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

[Patrick Anderson]

On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 11:59 PM, marc fawzi <marc.fawzi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

I agree that energy is part of it.

Hosting any 'virtual' community has real physical costs that must be
(re)covered else the organization cannot be sustained.  This is the
same problem with physical communities.

Some costs are periodic, such as a hosting service's monthly or yearly
charge while other costs depend upon usage, such the hosting service's
bandwidth limits, CPU, RAM, Hard Drive, electricity. The various
'loads' a user puts on the game server should weight his price to
incent thrifty users and insure heavy users pay for excluding others.

It seems our thinking oscillates between either of:

1.) Users should pay absolutely zero price (free as in beer) - which
is BELOW cost, or
2.) Users should pay a priced somewhere ABOVE cost for it to be "worth
it" for the initial investors, and for (centralized) growth.

But there is a place right in-between those two.

1.5) Users should pay a price exactly EQUAL to cost except in cases of
(decentralized) growth.  [The growth would only be decentralized if
any price above cost were treated as user investment.]

I wonder why this middle-ground seems taboo or ignored or avoided...

So, (case #1.5) if we abundance seekers were to begin such a service,
we would need to connect the real 'impact' each user has upon the
physical sources needed to host that community with the price that
user pays - for then there would be nothing to stop it's continuation.

Otherwise, (case #1) we have well-intentioned individuals attempting
to offer zero-price services that finally must give up because they
cannot afford to cover those costs themselves.

Or, (case #2) we have for-profit corporations charging more than cost,
and yet still winning because they are able to continue and grow.


Patrick

PS: You might be interested in a (now idle) game project with those
goals at http://EcoComics.sf.net