Topic: Post-2007 SecondLife (sans admins), here we come! (Read 5801 times)

House of cards, in the sense that there's so much behind the scenes graft and market manipulation that the regulating entity doesn't want revealed that they'd rather start the demise of the entire system then let it be revealed. Bitcoin doesn't have this issue - there's nobody pulling the strings here.

The part in bold is kind of my point: I'm not sure we really ever had a chance to try to succeed, since every time 7 happened, 8 (laws and regulation) followed. My optimism only extends to being able to see what will happen. Perhaps you are right, and thanks to Bitcoin we will be stuck in stage 7 for ever. Maybe we'll come together to form some sort of ratings body that, while doesn't have any legal force, can use its ratings power to destroy anyone who doesn't conform to accepted practices. Or perhaps the outcome will be something else, and something totally unexpected. I don't know. I believe people in general are good, so perhaps I am a little optimistic.

And where in your model go those who simply want to live and let live?

This is warrantless optimism. I don't see end of this "stage" anywhere in the sight, especially with steady inflow of newbies. People in general are poor with money management even within heavily regulated area of fiat currencies/credit cards. And even if you succeed with some community self-regulation(had that ever succeeded in history?), don't forget there are billions of other people that don't speak english/don't know about bitcointalk/don't trust us/etc.

Do we need a grid for Bitcoin?

Edit: Imagine we can meet Gavin and give him back some BTC we received out of his faucet. And maybe Satoshi too! 

Likely something to do with this: https://gist.github.com/2217885

Thanks for the post Rassah. It was an enjoyable read. Like many others here, I had only heard miscellaneous stories about SL, and you provided a very interest glimpse into it's life.

Blatantly thread-shitting to warn anyone who deals with Andrew Bitcoiner that he is a scammy fuck!  This guy owes me over 133btc in withdrawls from bitjack21.com, and he deleted my account which still had over 260btc in it!!!!

A couple of responses to things people are wondering up-thread:

1) You can now transfer move around between different grids and use the same inventory, if the grid you're on and the grid your inventory is on both allow it. IIUC what's happening under the hood is that the first time you try to rez some inventory that comes from another grid, the grid you're on fetches a copy of the whole thing, including all the textures and sounds.

2) OpenSim doesn't include money handling by default, but it has a lot of hooks to allow people to make modules for it that do. The approaches are:
 a) Internal currency that only works on your grid and may or may not be exchangeable for real money (there's a FOSS module called DTL/NSL, and the other day Dreamland Metaverse announced what sounds like a proprietary one for their own grids.)
 b) Vendor-managed digital currency - Virwox, who also run Bitcoin exchange services, do a currency called OMC which is designed for OpenSim grids. This looks like quite a nice piece of work, but relies on a single, small tech company to be competent and honest, stay in business and not suddenly pivot to a more promising product. So far so good in this case, but it's probably not sensible to build an open commerce infrastructure on a small private company.
 c) Real-world currency, where the grid just brokers addresses and confirms payments (Mod-PayPal for PayPal, or my Mod-FreeMoney for both PayPal and Bitcoin).

I have taken gear from OSGrid out onto the hypergrid, picked up items out on the hypergrid and brought them "home" in my inventory to OSGrid.

It is apparently true though that Open Simulator deliberately does not force a particular implementation of currency.

I have heard there are various currency modules or plugins but I have not investigated them yet, partly because someone else is already looking into using Open Transactions somehow for that. There is at least one open currency though that supposedly works, is exchangeable and so on, supposedly it is simply up to people who run regions whether to choose to enable it. (Maybe having to go get that module and include it somehow; it does not come with the "standard" mainstream Open Simulator releases.)

-MarkM-

Since the discussion has moved onto Bitcoin / OpenSim, I thought I'd post an update on the work I've been doing to integrate them.

This is my money server, which just about works, but not yet securely:
https://github.com/edmundedgar/Mod-FreeMoney

I'll post another announcement when it's finished enough for people to install on a non-experimental basis.

It's based on a module originally designed to do PayPal transactions, and I've kept the PayPal functionality in there (you can turn it on or off in config). I'm hoping this will make it more attractive to grid admins who don't know enough about Bitcoin yet to bet the farm on it.

It doesn't handle any of the user's money - it just keeps a list of addresses for avatars, prompts them to pay the appropriate address and delivers their inventory when the payment is complete. It has functionality built in to use www.coinapult.com to pay people who don't have a Bitcoin address registered yet, but that's not currently usable because whoever did Coinapult has dropped off the face of the earth and won't issue an API key.

I think this will be quite useful, but there's still a bit of friction in the payment process - you have to click "Buy" in the viewer, then follow an open URL link, then pay an address either using a bitcoin:// URL or by copy-pasting into your client / e-wallet.

Taking the friction out of the process completely involves hacking the viewer (a bit tricky) then getting everyone to install it (potentially very tricky). But I think this should be the ultimate goal. If anyone can help with this, please let me know.

What I'd like to do for now is to take out _most_ of the friction by making it possible to authorize the money server to tell your wallet to make payments, for a limited time, up to a maximum amount you can specify. My current thinking is to make a hacked version of a client like Electrum and build that feature in. It could also be done with a separate bit of software in the middle to bridge your Bitcoin client and your viewer. Likewise, if anyone can help with this (say hacking Electrum to make an "Electrum OpenSim Wallet" version) please get in touch.

Adding BTC support integrated into the viewer would be a solid step in the right direction. This would liklely bring a number of new people into the Bitcoin world overnight.

OTOH, there is still the asset server problem. How is a random viewer used by a random av in a random region supposed to know how to render UUID 762354-9834598-8734 without common asset servers?

Not sure I get the exact point of this thread, but it makes me think of this idea I red once, according to which the Internet itself is a MMORPG.

It is more than that. And sadly, it is also less. OpenSim sims do not have a common currency. Accordingly, no real functioning economy.

The centralized control that LL has over SL allows for common asset servers that let you carry your identity across sim boundaries. This allows for portable assets. This in turn allows for a system of commerce.

Last I looked OSGrid had no expectation of an av carrying their inventory and being able to rez it in any arbitrary region. At least and hope that it is discernible in its true form by others. Is my impression outdated?

That is what Open Simulator is. You can run it yourself on your own machine, I can run it myself on my own machine, we can visit each other's "worlds". No central authority, if you want me to be able to manipulate your world you can let me, if I want you to be able to manipulate mine I can let you. There is no need to just imagine it, you can run it, visit it, it already exists.

-MarkM-

Hmmm. Imagine an open source virtual world protocol with no central authority? I might never leave the computer!

This and similar properties are what make Bitcoin so exciting to me. There are several firsts for humanity to explore: truly deflationary currency, ability to recover money from disaster (backups), non-seizable, money stored in your brain - just to name a few. These things have never been experienced by humanity before and we get to watch it play out for history.

good read, if not epic post!

Self regulation has just a sordid of history as everything else we've discussed. Without government regulation, there will always be people that say 7% WPR, and there will always be people more than willing to send an anonymous person with "solid forum reputation" their money. While the FCC doesn't have a 100% track record, a lot of these schemes done here are no where on the same level of sophistication as Madoff or Sanford, and would have never, ever pass the smell test. This whole idea of "getting the weak hands out," "the strong survive," and "we'll take care of it ourselves" is simply not good for business. I've read countless people say that what pirateat40 did was good for the BitCoin economy. No, it wasn't. Anytime someone gives up on BitCoins means that person is not going to accept or demand payment in BitCoin, one less person that will spread the word of how useful it is, one less consumer willing to spend with this currency. This is a numbers game, a sad state of mobocracy, but it is what it is; we can be the smartest people in the world with the best idea ever but if no one wants to play with us, we are doomed.

Honestly, at this point, there's not much we can do but hope for the best. We set our path, placed our bets based off of what we thought, and tossed the dice some time ago. However the dice may land, let's just hope we bet right.

Ok, I see what you're saying, and fair enough.  In second life, the activities are limited to only pacifist ones.  Eve gives more freedom and more activities, including those relating to warfare and clanship, which results in a better-simulated economy.  I can agree to that.

In Second Life you have fun in the different worlds and...that's all.

In EVE you fight. You fight for resources, for control of systems, for supremacy. You have thousands of players busy in different alliances to produce EVERYTHING they need, from the simplest frigate to the most complex super-capital ship and space stations. You must conquer and hold systems, exploit moons, get hundreds of different resources. And you can't do that alone, this is not World of Warcraft where you must go farm the instances to drop the super sword because it's "bind on pickup" and you can't buy it. Thousands of ppl specialize in different things. If you want a super capital ship you don't have to produce it yourself, you can just buy it. Who produce them don't have to mine the minerals, they just buy them, make the ship and sell it. And so on.

In my opinion this simulate much better the free market than second life. An alliance risk to disappear if the leaders are so fools to lose their money in a ponzi scheme. So not only they lose money but you see other alliances exploiting this to destroy them