[p2p-research] abundance and scarcity in second life: market vs. other incentives

Mon Feb 16 07:59:52 CET 2009

I read just the top half very quickly and something jumped at me.
Charging fractions of a cent for SL objects is a bit problematic although on
the right track at one level.
A cent is a unit of a scarcity-enforcing currency called the US dollar.

If you sift through the P2P Energy Economy model you will find portions
explaining the scarcity-enforcing mechanisms inherent in the existing
international currency. Does it mean that an object costs fractions of a
cent today but 1 cent tomorrow? What happens when the dollar sinks in value
or when in 10 years the dollar has less buying power (due to "inflation") ?

There are a lot of silly games embedded in the design and principles (or
lack of) underlying the current economy and the international currency.

Why use a currency with a relative value that goes up and down (but
generally goes down so you can buy less with it over time) when we're
dealing with mere electrical pulses stored on some metal pate (or bits)
....?  Why not come up with a currency that lets us measure the cost of
storing a single bit in absolute terms, based on the total work energy it
takes to record and then replicate and deliver each bit?

See this as an example model: http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Energy_Economy

I'll be adapting to work with open source content (goods) and open source
development (services)

Another thing: if the Second Life object in question is not open source or
if the license does not permit the person who purchases it from re-selling
it as is at cost then it's a scarcity creating license ,,, money should not
be used to create scarcity in goods and services .. it should be used to
enable an abundance.

I see a lot of flaws emanating from the use of traditional systems in
enabling abundance

Complete rethinking, starting with the nature of money itself (what it is
and what it;s supposed to do), is needed.

I tried to answer as many questions in that regard in my work so far, which
you can freely use for any purpose, especially for enabling the abundance of
arguments (about what money is and how it needs to work in order to enable
not curtail abundance)

As it is today, money is very scarcity enforcing

If I was Second Life, I would be looking at a new type of currency to start
with, one that has a fixed value in work energy

Marc

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 5:45 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear friends,
>
> this came in at
> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/abundance-and-scarcity-in-second-life/2008/09/03
>
> Any comments and insights based on your own experience, either here or
> directly for the blog?
>
> Many thanks for any input,
>
> Michel
>
>
>    1. Gwyneth Llewelyn <http://gwynethllewelyn.net/> Says:
>    February 14th, 2009 at 5:39 pm<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/abundance-and-scarcity-in-second-life/2008/09/03#comment-378237>
>    e<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-admin/comment.php?action=editcomment&c=378237>
>
>    IMHO, a bit of both of your first two questions. Second Life's *very*open attitude to allowing
>    *almost any type of content*, without supervision or pre-approval, has
>    given the message to the content creators that they would be allowed to do
>    pretty much anything without constraints — and, unlike other
>    tools/platforms, Second Life has always included the required tools to
>    create content (and program it!) inside the free and open source SL viewer,
>    available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. So this openness definitely attracted
>    content creators — many of which never dreamed to be a 3D content creator
>    anyway (the tools for that are way too expensive and require a lot of
>    experience and courses to be familiar with them — e.g. Maya, Blender, 3DS).
>
>    The market approach is naturally vital. Allowing content creators to
>    retain their intellectual property rights, *and being able to license
>    it to other users of SL* (this is, for all purposes, what happens when
>    someone "sells" content in SL: you get a license to use content produced by
>    someone else, for a small fee. A tiny fee in most cases: fractions of
>    cents!), was the ultimate discovery to create and manage a successful and
>    thriving digital content creation economy, which, even though each
>    transaction is so little in value, sums up nicely to about a million US$ per
>    day. No other company designing virtual worlds has embraced this route
>    (although a few have come close). Most feel they would completely lose
>    control over what kind of content is sold, and would be kept away from
>    getting a share of the proceedings. They would be quite right! Linden Lab
>    (LL) does not produce content neither charges any fee for selling licenses
>    to use that content. They use a completely different business model —
>    content has to be displayed somewhere, both at the seller's location
>    ("in-world shop") and on the buyer's location (their home or group). Both
>    will require server space to display that content, so LL is in the business
>    of hosting 3D content persistently, for a small monthly fee. Again, this is
>    completely innovative, and even after a decade since Linden Lab was founded,
>    the model is so novel that "nobody understands it yet", as Philip Rosedale,
>    Linden Lab's founder, put it so nicely on a recent interview<http://videos.sapo.pt/LvRnciISAiLPs8RoWev6>
>    .
>
>    As for "volunteering" vs. "self-interest"… I'd say that volunteering *
>    might* have given a huge help on the very beginning of Second Life and
>    during the early beta stages. One year after Second Life opened, however, it
>    was the economy of digital content that made it attractive — specially
>    because you could make real money out of it. These days, SL's economy has
>    gone way beyond merely buying and selling digital content (the services are
>    is probably outgrowing pure digital content production) and has complexified
>    to a degree coming closer to real life with every day that passes, but it
>    was definitely the "economy" that jump-started Second Life, and not
>    "volunteering".
>
>    There are still volunteers in Second Life. Thousands and thousands of
>    them. All of them very helpful and doing it all for the pleasure of it. But
>    3D content creators that regularly offer their products for sale, as well as
>    service providers of all kinds (from live musicians and DJs to their
>    agents…), are perhaps a hundred thousand… "self-interest", in the sense that
>    people can earn real money from this, even if it's just a little, is a far
>    greater incentive for those hundred thousand
>
>
>
> --
> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>
> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>
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