RFC: SL Commodities

I am making the proposal to Linden Labs that in future versions
they great commodities of heavily used resources in the game.

Example:
------------
a) Prims


No longer will prims be free and only have a limiting factor based
on the amount of prims your land can support. In the future, prims
will have to be purchased on LindenX. If you wish to create a 500/prim
object, you will need to buy 500 prims. This will force demand for
Linden Dollars (L$) and begin pushing up the US$/L$ valuation.
As more people require prims, more L$ will be needed to buy them.
And as more L$ is purchased, the available money supply will shrink
and the value will rise.

This will also create a base-line cost of production. Somebody who
runs a T-Shirt shop will have to purchase the basic materials (prims)
to create the articles of clothing they sell. Those with Capital to create
a business will succeed. Those without the capital will need to turn to the
capital markets for initial investment. Thus begins the need for a stock
market and SL business investment. And the tools to manage it in SL.

All Hail to the Capitalist.
All non-Capitalist can go back to (There: http://www.there.com)

Bad idea.

Adds nasty barriers to entry into founding your own business. Abitrary barriers to business entry are bad. Mmmkaay?

Any different than having to buy land and pay a monthly tier
with enough prim capacity to setup a store?

...horrible idea - anyone will be able to grind a sim to a halt, intentionally or not, by simply throwing money at it...


...oh my god yes!..

...if we want a scarcity-based economy, it should be based on real scarcities inherent in the system: computational resources, man-hours, and creative output...this is more-or-less the present setup, no need to go about forcing artificially gamed and gameable scarcities to muck up the system...

CPU cycles are a scarce resource.

Right now, land ownership is a proxy for CPU usage -- handling prims take CPU cycles, so the number of prims you can rez is directly related to the amount of land you own in a sim. Selling prim usage directly rather than through land ownership would mean you could put up a small-yet-intricate build without having to own the better part of a sim's worth of land in order to do it.

Prims are not a server resource, they are a client one. Highly densely packed builds, rather than having the prims scattered all over the sim, will lead directly to nastier client framerates.

How does this support capitalism again? Seems counter to it.

-K

p.s. t-shirts are created with textures, not prims.

Perhaps prims aren't a server resource. They are at least a bandwidth-related resource. In any event, they *are* related to something that can be considered "scarce", be it server cycles (the server has to know to stream the prim info to clients) or bandwidth.

I thought we did pay for prims.. my 9.99 gets me just over 100 prims a month, as far as I know.

...whether or not you'd like to own the better part of a sim's worth of land, the better part of a sim's worth of land must remain empty to support that small-yet-intricate build...someone needs to pay for that, and if you can propose a better model than it being the person actually consuming the computational resources, i'm all ears...

...whether or not people intuitively recognise it, tier doesn't pay for geography - it pays for computational resources...context and quality of the associated geography are merely attenuating factors to that inherent value, covered in the up-front cost of land sales and strictly subject to user-generated value rather than computational resource scarcity...

First off, what is Capitalism?

cap·i·tal·ism
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution
are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to
the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.

In SL, there are no means of production. I can create 1 widget or
10,000,000 widgets and they cost nothing to produce. This prevents
any free market system from developing. Thus preventing capital from
being invested into SL.

Why do you think the L$ dollar continues to decline time and time again?
The reason is because there is no demand for L$ to underpin the economy.
A user can product 10,000 widgets, sell them for L$XXXX, then dump the L$
on LindenX and make a 100% profit. Why should they hold L$ when they
don't have to? And with a declining value, its better to sell now, and buy back
only when you need it.

But under an economic structure where the means of production require
an initial investment, you then end up with a system where there is a
constant inflow of US$ for L$ to purchase "prims" to build/make the things
we all use and love in SL. This has 2 effects. It creates a constant demand for
Linden Dollars and it locks in capital investment. Because if it cost US$5.00
to buy 500 Prims to make a widget, you can be sure that the initial cost for
that widget will be no less than the equivalent of US$5.00/L$ (ie: L$1400).

Anybody who owns that widget will have an (ASSET) worth L$1400. Anybody
who resells that widget will most likely sell it for more than L$1400. Helping
to continue the demand for L$ in the marketplace.


So as you can see, we need to turn things like prims into commodities.
SL needs more commodities which are traded on the open market.

LindenX needs a verison of the CBOT.

Nice idea in RL do it here and you will remove the one thing Sl and LL and all of us who do RL in SL need to survive. ie residents cuz they will go elsewhere. Thats happens and there goes the future of Sl no residents no buisness no LL no SL.

Very nice idea try again

Cries ofr Doom and Gloom, yet everybody is already doing it.
SL has (2) Commodities right now that you pay to aquire.

The 1st is the Linden L$ Dollar.
The 2nd is Land.

Both have value and both have a floating valuation that
changes as market factors dictate. As LL dumps in more
land, the value of land declines. As more users join and buy
up land, the land becomes scarce and prices rise. Same with
the Linden Dollar.

But these two examples aren't real commodities. Although land
might be the nearest to being an actual commodity. But making
Prims a Commodity would give intrinsic value to EVERYTHING
that exists within SL....

Then why do you think there are prim limits to sims?

You have to consider.. the author of this idea also considers a service you pay for wiht premium -the weekly stipend- to be welfare

What do we do to earn it? Oh yeah.. pay Linden labs. Oops not welfare.

This is some sort of joke alt, right? I'm not just imagining this?

Unfortunately hes actually serious. Sad isn't it?

Almost as bad of a unintentional self parody as the freebie reselling troglodyte parasitic legend.

No.

I thought that there was some kind of similar tax once a long time ago- and the SL citizens of the time said "NO", and they were heard. I - like them at the time - don't believe this is a good idea.

I know THERE has a similar concept. You pay for being able to design things, you pay for uploading them, and you pay fees for each copy of the item that is created ingame (of course, there is no way to copy anything, it all must be bought). The fee is basically proportional to the amount of processing power the object consumes from the world.

Result? not many people actually build anything - not many people that *do* build, do it for the sheer beauty of it. And not many people that build for sales are very successful at it.

In the end, THERE became the boring and monotonous place it is now...

...

Damn, I forgot what this thread was about already. Oh.. oh yeah... the stupid welfare society and the rise of the lindens.

So, who exactly is on welfare?

To stop 20,000 prims rezzing per home. The limit may be per-sim, but the point of it's purely client related. A 'no more than X prims per Ym' is going to be complex to both setup, and bill for.

Parcelling and prim allocations is a simple solution to a complex problem.

The best thing about this proposal is that from this point on, the average quality of postings to this forum can only get better.

I might say basics were on welfare? But that basic stipend is LL's investment to keep people buying Lindens and hopefully get them to upgrade to premium.

Other than that theres no welfare. Aside from Camping chairs...

Edit:



So true

I dunno really... I think that's a question best made to the Thread Starter, since he and others are developing whitepaper-long threads about how everyone recieving stipends is on welfare and how every single thing in SL should cost money.

Which reminds me that the initial post actually obstructs one of the common sayings of those who follow this train of thought.. Having to pay to rez a prim will actually make it almost impossible to be able to enjoy SL without having L$.