[Opensim-dev] Micropayment

[Dalien Talbot]

On Nov 14, 2007 7:38 PM, Aldon Hynes <Aldon.Hynes at orient-lodge.com> wrote:
> /d
>
> I hear what you're saying, but it still sounds an awful lot to me like your
> saying that because we cannot force all servers to be trusted servers we
> should not include in the design any feature that depends on trusted
> servers.  That does not sound like a wise decision to me.

I am advocating we should change the design of the feature such that
the presence of the untrusted sim minimizes the collateral damage,
preferrably without the alterations to the client side.

>
> That said, I recognize there are many issues to be addressed in moving
> forward from release 0.40, many of which, some people may find much more
> important or compelling.  However, that doesn't mean we should design an
> architecture that does not allow for the use of currency or discourage
> people who are interested in that part of the project from working on it.
>

totally agree. But the user identity and the interdomain (or intersim
within single grid) trust model are the foundations which we do not
have at the moment - and I believe they are critical to be able to
understand on how to tackle micropayments in any meaningful way :)

Claiming the existence of the micropayments system is a huge liability
from the PR standpoint for the project - even if we consider the "toy
tokens" to be nonexchangeable into any real money. Once there's any
touch with the real money, additionally there're legal legislation
rules that kick into place - I guess this is one of the reasons why
there's no rush in this direction.

In any case - I totally agree that just merely implementing a plugin
doing a simple database backend doing the L$ arithmetics + packet
handling code as a sort of module is a useful thing, and is very
welcomed - it would be a very good start.

But it's important to include appropriate disclaimers which outline
the limitations of that plugin.

/d