First of all to make things clear, Mark you have your DVC tokens that represent something in your game and your own assets like GFC, etc. But sometimes in your language you seem to say that all Devcoin holders are playing in your game or even that the Devcoin Foundation has some debt to pay to you or your game, so you come time after time stating that there is a zillionary debt. Who are the debtors? You alone, the players? everybody holding Devcoin coins? Can you clarify that for everybody in this thread?
The game is all-encompassing, Earth is just a mythical planet that has usually been thought to even be impossible and definitely improbable, because tales about the planet known as Earth often seem to say or imply that there are more different civilisations on that one planet than any actual known planet has ever been known to have.
FreeCiv only supports a maximum number of civilisations in play at once, and until quite-recent versions the limit was much lower than the present number of 127 or so; thus for most of FreeCiv's history it has not been possible to represent in FreeCiv the actual state of affairs on Earth. Since the peoples of the FreeCiv-based planets have only ever actually encountered planets with far far less civilisations than that on them, the whole idea of an "origin of humanity" planet that has had many many different civilisations all living on it at once without even yet supposedly having been taken over by one of them seems rather unlikely, thus probably apocryphal, mythical, fictional.
Nonetheless some ideas that some have associated with that mythical planet are widespread through the galaxy or galaxies as it is an enduring and large body of mythology; there are even entire ouvres of literature attributed to authors who purportedly were or are Earthlings.
One thing you might have noticed in stories about money as it is used on Earth is that it is heavily debt-based. In fact it is often described as basically coming into existence in the form of debt in the first place. Banks loan out funds they do not necessarily even have, and thus new money comes into existence.
Debt also is an economic driver, in that it creates demand for the currency.
Then too, most free open source multiplayer online games basically give stuff out for nothing to starting players, so that it is possible to flood the game with free stuff out of no-where just by creating new player-accounts so as to get all the stuff each new player gets given at their start of play, which can be a nasty hole in the entire economy, especially if what players start with is something that ought to be quite expensive such as an entire colony ship just arriving at a planet for it to colonise.
Thus it is necessary when adding a game into the larger multiverse to somehow account for where the starting gear for the new game came from in terms of the already running games.
In the case of the intergalactic colony ships creating mining colonies in galaxies far far away the question naturally arises who built them, who paid for them, how did they even get to those far away galaxies, who authorised the new player to take control of the new colony and why and how and where did they come up with whatever resources were involved in getting to that point?
So, each new player-account in the Galaxies Online game came with a back-story that it had borrowed from General Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Funds (GRF) Corps in order to finance the sending of the colony ship that was just now as they started play landing on a planet in a far-away galaxy to start building a mining-colony.
This also gave them a built-in market for the DEUterium they came there to mine, since both GMC and GRF were building depot colonies out there to which the DEUterium could be delivered in return for currency.
Thus it should have all been really rather simple; people would start play, build colonies, mine DEUterium, ship it to depots and thereby pay off those debts.
Where it got more complicated was when it emerged that most players simply registered, got given a colony, and never came back.
That led eventually to some very large debts, so the ability to register as a new player was closed and "repossession Corps" were set up to "repossess" the abandoned colonies since the entire project of setting up these colonies is considered essential to the security of the civilised galaxies, that is, to the civilisations based on FreeCiv.
So now there are about forty-something intergalactic mining Corps still but most of them are "repo Corps", Corps that took over colonies that had been abandoned for more than an entire planet-Earth year, which should be about twelve game-years if FreeCiv one-year game-turns are given a whole month each to play out.
Of those only a few are "free and clear" having long ago paid off their startup loans; most of them still owe huge amounts, some so much that it might make more sense to think of them as owned by the Corps they owe their debts to.
If you follow up the entire many-years-now back-story of the whole thing you will see that there was a period around the whole repossession period in which various governments decided that they were not all that eager to let GMC and GRF be the only lenders raking in the nice amounts of interest the mining Corps were paying on their loans. Thus a bunch of alternative financing schemes were created and for a while their representatives on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet were running around actively competing with one-another to re-finance the miners with loans denominated in their own currencies.
If you search bitcointalk you should still be able to find threads where you can see General Financial Corp being created as a Corp with one million shares, various entities giving it startup funds, the calculation of its initial value per share fo9und by dividing the total initial funds by the one million shares to find it started at 20 DVC per share.
Only a few months later you can see its shares had gone up massively thanks to their officers' cleverness in arranging to borrow MBC from the Martians at a lower interest rate than other governments were asking, so low that GFC was able to offer the miners interest rates competetive with what the various governments were asking.
Thus GFC ended up with probably more of the miners on its books than any of the other lenders ended up with.
Way back then miners liked their debts to be denominated in DVC rather than GMC, GRF, MBC, UKB, CAD or UNS because those other currencies were trending up in value so fast their was a real worry that debts denominated in those currencies might end up being impossible to ever pay. DVC was not climbing anywhere near as fast, which made it an attractive option at the time.
Later there came a period, while we were still calculating the value of DeVCoin by looking at the prices prevailing on the usual web-based "exchanges" folk here on bitcointalk are used to, when DeVCoin's value plummeted so low that a few Corps who noticed in time managed to completely pay off their DeVCoin-denominated loans and some others at least managed to make a big dent in their debt.
Already at that time though there were so few DeVCoins on the platform that it was not practical to expect them to actually get hold of DeVCoins with which to pay; they would have paid using other currencies, using the "Latest Rates include-file" conversion-rates. Because even that many years ago the DeVCoin project was not allocating many if any DeVCoins toward any projects that formed any part of this whole huge multiverse of intertwinded economies created for the purpose of both providing value to the coins and making use of free open source software that presumably was most of the whole point of DeVCoin's mandate.
For whatever reason none of the coins, even those merged-mined right alongside DeVCoin, were not getting any DVC shares for running their nodes, nor bounties to upgrade their software to keep it current; none of the FreeCiv nations were getting any shares for forming entire civilisations of backdrop for DeVCoins to operate in, nothing. Basically pretty much the only DeVCoins going onto the platform were the half of my own coins that I was free to tokenise given I only tokenise half of what I have of a coin in order that I still have the other half to redeem the tokens with without having to go dig up the coins I actually tokenised.
Plus of course I have lost well over a billion DVC on those "normal web-based exchanges" over the years as they flow-by-night. Again with no shares for running those market-making operations over those years.
All of this should have been learned by hanging out on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet all these years, or by Devtome-wiki posts about it all by players who did thusly hang out with the other diplomats and reps and such keeping track of it all and probably also becoming influential political figures helping to steer the whole thing; instead people were being paid for Devtome postings that did not seem to relate whatsoever to any part of any project that was actually working on building up entire universe of backdrop and economy behind DeVCoins and its sibling coins that are mined right alongside it using merged mining.
Right now coins like GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, three of the merged-mined coins, hardly even have any nodes left online, and other coins that are not merged-mined, such as the two original scrypt-based coins that pre-dated litecoin (Tenebrix and Fairbrix) are in similar straits. Some coins are so low in difficulty by now that you can mine them with just one CPU core. That is the time to be mining them, to build up a bit of a stash before someone with a GPU or some ASICs comes along and drives their difficulty back up. Thanks to my policy of not minting-and-destroying tokens on-demand, a low difficulty on-chain does not really affect the security of coins traded on the platforms because the actual on-blockchain coins backing the tokens do not keep changing as people cash in and out; once a coin has been tokenised, mostly years ago, I use the other half of my coins to cash out to the blockchain anyone who wants to thusly cash out, so the coins actually backing the tokens stay year after year unmoving on the blockchain racking up year after year of confirmations.
-MarkM-
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