Talk:Money

Hi

My interest in opensim has a lot to do with the money aspect: I wonder how it could be used for example in civic mirrors like what Darb Dabney is working on at http://blog.simgis.com/

If an opensim grid or sim approximates a real place, how soon before it becomes an augmented reality server, mapping a real life community? In that situation, could a local currency map to a real, geographical or social area via a simulated world? The simulated 3d aspect of the world here wouldn't be as important as the currency - it's not important to trade prims or scripts, but that people are who they say they are and that transactions are securely handled.

The idea is basically that people in habiting a local civic mirror sim would trade something other than prims, for example make agreements as to trading services or goods and then just use the money system in opensim to then make that transaction visible to other users. I don't see a need to trade prims as in SL (except perhaps for gaming or educational purposes) unless they are for real life applications, such as RepRap meshes for making real plastic items. http://reprap.org/

There are some social currency systems around (LETS systems for barter for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Exchange_Trading_Systems) but they are encumbered by the fact that a central administrator has to keep track of all transactions and resolve conflicts. A software enabled one, in an accessible system like a virtual world, especially one that can degrade gracefully into chat/emails and IM, could solve a lot of this problem, although it may be seen as overkill.

Other things are honour or merit systems, which don't translate as "money" but can be used to assess trust within an opensim: in many non-western societies for example, there are implied systems of trust and generosity - where those with a high amount of physical wealth are expected to be generous, and where as your physical capacity to generate wealth diminishes with age, so the trust and respect increases so as to provide well being into old age.

I don't know if anyone will understand this - I'm coming from an environmental point of view, perhaps as first shown by E.F. Schumacker in his paper "Buddhist Economics" http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics.html - which is the basis for a lot of green economics initiatives today. With a big financial crash happening around us, it may be time to get inventive with the currency possibilities we have.

Ale Fernandez