[Opensim-users] Money in OpenSim-Worlds [was: Bitcoin]

[Edmund Edgar]

> You cannot wait hours before  you can use your uploaded content, before you
> can use the land you just bought for 0.01 bticoin etc...

Right, that's what I just said. But let me fill out a bit more detail
of the other thing I just said.

A BitCoin transfer goes through several stages of confirmation. It's
immediately broadcast to all nodes that are listening, but It takes up
to an hour to be absolutely sure that user hasn't been trying to cheat
the system by spending the same money twice. If you're prepared to
take a slight risk that the transfer may be revoked (because the user
managed to spend the same money twice, and the network settles on the
version that got paid to someone else), you can accept the transaction
without waiting for confirmation.

If you're doing a land transfer or texture upload, the sim owner (who
is the payee in this case) probably doesn't mind taking a small risk
that the transaction may be reversed. They're probably still much
safer than they would be with a PayPal or Credit Card transaction,
which can be cancelled months after it was made. And if they're
trading money for virtual land or texture storage, they can always
take their land back, delete your texture or just kick your avatar
out.

But if you're dealing with a large payment from one user to another,
you probably don't want to take that risk. (The larger the payment,
the greater the incentive somebody has to try to double-spend.)
Charge-backs are a big disincentive to vendors, and one that we don't
want to bring with us.

So what you'd probably do would be something like:
- Money transferred to a sim owner as a fee for an upload or land
transfer would be spendable in seconds.
- Purchases made below a certain value would go through in seconds.
- Purchases bigger than a certain value would take an hour or so.
(That's the average time required for 6 confirmations, which is
considered effectively irreversible.)

Alternatively, the "hybrid" version would be that you'd keep some
money on the server, which would give you instant transfers on the
Linden model, but could put cash into the system when you were running
low and have it automatically send you cash back when you reach a
certain level. (That puts a cap on how much money the grid has to
baby-sit.) This would be the most painless way to do this for the end
user, especially while there's no BitCoin-ified viewer to use, but
it's less "pure" in that it still puts a certain amount of money in
the hands of somebody who we don't completely trust, and who doesn't
really want to be holding it for us.

-- 
Edmund Edgar
Founder, KK Social Minds
Educational Technology for the Web and Virtual Worlds

ed at socialminds.jp
+81 090 3912 3380
Skype: edmundedgar
Second Life: Edmund Earp
Linked In: edmundedgar
Twitter: @edmundedgar
http://www.socialminds.jp