I have been thinking a lot recently about the role of a "whitepaper" in regard to play-to-earn gaming.
For the Galactic Milieu, I continue to think that a "whitepaper" would not be appropriate.
A major factor in that thinking is that the kind of information people seem likely to want or expect to see in a "whitepaper" is the kind of information the characters in the game probably ought not to have "up front"; the kind of information that characters could spend lifetimes seeking and investigating, the kind of information that ought possibly to be the stock-in-trade of "ninja" type characters or "influencer" characters and such; the kind of information that some nations might have and others might not have; the kind of information that could give advantages to those who manage to get hold of it and have some way of verifying it.
Aha, notice that last part, too: verifying it. A lot of such information floating around in the various cultures and nations and subcultures within the game might well not be entirely, or at all, accurate! Having some "outside the game" whitepaper to garner such information from eliminates vast swathes of in-game roleplay and propaganda possibilities.
Another factor is that whitepapers seem typically to be aimed at venture capital investors; the Galactic Milieu hopes to be a realm in which actual players, rather than venture capitalists outside of the game, are the major beneficiaries of the economics. Venture Capitalists can get involved if they choose to, sure, but on the same terms as any other players. They need to get into the game and play, like anyone else. Their large sums of capital will only help them in the same way any other player could be helped by having a lot of capital to play with, and the advantages they gain should be the same as the advantages any other player would gain from whatever assets etc they obtain in the game whether they bought them with fiat or highly liquid crypto or accumulated them by skillful and/or lucky play.
There are however some generalised observations and theories one might apply to get a bit of an overview of some kinds of things one could encounter and the kinds of effects one might expect from them.
Consider for example "staking", which in the old days used to be a method of securing blockchains but nowadays seems to have morphed into a sort of general term for "earning interest".
If a coin, currency, asset or whatever you like to call such things offers earnings on the amount held, do those earnings come from minting more of the thing to pay the earnings with, or are the earnings somehow paid from the already existing number minted?
If there is minting, then typically one can expect the value per coin to be diluted by the newly minted ones coming onto the market.
If there is no minting, where does the earnings process obtain coins to pay out the earnings with?
In the Galactic Milieu, large swathes of the economy involve interest earned on loans. That interest is paid by the borrowers to whom the loans are made.
The loans are "secured", not only by collateral but also by some of the major civilisations in the game including the Galactic United Nations which many of those major civilisations are members of.
For the United Nations, a major motivation for the secured-loans programme and the intergalactic colonies that borrow from it is defense of the Civilised Galaxy or Civilised Galaxies; the military goal being to establish defenses in galaxies far far away in a series of defensive spheres farther and farther out into the universe, lest some hostiles turn out to exist out there somewhere that could be potential threats to the Civilised Worlds.
So ultimately the loans are secured by the United Nations Security Council as part of its mandate to defend the Civilised Worlds, or at least such of the Civilised Worlds as are signatory to the United Nations accords.
The history of that loans programme has been quite instructive, in that the software implementing the robotic intergalactic mining colonies was open to any random passers-by on the internet. Anyone, including you had you happened upon it back in those times, was free to start a colony in "a galaxy far far away".
An initial colony ship already built and sent out was assigned to the new player, landed on a suitable planet, and its controls were made available to the new player so they could direct its building and resource-gathering processes.
In the background, the new colony was issued loans to cover the cost of the initial development and deploying of the colony-ship that was assigned to them. The interest rate on those initial loans was 1% per planet-Earth day, compounded hourly.
To denizens of "the planet known as Earth" that might seem like a rather high interest rate, but consider that game-time runs twelve times as fast as Earth-time, so in-game it amounts to 1% per twelve days, compounded 12-hourly.
Still high? Well consider also how risky an enterprise all this was.
It turned out that the majority of "random internet passers-by" who signed up to play never did anything, or maybe just that one time bothered to tell their robots to start building, then never came back.
A whole planet-Earth year later, most of the colonies lay idle, their debts building up alarmingly.
Thus the decision was made to shut down the new-player-signup routine, so that the opportunity to start new intergalactic mining colonies could be restricted to players who paid in advance, no more loaning needed. Or at least, any loans involved being a whole separate matter players could sort out on their own, new colonies only being created once their creation had been paid for "up front".
Then began the formation of "Galactic Repossession Corps", one per abandoned colony, in sequence starting from the longest-abandoned and progressing toward the most recently abandoned provided it had been abandoned for at least one full planet-Earth year.
The first such Corps were First Galactic Repo (FGR), Second Galactic Repo (SGR) and Third Galactic Repo (TGR), but after those came Galactic Repo 4 (GR4) through Galactic Repo 38 (GR38). Thus it stands today, and as of this writing some of them have yet to pay off their debts, although others, happily, have.
The initial loans to each colony consisted of 1000 GMC (Galactic Mining Corp) and 1000 GRF (Galactic Retirement Funds). However it did not take long for the high interest rates involved to attract competing lenders.
You can see on the BitcoinTalk forum the thread whereby General Finance Corp (GFC) was brought into existence; it turned out to be a very lucrative enterprise as rather than use shareholder funds for its loans it negotiated a bulk loan of its own from the Martians at a quarter of the going interest-rate (at that time still 1% per planet-Earth day) and offered loans at half that going interest-rate, which is to say, at twice the rate it was paying to the Martians for the capital with which it operated.
As can be seen in the above-referenced thread's April 13, 2012, 09:28:36 PM post, the initial shares went for just 20 DeVCoins each, and as shown in the same thread's July 23, 2012, 01:45:02 PM post the shares were valued at 3762.33578947 DVC per share. Right now as I write, the Latest Rates include-file shows their current valuation as sGFCrate=5028644.67068231 DeVCoins per share.
It is possibly worth noting here that at this moment as I write one can actually obtain DeVCoins much cheaper than the valuation used by the Latest Rates include-file calculations; DeVCoins are available at one Satoshi each on FreiExchange and even cheaper priced in LiTeCoin on
FreiXlite, whereas the Latest Rates file, which is denominated in DeVCoins, shows BiTCoin and LiTeCoin valuations to be BTCrate=41379680.61506609 and LTCrate=138217.46553136 respectively, reflecting both the calculated valuation of DeVCoin at the time and the actual reported market prices of BiTCoin and LiTeCoin at the time. Obviously since both BTC and LTC tend to have volatile prices a lot might have changed since I wrote this paragraph.
General (aka Galactic) Finance Corp (GFC) denominated its loans in DeVCoin, which at the time seemed a much safer choice than the mining colonies' existing loans denomated in GMC and GRF since DeVCoin was not shooting up and up and up in value as fast as GMC and GRF were. That plus the lower interest rate attracted several of the colony Corps, which in turn led to more players launching loans businesses.
Persons interested in something along the lines of a "whitepaper" might hopefully be able to see from just this small part of the story that it could take quite a lot of work, possibly involving quite a lot of ninjas or industrial and financial espionage operatives, to obtain enough details of the operations of all these various Corps and such to be able to consider trying to put out some kind of "whitepaper" about it all...
-MarkM-
