Free Halting State by Charles Stross

even running the distributed-processing nodes in a separate VM will stop them. So, to prevent fraud, every item in a distributed game space has to be digitally signed and every significant event in the local game is voted on by at least three peers, and we rely heavily on the phone’s trusted processing infrastructure. Incidentally, this means we’re into the same authorization and authentication business as your credit card company. Because if somebody finds a way to change stuff without our authorization, they can create value from nothing, then sell the results on IGE or eBay. Which is ultimately deflationary, not to mention being a howling whirlwind of No Fun At All for everybody who’s trying to play the game by the rules.
    “That’s one way of looking at the picture. Not only is there this whole raft of mind-numbing automated administrative stuff that goes on every time you add a player—which is what the game developers worry about—there’s inflation . Inflation happens when money and loot flow into the game. But to keep the customers happy you have to keep rewarding them. Playing the game is inflationary because they keep burgling the tombs of dead gods, breaking into the governor of Jamaica’s dungeon vaults, colonizing the Andromeda galaxy, and so on. And you know, you can’t tax them or make the money decay, because that would be No Fun, and if the game stops being Fun, why play? That’s the difference between in-game economics and the National Bank—the bank doesn’t have to worry about whether we’re enjoying ourselves. So we have to control this tendency towards galloping stagflation, and we typically do this by offering short deposit accounts for star-ship captains, controlling the after-market in magic wands, providing mortgages for prestige-rank necromancers wanting to build their own crypts, and all that sort of thing.
    “Then there’s immigration and border controls. Most modern multiplayer games run on a couple of distributed-processing platforms—Zone runs on Symbian/GDF and Microsoft Arena runs on .NETSpace—and they’ve standardized on a common client engine so they can focus on developing new content. Competition is fierce. They’ve all got scrapers and immigration incentives to persuade customers to migrate from one game to another, taking their characters and loot with them. It’s against the terms of service, but no game vendor is willing to cut their own throat by enforcing it—that’d piss off the customers. So, you’ve got out-of-band merchant sites like IGE and eBay’s Gameboard, and a whole bunch of coyotes who make their living by providing tools to migrate avatars from one environment to another, using the exit game assets as arbitrage against a position in the entry game. Which in turn means there are exchange rates between games—and not just game-to-game, I’m talking game-to-euro rates, game-to-yuan, game-to-rupee. All the strong currencies, you name it, even US dollars. So there’s currency speculation and an external market in gaming currency hedge funds, not to mention the Magic bugs who believe in keeping their loot in the most powerful magic items they can buy, like the guys who keep their savings account in a roll of gold coins under the bed. There’s dirty stuff, too, dirty tricks some of the game companies play on each other, hostile speculation and attempts to dislodge or recruit each other’s customer bases, but we don’t do any of that stuff at Hayek Associates. We play strictly by the rules.
    “One way we take currency out of circulation is to sell imaginary real estate. Another is to provide safety deposit services so that players can stash their gold or loot with us for a fee—this works in game spaces with encumbrance rules. If we spot a deflationary sump, we have to create liquidity until we can plug the gap—this is something a real bank can’t do—so we can start offering interest on deposits, handing out free resurrections, that kind