We can implement an "interest" type incentive simply by assigning "shares" to any share-recieving addresses that still contain coins that have not moved for a certain span of time.
By limiting this to share-receiver addresses, such as the addresses folks have on file in Devtome as the address to pay their shares to, we hopefully will at least to some extent avoid paying interest to ancient long-lost dead addresses no-one remembers their private keys to.
A better way of implementing it though might be to assign a certain number of shares, or a certain percentage of the total shares, to a "General Interest Corp" (GIC) which will pay dividends to its own shareholders and whose mandate includes holding more of the coins itself after each dividend-payment cycle than it held prior to the previous dividend-payment cycle thus ties up more and more coins itself.
So far I have avoided creating any dividend-paying assets for a few reasons:
One reason I have avoided creating dividend-paying assets is that the dividend-payment cycle tends to create sawtooth waves in the value of the asset, since the value grows as it accumulates stuff then falls when it pays some of that stuff out as dividends.
Another reason I have avoided creating dividend-paying assets is my background as Gamemaster of "Role Playing Games" (RPGs); it has been my experience in games that players typically are not doing market-investor type analysis of their dividend-paying assets but, rather, have tended to in a way possibly over-value them; they have tended to hang on to such assets stubbornly, because the mere fact that such assets keep creating new value for the player makes them hands-off earners.
Take for example an "Odin's Ring" object that creates a gold ring each day; or a "Purse of Plenty" that creates a gold coin each day, or other such objects; I have yet to encounter a player who has computed a reasonable sale price to sell such an object based on its annual earnings or suchlike; instead players have historically tended to just hang on to such objects as something that will ensure their character keeps getting richer even if the player vanishes for a decade or few decades failing to play at all. Maybe it is simply too much trouble to try to bend their minds around how to compute a price, or maybe it is partly there are not a lot of active markets in such trinkets so they do not have other "interest-bearing" trinkets against which to compare relative price vs earnings ratios.
Take for example "
General Holding Corp", known outside the game as "General Hosting Corp". It charges the civilisations on the FreeCiv planets "hosting fees" intended to cover the projected cost of maintaining "
OpenSimulator" three-dimensional representations ("regions") to represent the land held by those civilisations on those planets.
The actual cost of running a FreeCiv planet is far, far less than the projected cost of representing that entire planet in "
OpenSimulator"; General Holding Corp (GHC) accumulates the difference between what it charges the civilisations and what it currently actually costs the Corp to maintain the planets at the current level and scale of representation.
Since we thus far have not deployed OpenSimulator on planetary scales, this accumulates a lot, so obviously it is in the interests of the civilisations to hold enough shares of GHC to offset their civilisation-hosting fees.
This in turn would lead to a barrier-to-entry for prospective new civilisations considering joining the game, if all the shares of GHC were already owned by competing civilisations. If we insist that in order to create a civilisation within the game you must own at least one such share that makes even less incentive for anyone to part with a share, at least to anyone who does not already control a civilisation within the game.
By not paying dividends, General Holding Corp (GHC) forces players to have to sell shares if they want to "realise" any of the accrued "earnings" of the Corp. That hopefully will create enough sell-pressure over time to ensure that at least from time to time it becomes possible for aspiring civilisations to find a share to try to buy.
Another example is
General Financial Corp. As can be seen from the table at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/sharesindvc.html it has accumulated value over time. If it paid dividends what would be anyone's incentive to sell any of the shares? By not paying dividends it forces holders to have to part with shares if the holders want to "realise" any of the gains.
Considering how much hassle has historically been involved in dealing with "exchanges", whereby any given asset or coin might at any time turn out not to happen to be actually "listed" at any such service, it has seemed particularly important to try to give holders some reason to actually sell something occassionally. So the giving of dividends has historically always seemed like a counter-productive idea compared to making it necessary for someone to actually somehow "make a sale" in order to "realise" any "earnings" or "profits"...
BY THE WAY, regarding "DiaMonD": that is indeed a nice coin, at some point I should probably add it into the "current conversion rates" calculations as it has been becoming more and more important to the "big picture" ever since using it as a major way of withdrawing earnings from Cryptsy. Well over 100,000 DMD so far is in our current "big picture" and it is expected to have more and more importance as part of the "reserves" that in effect are the ultimate "backing" of the coins used in the
Galactic Milieu and thus effectively in "backing" DeVCoin. It will probably also eventually become associated with the in-game objects known as diamonds in the various games that serve as interfaces into the Milieu.
ALSO BY THE WAY, regarding General Holding Corp shares, you might have noticed GHC is not listed in the public pages showing share values. That is deliberate, as the Corp is not really intended to be publicly traded as ownership of its shares is intended to be by civilisations and prospective civilisations rather than by the general public.
-MarkM-