Script security in the distributed environment

I won't write yet again that "once you copied something, you lost the control" - so obviourly the source of the scripts has to stay on the original sim (home/inventory sim). Now, how about if we make this even more extremist and keep the whatever binary is there as well (byte code or such) on the home sim ?

This creates a couple of interesting interactions:

1) script creator <-> home sim owner = someone has to pay for the CPU and bandwidth taken by the script execution
2) script creator <-> script owner = now the replication is actually a *constraining* factor for the close-sourced scripts, which means that may be close-sourced scripts might need a "subscription" based model of business to compensate for the (1).
3) script creator <-> script owner's sim owner = possibility to allow to run the script in the non-native environment. What determines whether to allow this or not - an open question.

The coolness of this approach is that it would stimulate the creation of open code, to an extent - since the closed code will accumulate on the home sim and eventually render it almost unusable. But, given the enough backchannel funding from the users (on a service-based model) - this could actually cause a creation of a lot of "closed overlay trees" on top of the grid - and might be a good and interesting thing for the metaverse economy.

Again on the topic of e-currency..

I've been wandering around on the web and reading up about LETS, and other funny nontraditional ways of trade, and found this pretty interesting page, which has a lot of information on various projects.

One of those, which has some interesting ideas, is the epoints. Quite funny how they tackle the issue of "copying" of the notes by using the one time challenge-response scheme - maybe this could be usable in the future as a base for something...

Human beings will always betray you

Ciaral Laval posts an interesting question/news: apparently the stuff created by "Cory Linden" is now seen as created by "Cory Ondrejka", and there is a discussion of "Is using your real life name for your avatar name good or what ?"

I can understand the possible reasoning on LL side for musing with this idea - the attempt to avoid the burden of regulating the world by attaching this burden to possibly "spoiling" one's RL identity by "wrong" inworld actions in SL, and as well to assist in RL legislation over the activities of SL.

To me, quite frankly, this would mean the end of the "our world, our imagination" thing, and it's one of the worst moves that LL could make - unless they want just to become a kind of "virtual 3D communications platform for real world".

I've been always saying that one thing SL did not do what it could - to become a field for trying out the possible completely and crazily new economic and society ideas, at a relatively small expense - compared to trying them out in the real world. Ok, well, maybe replacing the centrally-issued currency with some other form of interaction is too much - so the crazily new economic ideas are out. But still there is/was the interesting social experiment - how will the world organize if left unregulated.

The absence of the bind of RL name to avatar name inworld, means that the people are able to act genuinely, with much less constraints put on them - hence allowing for a better exposure of the true human nature, as opposed to the "human nature altered by the society, economics, and current morale".

But as soon as you bind the RL name to SL name - you push the actions under the microscope of their interaction with the real world.

There's quite an interesting video documentary series. I do nt agree with at least some parts of it, yet it makes one think and wonder - which is, although painful, is always a good thing.

It makes me draw some parallels, and argue that if there is a RL name exposed by inworld, this means the end of SL.



SL is unique in comparison to many other environments is that there is no explicit purpose in playing it. So, it is an extreme experiment in "negative liberty" as defined by Isaiah Berlin - see the third movie of the documentary series for an indepth discussion on this.

I'd argue that the low concurrency numbers of SL and declining growth are the consequence of the absence of purpose. The exponential growth was the hype that has arised there - you can make millions while not standing up from your chair!. While not necessarily the most sophisticated (there might be some things in the world that are better than money), it is certainly a purpose. And this has attracted new millions to SL.

And together with that there was a discovery of wildly deviant behaviours for someone with "augmentist" view on SL and strong conservative view on RL - so there were vocal few who said "Pheww... Beurk!", and the chanting crowd that always follows the leaders went into the same spin - and the same folks who a few months before were blindly singing hallelujah, were now throwing the stones. Couple this with some attempts to regulate the scammers or the biz that was not legal according to the US legislation - and you get what we have now.

Cory pushed out or simply left, Philip steps down, and everyone seems to understand and welcome the move. I can understand both. It gets boring - it gets exactly the same like any other business. Noone would argue that the toilet paper is extremely important, yet it's not something worldchanging - and it's worldchanging possibility that I like SL for, not just being an "3d business platform".

Nobody Fugazi argues that it would be hard to introduce this in a way that hurts the community. I would argue the opposite - it is hard to introduce this in a way that does *not* hurt the community.

As a pure "3d business platform", SL is years before being mature. Besides, if i am in for a serious business, like buying the car, I'll still prefer to go to the dealer and try out the real thing. It's this magic smell of "you can be anything and anyone and do almost anything without bringing the baggage of your RL reputation and without risking much" that makes SL so special.

Do not take it that SL reputation is not important - I hope "Dalien Talbot" has some reputation and some image, which I value. It's maybe even not so different from the one of the meatball behind the keyboard, but I prefer to keep the two - to be able to clearly separate where I try things and dream about things - here, and where I do the things "as I am supposed to".

If that little invisible and shaky wall of different identities disappears - there will be much less room for experiment - and, remember, as they say, human beings will always betray you, so think twice before you fully trust your avatar life fully to them...

Inflation-free money

I've stumbled across a page with a bunch of interesting money-related links - this one.

Quite interesting book there is about inflation-free money. Unfortunately, it's not available on amazon, so I could not get a paper copy, so will have to continue reading online. There are a few interesting thoughts about avoiding inflation, and community money. I'll include one interesting quote here:


Between 1932 and 1933, the small Austrian town of
Wörgl started an experiment which has been an
inspiration to all who have been concerned with the issue
of monetary reform up to this day. The town's mayor
convinced the business people and administrators that
they had a lot to gain and nothing to lose if they
conducted a monetary experiment in the way suggested
in Silvio Gesell's book "The Natural Economic Order".


People agreed and so the town council issued 32,000
"Work Certificates" or "Free Schillings" (i.e.,
interest-free Schillings), covered by the same amount of
ordinary Austrian Schillings in the bank. They built
bridges, improved roads and public services, and paid
salaries and materials with this money, which was
accepted by the butcher, the shoemaker, the baker.
The fee on the use of the money was 1% per month
or 12% per year. This fee had to be paid by the person
who had the banknote at the end of the month, in the
form of a stamp worth 1 % of the note and glued to its back.
Otherwise, the note was invalid. This small fee caused
everyone who got paid in Free Schillings to spend them
before they used their ordinary money. People even paid
their taxes in advance in order to avoid paying the small
fee. Within one year, the 32,000 Free Schillings
circulated 463 times, thus creating goods and services
worth over 14,816,000 Schillings. The ordinary
Schilling by contrast circulated only 21 times. (8)
At a time when most countries in Europe had severe
problems with decreasing numbers of jobs, Wörgl
reduced its unemployment rate by 25 % within this one
year. The fees collected by the town government which
caused the money to change hands so quickly amounted
to a total of 12% of 32,000 Free Schillings = 3,840
Schillings. This was used for public purposes.


So it looks like "decaying money" were very much stimulated to circulate - so they were a much more effective instrument of enabling the trade.

In my mental experiments I came to concepts that were similar, better yet, they did not require the any centralized authority to govern them - which is pretty cool, I think.

I'll write some more about that in a separate post, when I can crystallize it more.

Even yet better than free: paid! :-)

Ok, this one I have to link to - as even with the diagonal reading this is an excellent post. Prok's reply to the "better than free", which I bookmarked a few days ago.

Minus the classic Prok's rant that "all you morons tekkies imagine the information *has* to be copied" (which is a misunderstanding of at least my point of view anyway, so I do not hold any anger) - it is an excellent read.

Especially the great notion is the truck driver. While in the hypothetical matrix, the job is done by the machines who keep the meat they need to function (or for whatever the reason they kept the people in the half-asleep state - maybe as randomness generators?), the real-world is much simpler and much more complex.

Thanks for this post. When the credit is due - it's due. I'll need to reread both later when I have more time to think without interruptions.

30 pieces of silver...

I've been reading up so much on the SL content piracy in the blogs, that it is not much fun anymore.

Some of the folks it's an easy problem that should "just be fixed", and it is not fixed yet merely because of the stupidity and ignorance of the punk libertarian tekkies.

Some of the folks realise it's a damn hard thing, entangled with psychology, economy, philosophy, one's notion of integrity, and somewhat a little bit technical (I applaud Ordinal for the well balanced analysis of the situation - but call up for the benevolent dictator to appear out of the box and fix everything.

Personally, I believe in the openness.
However, one thing I question is if we'd take a random sample of 1000 avatars from the crowd - how many of them would knowingly go and save 30 silver pieces in exchange of their integrity ?

I've mentioned the experiment the other day - but today I thought - there's already quite a few places live, where this kind of experiment might take places - it's just a matter of exposing them.

For this purpose I've created a new blog Second Thefts: the alleged thefts in SL revealed and openly discussed.

The rest is written there, and I will be looking forward for any posts there, and we will see how the experiment turns out.

Better than free

A very interesting article about the money making in the case of freely copyable content.

A very interesting article - I suspect the conclusions from that are not only valid for the digital world - if you look around you, the RL is increasingly more and more about "Freebies", so the similar principles could apply.

Found it via Virtually Blind.

lame-ass economics, part 1.

First, a disclaimer: all of this represents purely personal speculations and mental experiments of an SL avatar, which neither claim the correctness of itself nor intend to claim the incorrectness of anything else, and bear no correlation with real life whatsoever - keep this in mind. Additionally - they're going to be rather random and incoherent. If you feel uncomfortable - please stop reading here.

With an attempt to squeeze any monetary system into a fully distributed environment immediately the main question pops up - who and how can print the money. (The fact that it is fairly obvious that in such a system we would most probably talk about fiat money). Obviously since we talk about the fully distributed system, the usual safeguard of the smart folks at government printing the money would not work - there's simply no such entity. So - "anyone can print the money".

There is also a strong tie to another messy area in the distributed virtual world - identity. For now we assume this problem to be "solved".

I would think that one of the best properties of the money - its total "anonymity" is also one of the biggest evils. If each banknote did have a full history if its adventures - the things like money laundering could be easier to detect and address - if we all agree that drug dealing is a "bad" thing, then money that has been once used for this - would become "tainted" and automagically lose its value for anyone who considers the drug dealing to be "bad". Let's put aside for now the process of creation of the specific microeconomies with the same "currency" being only internally used - the money that lost its universal acceptance would cease to exist.

Now, index by the identity, and we have an interesting system which would also take care of the reputation - the person which is engaged into socially unacceptable financial activities would also be a "tainting factor" in itself for the currency.

This "index by identity" is a difficult problem as while it is relatively easy to "trail" the money - just "write on the back of it", tracking "all the notes that were printed by the current individual" is a more challenging task.

However, this is not something impossible - imagine a high-redundancy distributed storage media, which would record every transaction. It is in a sense a one-way street - it is very easy to put something into such a system, but with the reasonable information storage redundancy, it would be very hard to retrieve the information out of it. This kind of media ("distributed data bank", if you like) would also be required.

I don't touch yet the question on how to limit the given individual to become hyper-emitter, but even with the above propositions it sets up some funny playground for mental experiments.

My evil plans to become an SL billionaire

Ok, after reading Bella's lesson in economics, I have a confession to make, my friends.

Like any human, I am infected with a bacteria of Greed. Although I think overtime I learned to feel when there is an upcoming strike of the disease - and take the measures - appeal to my common sense, to morals, to the principles, donate to charities (even though I have little trust that those actual in need will get a bit of what I gave, at least I offloaded the burden of my chest).

But nonetheless, the ghost of the bubble burst of the 90s is haunting me. I want to come up with something that will be liked by all others, and that will generate me an sky-high amounts of lindens without any involvement from my side.

And I think I have come up with this idea. The only quirk is whether it does comply with the new gambling policy or not. I think it does comply with the policy - but not sure. To doublecheck, I've IMed a few lindens with the question. Hopefully they reply. Well, if not, I guess in a couple of weeks' timeframe we will have to test out whether it complies or not :D

The game looks like a remote relative of a sploder, but is much more brutal, honest, open, and deterministic. Everything depends on your strategy and the amount of lindens you have. It's fully predictable, my friends. Except the mystery of others' minds...

And with this we depart into the next RL week, thanks for staying with us.