send transactions back and forth over the blockchain, and waiting for transaction confirmations, instead you represent your coins as digital assets in the OT system and only need to touch the Blockchain when you're withdrawing your money into your own Bitcoin wallet. 

 

It also solves the exchange fraud issue, but again that's a complex topic that isn't really not worth getting into right now (but I am more than happy to if someone wants).

 

 

A very easy (and simplistic) way of explaining it is: For Dual Universe, OT would just be a tool for handling the bookkeeping of the currency in the game. 

 

Assets, tokens, vouchers, etc. they all kind of mean the same thing in the OT system. 

[yamamushi]

I love the idea of open transactions (for ingame currency only thow).

The fact you could have smart contracts, different currencies, or just different valuables (equivalent of gold) traded is amazing. Also you can issue bonds etc.

Not only you could have player banks with real bank like functionality but you could even set up a stock exchange of sorts!

 

Ultimately I think that's where I left off my first post on this thread.

 

That even if DU doesn't use OT, they should still keep in mind the features it has for their own bookkeeping system.

 

I'd love to see Bonds etc. Not only because it means players could run their nations like real world nations, having to work out their budgets and manage their national debt. But also because it would open up the way towards player run stock exchanges. 

 

Suddenly the semantics of PVP become very fuzzy, and instead of waging wars with ships and cities (space stations, etc.) being destroyed, you may end up with wars where the weapons are the markets. Managing a large scale war would require massive amounts of planning, both from a munitions standpoint, but also from an economic standpoint. You'd have to be ready to enter a war knowing that the companies in your alliance on the market (or even nations themselves) may suffer.

 

Managing it would be horribly difficult, but you could also issue national currencies and their values could compete on an open market.

[Shynras]

You do realize that it's already legal to sell game currencies and items for real money, depending on your jurisdiction, right? If it was "illegal" as you claim, then how is it that Blizzard got away with it for their Auction house, or Wurm Online, or Project Entropia or Second Life even?

 

The whole point of having a ricardian contracting system and digital assets is that you don't have to tie them to any particular currency or unit of value. If they wanted to have a cash shop selling in game clothing and other cosmetic items, those could also be represented as digital assets. Everything that you "own" in the game that is tradeable on the market could be represented as an asset. 

 

I've said multiple times in this thread that I don't think NQ has any intentions on making RMT work, and I've also said multiple times that RMT is just one of the options that OT allows, it's not mandatory. There are plenty of good reasons why RMT works well in some games, and the closest example to DU would be Wurm Online.

 

Everything in Wurm Online can be sold for real money, even characters, and they've yet to deteriorate into the "rich people rule" scenario you've laid out. The mechanics of their game don't allow you to benefit from the real world money you're spending easily, without first needing to actually spend real time playing long enough (sometimes months) to actually feel those benefits. They are a full open world sandbox game too. 

 

It also works in Wurm because the only way to get the currency is for someone along the way to spend real world money on it. If you want to buy a plot of land, you buy some silver coins through their store or another player to pay for it. If you don't want to buy any coins, you build something to trade for some. Regardless of how you end up with your silver coins, ultimately the only way they ever got into the game was through the company that runs Wurm Online. 

 

That likely won't work in DU, as I've said before. But you can't just dismiss RMT outright when there are numerous examples of companies making it work for their players and themselves. 

 

I might also suggest not coming in here and calling people stupid, as the last thing we need on the forums is a flamewar breaking out. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OT is currency-agnostic. It doesn't matter what assets you want to represent with the system, the only thing it cares about are assets and contracts. What you decide to have as an asset within those contracts is up to you. 

 

It's worth pointing out, OT has no concept of "Bitcoin" or "Dollars" or "Gold" or whatever. In OT you issue assets, that you can call whatever you want (bitcoin, cash, gold, etc.). The semantics of converting those representations of assets into the real thing (ie, taking a asset from an OT exchange and withdrawing it into your bitcoin wallet) would require someone actually write a software interface to do that. I've worked for several companies that have written those types of interfaces for OT.

 

Without real value backing up those digital assets in the OT system, they are effectively just monopoly money. Which I guess is a good way of explaining it. Assets are just digital representations of whatever you choose them to be. 

 

If we were playing monopoly, the money would be worthless. But If said, every dollar in our monopoly game is worth 1 dollar of real world money (and had a briefcase full of cash to back it up), and we played a game that way, it may change the dynamics of how you treat that monopoly money in your hands. 

 

That's how you can imagine an asset. Now just imagine digital monopoly money, only with layers of encryption that make it impossible to forge it. To clarify, you don't need real value backing up an asset, they don't actually hold real world value until you do though. For DU, there's no reason to have real world value backing up the assets.

 

Only the server operators can issue more assets, and the semantics of how that works is somewhat dependent on the situation which isn't worth getting into here.

 

 

The reason people talk about Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) and OT together is because OT can solve the off-chain transaction issue (not going to get into all that here either). Rather than having to send transactions back and forth over the blockchain, and waiting for transaction confirmations, instead you represent your coins as digital assets in the OT system and only need to touch the Blockchain when you're withdrawing your money into your own Bitcoin wallet. 

 

It also solves the exchange fraud issue, but again that's a complex topic that isn't really not worth getting into right now (but I am more than happy to if someone wants).

 

 

A very easy (and simplistic) way of explaining it is: For Dual Universe, OT would just be a tool for handling the bookkeeping of the currency in the game. 

 

Assets, tokens, vouchers, etc. they all kind of mean the same thing in the OT system. 

 

First of all sry for the bad written post, since I was on the phone and secondly for the fact that, since my english is not perfect ( Sometimes i can't find a good way to say something, because there's a lot of words i don't know), I couldn't express my thoughts how I wanted. 

I never called you stupid, I was referring to the idea that RTM could work on this game, and yes, I probably should've used a "kinder" word than "stupid", so I'm sorry for that too.

 

That said RTM is never going to work in a game, not in DU, not in every other game, for the reason I already mentioned, and many more. You say that there are games where this works, but I can't find a game, that I can define succesful with said feature. Secondlife? Entropya? Wurm? All those are niche games, played by a bunch of people. Are you sure that, without this mechanic, those games couldn't be much better?

 

Regarding the fact that i talked mostly about RTM, is because I was just responding to your previous quoting me, so just about what you said in that post, not in the topic. 

 

I personally don't think they'll ever implement rl money in any case, it wouldn't even make sense in a P2P game. Regarding a good economy system, I would love that too, and they've already said the game will have it. The possibility to buy bonds from corporations, or stuff like that, would be interesting. but I'm unsure that would be a healthy feature for the game (not many people like that, it's confusing, it's close to be "another game" in the game, ecc...), definitely could be discussed. 

 

Ofc this are all my opinions, and I could be wrong.

[SledgeHammer]

Wild capitalism at it best!

[yamamushi]

First of all sry for the bad written post, since I was on the phone and secondly for the fact that, since my english is not perfect ( Sometimes i can't find a good way to say something, because there's a lot of words i don't know), I couldn't express my thoughts how I wanted. 

I never called you stupid, I was referring to the idea that RTM could work on this game, and yes, I probably should've used a "kinder" word than "stupid", so I'm sorry for that too.

 

That said RTM is never going to work in a game, not in DU, not in every other game, for the reason I already mentioned, and many more. You say that there are games where this works, but I can't find a game, that I can define succesful with said feature. Secondlife? Entropya? Wurm? All those are niche games, played by a bunch of people. Are you sure that, without this mechanic, those games couldn't be much better?

 

Regarding the fact that i talked mostly about RTM, is because I was just responding to your previous quoting me, so just about what you said in that post, not in the topic. 

 

Ofc this are all my opinions, and I could be wrong.

 

 

I understand, and it's hard to convey feelings through forum posts especially if english is your second language.

 

DU definitely seems like it will be a niche game, it won't appeal to everyone. Things like the subscription model, targeting mechanics, etc. are all going to play a factor in it. I would go so far as to say even games like Eve Online are niche games