Because an MMORPG would be massively expensive to create, development has pretty much inevitably always come back around to finances, and that is why we find things like the Open Transactions system coming to the foreground. In games like Freeciv the improvements players can build in their cities include markets, banks and stock exchanges. Open Transactions seems to be potentially useable for representing/simularign such things, and it touches upon finance, so we end up with Open Transactions development going on because hopefully things like markets, banks and stock exchanges could be aspects of games in which games can intersect with finance and thus maybe find some means of financing games.
Eventually hopefully we could know within some individual character run aroud in sewers killing rats level of combat/adventure game what exactly would be involved if a player racked up enough wealth selling rat pelts to think about building a martket or a bank or a stck exchange. The much larger scale, based on Freeciv, that most players running around doing hand to hand combat with individual monsters probably tend not to care about will be covered for us by the much higher level larger scale Freeciv scale that manages an entire world at a time for us.
we would thus have built into the game an in-game "what it would take" to deploy an Open Transactions server representing a market, bank or stock exchange built in a specific game-year in a specific city on a specific planet.
So far of course all we have is the one Open Transactions server having to handle/represent all the business of all the cities of all the planets in the entire Galactic Milieu, but that again is of course due to finance/economics. How is even just that one Open Transactions server to pay for itself? Because obviously we cannot scale up to deploying one such server per each of the hundreds of cities that have a market, bank or stock exchange on each of the many planets of the Milieu if we cannot establish how such a server can finance itself. If however we can develop a business-model by which any individual server can finance itself then scaling up to tens or hundreds or thousands of servers is a lot more economically feasible, depending mostly on market depth as in how many cities' players actually choose to build a market, bank or stock exchange in their city or how many that do so choose to enable the detailed level of representation of such a city-improvement that an Open Transactions server can serve as.
So many problems end up coming down to economics/finance that I guess it should not be surprising that aspects of systems that touch upon finance keep ending up taking priority, since until finances are solved little else can be done other than by such volunteer labour as might from time top time choose to devote itself to some aspect of things.
Target audiences such as the denizens of bitcointalk forums do not even seem interested in all the MMORPG parts that many MMORPG players are looking forward to, they actually probably prefer dealing abstractly with stocks and shares and currencies without needing some "character" to walk past potential assassins or pickpockets to enter some "bank" building in order to deal with such things; they probably prefer to not have to deal with the city, the planet, the rats in the gutters and sewers, the pickpockets and muggers and bank-robbers, and just very abstractly buy and sell commodities, currencies stocks and shares on a website... Which is good, because it saves a lot of expense of providing graphic representations and personal combat systems and so on, allowing us to go direct to the financing before we even have the imagery and music and sound effects and all that stuff because all that stuff is used for aspects of the game that this target audience does not want to deal with anyway. Hopefully a win-win!
-MarkM-
