[Opensim-dev] Micropayment

[Aldon Hynes]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dalien Talbot

> 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.

Yes, these are the sort of considerations that I think we should be
thinking about.

> 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 :)

I think this gets to some of the crux of the issue.  Identity and
interdomain
or intersim trust models seems like it should be a core issue that
people focus on, independent of the peculiarities of micropayments,
and it was this context that started the whole discussion.

> 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.

As I've repeatedly noted, I'm more interested in the architectural
issues than I am in the PR or legal issues.  I thought that was
what the list was trying to focus on.

> 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.

When I get some free time, I will explore this.  Looking at the wiki
for comments about modules, all I see is about adding Region modules.
I'm not sure that this fits as a region module, so thoughts about
how to add this as a user or communication module would be appreciated.

Likewise, I'm curious about how the client receives information about
how many dollars an avatar has.  Any ideas in tackling that, as well
as writing a module that is consistent with any data abstraction layer
would be appreciated.