But worth it for an entrepreneur in this business. I've personally considered selling part of my soul IRL, because I'm an atheist and I don't believe souls exist.
I remember seeing this in The Simpsons! Bart had sold his soul (He wrote on a piece of paper "Bart's Soul" and sold it to milhouse for like $5) he couldn't laugh or anything after ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ How about you try it? (The business thing)
I'm preparing to do it, I eventually plan to use the money to launch a market site where people can pool their souls together and receive interest on them through a bond system, and where people can sell fractions of their soul for competitive prices. I think Jainists believe animals and objects have souls, I could probably exploit that. Then, I plan to reinvest the money in making a fictional microstate, based on a wiki-like website where people write about my microstate and essentially create its history and heritage. I could eventually port this to the real world and buy a private island.
Staying on track, currently the only form of investment is to buy and hold rare items (gold, diamond, ores, etc) in hopes of price appreciation, usually caused by Minecraft updates (like the current redstone price spike). Or you can do a pair trade and dump all your diamond and buy up redstone. The problem with any other type of financial service is the lack of tracked credit, the backbone of all lending and borrowing. The only thing to remedy this is a credit database, which actually sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is. The database should hold the following data per PLAYER TABLE. TYPE, AMOUNT, PLAYER_2, INTEREST, DUE. TYPE: Block ID or "rupees" involved in the contract AMOUNT: Amount of TYPE involved (Positive for items lent, negative for items borrowed) PLAYER_2: Other party involved in the contract. INTEREST: Agreed upon daily (IRL) interest DUE: End date of the contract where borrowed items plus interest must be returned. It actually fairly simple. And every night, when the server reboots, it calculates all the new amounts based on the interest. A player can initiate a contract via: /contract PLAYER_2 TYPE AMOUNT INTEREST DUE /contract 72Volt 331 640 0.5 30 I just offered 72Volt a contract for me offering him 10 stacks of redstone at 0.5% interest per day, ending in 30 days. He then gets a prompt for a y or n. Upon completion, 10 stacks of redstone are removed from my inventory and given to him (contract fails if I don't have the items or rupees to lend). The system is quite simple and introduces credit while holding people accountable for lent items and money. What this then allows for: - going short a commodity by borrowing the asset - borrowing items or funds for a project - putting your huge stockpile of rupees to use to make interest while promoting EMC developemnt - hedging your business - etc And the best thing is, we can track a players credit easily via another command: /contract 72Volt /contract 72Volt 331 which will show me all the contracts 72Volt has and all the contract 72Volt has related to redstone respectively, so I can make a proper decision before lending anything to him if I see he is already heavily in debt. Anyway, just my 8 cents. EDIT: hmm, seems I should have finished what I started by adding some extra thoughts. Ok so now to exit a contract you must return the items any time before or on the contract end date: /contract gtabmx 331 end (72Volt's point of view to end his contract with me) However, this creates the problem that borrowing building materials forces you to have to find these again, pretty much defeating the entire purpose, so you can either use your rupees to buy the items from a shop or settle the contract in rupees via: /contract gtabmx 331 end 2000 (72Volt's point of view to end his contract with me paying 2000 for his 640 redstone owed) Anyway, I'm going in way over my head discussing this because while the overall system, once determined, would be simple, there are kinks that need some thought on how best to work through them. They include: - either player not being online for the end of a contract (thus extending it needlessly, since you can't end a contract until the exchange is made, and you can't exchange until you know the receiving party has enough room in their inventory to accept the items) - forced player paybacks could auto-initiate the the repayment of items or rupees upon the end of a contract, but what if the borrower doesn't have sufficient funds or items? - credit must span all worlds - extending loans - more loans for the same item from the same player with same or different due dates (how do you end only one of them? are there contract numbers? Are they summed and the latest due date taken? We need the system to be as light as possible) - etc -Mike
Knowingly selling something that doesn't exist is fraud isn't it? I side with those that say that bonds or any sort of investment are gambling since there is no guarantee of a return. I also don't see much point since any time I've ever wanted anything in EMC, I have put the work into getting it (usually) without any outside help. There is really no reason to want a loan except to avoid work or satisfy impatience. The type of person who would be most likely to pay back a large loan isn't likely to want one in the first place. Alternatively, someone who needs wants the Rupees to buy things for a project, most likely won't be able to motivate themselves to work on paying a loan back. Just like in life, some people always scrape by regardless of their income and always will. Giving them a loan just complicates that fact with expectations of repayment.
Well, no, it isn't fraud, as the matter of the existence of a soul is a matter of opinion as nobody can conclusively know. I disagree with your view that investment is essentially gambling, we just need to implement the correct measures like the ones proposed by gtabmx, and we have a fully functioning system allowing capital to be allocated to those who need it with little risk to those putting their money into the system, like the bond buyers.
Without getting too philosophical, your soul would have no value to me unless you also thought it existed. Remember Bernie Madoff? A lot of people gave him money with the opinion that they were getting something of value. I don't see any reasonable means to force anyone to pay anything back. What happens when some little kid borrows 10k Rupees to build a hotel, buys a bunch of wool and stone, pays back 200r a month later then quits paying because one of his tenants burnt the place down and he's frustrated that he'll never be able to pay it back? You are also going to sell Fire insurance, right? What if he loses interest because it's baseball season? Will you sue them? Guarantee their Rupee allowance? Foreclose on their residence? Ban them? Make them work in a Cobble quarry? Not wanting to work for materials is the only reason I can see for wanting to borrow Rupees. The people who have the motivation and means to repay anything substantial don't need the Rupees anyway. I think if it were ever allowed you would have more defaults than not.
I disagree. Here are examples: 1) I want to short sell emeralds, which I must borrow in order to sell, so that I can buy back later cheaper to return to the lender. The opposite of hoarding. 2) A new player wants to create an enchantment shop, made from blue wool, but is not a sheep shearer or breeder. He can borrow wool to be settle in rupees, to build his shop, which he can then profit from to repay the loan. Why should the skilled creeper-slayer be forced into sheep work? 3) Commodity swaps 4) Financing Yes there is risk for the lender, but that is why he takes interest. Each Minecraft player only has one life in EMC, as he only has one username, so he is either committed to his credit or not in EMC anymore due to general loss of interest. Its the lender's choice to lend, not the other way around. -Mike
