[Opensim-dev] Micropayment

[Dalien Talbot]

On Nov 14, 2007 9:08 PM, Aldon Hynes <Aldon.Hynes at orient-lodge.com> wrote:

> > 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.

perfect, we're in full sync then! :)

>
> > 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.
>

Yup. We're in violent agreement :). I started musing around with the
IDTP precisely because it allows to toy around with the trust models
and distributed identity, and associated protocols.

take a look at http://daltonic.blogspot.com/2007/11/interdomain-teleports-revised.html
(cos I am not sure whether my hyperlong mail to the list with the
similar contents got through) - that post basically is my mail to the
list minus the few-thousand-lines-diff of hackishly done code to make
it work.

> > 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.

yes, technical issues of course are the primary concern.

But when we start talking even about toy money, it starts smelling all
other kinds of protocols, so even though IANAL, I prefer to try to
keep those in mind according to my modest capacities :)

There's actually a lot of area for experiment there.

>
> > 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.

I *think* you might want to search for SendMoneyBalance / AddMoney
functions (but this is purely on the quick glance into the code, I
never looked at this, so take it with a grain of salt! :-)

/d