Sunday, January 14, 2024

Converting to Other Blockchains - Vast Distances and Portable Wealth

Block Chain in 4AU or greater! in our Sol solar system, the problem is the distance from Luna or Mars or Jupiter and their corresponding blockchains. As 1 AU is 8 minutes, note that Sol with Neptune and Uranus - Ice giants and Saturn, they may be using different Blockchains per location. Pretty much acting like a currency. So even in Sol we will be having problems of speed of transaction completion. 

Basically what happens is, the problem is the speed by which a record, transaction and account can be verified. The solution is to convert values as you change Blockchain Domains. 

As distances become greater, the time for “the check to clear” takes longer. 

Basically a Blockchain domain is the reach by which the blockchain is reliable. When a transactions will take weeks or months to process, it’s best to convert the funds into a currency of a Blockchain that is closer. This means I will take 1 million credits from my Imperial Account and Transfer it to this Local duchy’s Blockchain, I may lose 2-10% but I dont lose months or weeks waiting for my transactions to go through.  I may have only 980,000 credits in the new block chain. But I need these credits to help me with transactions and conduct my business in that location. 

So we just came from Taiwan in Dec 16-21 and it reminds me of converting my Pesos to NTD, and then converting them back. The rest of our money is back in the philippines and credit cards allowed us access to these funds at the speed of light, but its the CASH - converting PHP to NTD that made me conscious of what would happen if we lost access to the internet and we needed to make monetary transactions. 

In GURPS this would be Finance, in Cepheus Engine this would be Economics or Finance science. and it is a Science, to understand how many Financial systems overlap, interact, and attempting to predict multiple interacting systems: like Biology, Ecology, and Economics.  

In Game Terms - you can just roll to see how much resources you have at your disposal or the Referee can make this a hook and the challenge. You can handwave it, as one of the many factors the PCs are juggling and thats the purpose of the powerful AI in the Ship’s is for.  You can just keep to assuming the PCs draw from a source of funds - but the Referee can arbitrarily say if it is accessible. The constraints become an unending source of adventure hooks. 



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