[Opensim-dev] Currency

[Aldon Hynes]

Random thoughts:

I've always thought that the decision to not include currency in OpenSim was
an ill thought out decision for many reasons.  As people have noted, the
liability issue is a red herring.  I believe there are much greater
liability issues in the areas of intellectual property, copyright and so on
in the asset system than there would be in a currency system.  (I should
note that this comes, in part, after talking with retired U.S. Treasury
special agents).

Clearly, there are issues about people not understanding what it means to
use alpha code, as we learned last April, but that is also not a reasonable
excuse for not producing code.  All code is alpha at some stage.

As Jeroen noted, there are other aspects of how currency could be used such
as a karma system, that are well worth exploring.

All of that said, I have no expectation that the powers that be will ever
rethink their positions and so other alternatives should be pursued.
Perhaps the best would be for people committed to OpenSimCurrency to start a
seperate project where they can collaborate on building a strong and robust
currency system.

Currency doesn't need to be part of the core to be part of many worlds.
Instead, SampleMoney and OpenCurrency could be used as the starting point
for an OpenSimCurrency Project.  The project could be expanded to provide
much more information about the pros and cons of connecting a currency
system to external currency systems, and perhaps even mechanisms to make
such connections.

Likewise, code could be created to take currency and embed it in objects
using financial cryptography which could be used to transport currency
between worlds and for that matter between out of world systems.  (Side note
to skeptics:  I am well aware of the issues with many existing
implementations of financial cryptography.  I'm not saying this would be
easy.)

So, for any of you that are really interested in OpenSimCurrency, what do
you say to starting a parallel project that provides a third party currency
framework that can run in OpenSim?

Aldon