We build the Galactic Milieu from existing free open source software, but of course most existing systems tend to give starting players various startup gear, which in a reasonable economy has to come from somewhere.
Of course anything a player starts with has some value, even if small, so as long as we allow any free rabbitholes into the Milieu we are giving stuff away, even if that stuff consists only of the meat, organs and so on that a butcher can chop the player's character up into.
Thus even if we started new characters naked there would be "micro earnings" available even if only by killing starting characters, butchering them for their organs and such, and selling the parts of them to butcher shops or necromancers or whatever.
As it is, we are currently still allowing people to sign up free at our "CrossCiv" Crossfire RPG server, and even still have new characters start out with some gear.
If the ability to start new player-accounts and characters free is abused, of course, we will have to start charging if only to limit the amount of "spamming" of player-accounts and characters.
But as of this writing, the rabbithole known as CrossCiv is still open to free players.
Historically the integration of cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies has been through guilds, associations, clans and such (groups), with the provision of such services by the guild (or clan, etc) officers being a large part of why people join such groups. There has even been some work done on adding coin daemon access to the bartender NPCs in guild/clan/etc houses.
Recently we have created a currency, CCAMB to implement the trading of Amberium on the Horizon (NHZ) platform. Depending on how well that goes, we might also implement such a currency or asset on other such platforms (Burst? Next? Etc).
For years now we have maintained online tables of conversion rates between a number of the currencies and assets commonly used in the Milieu at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html but CCAMB is the first time we have attempted to integrate the built-in currency of the Crossfire RPG system into a trading platform. Bailing coins into and out of the system will, at least initially, be handled by guild/clan/etc (group) officers, so if you wish to move Amberium between the CrossCiv server and the Horizon platform you will for now continue to use your guild/clan/etc connections, affiliations, alliances etc just as you already do for various other financial services.
-MarkM-
Awesome that you guys found a way to use NHZ platform. Maybe someone will take over NHZ development again, upgrade to ARDOR like NXT will do in Q3 2017.