[Nomic] Money Money Money

[Adam Biltcliffe]

On Sep 24 2004, Stuart Moore wrote:

> Which is why I went the other way - it's more of a quick route to find 
> out what's going on, instead of looking through many emails (now 240) - 
> you can do illegal stuff with it, just as you can make declarations 
> within an email that break the rules.

I think we're diverging on a fundamental point here, which may or may not 
be the cause of our disagreement. You *can't* make declarations within an 
email that break the rules, because the rules do not have authority over 
you. The rules only dictate the behaviour of the game, not the behaviour of 
the players. I can post an email to the mailing list saying "I win" -- this 
won't have any effect on the game at all, because the rules do not define 
anything which happens as a result of a player claiming to have won. But 
it's not against the rules for me to do so.

I don't want to have to rely on a computer program to tell me what the 
state of the game is. If someone wants to volunteer to track financial 
transactions, and decides to use a computer program to do so, fine. But if 
we all end up just relying on a computer to do it, things will get 
forgotten or misunderstood because people aren't paying attention to the 
rules.

> I could possibly get it to email a balance sheet each evening, saying 
> who had what and what transactions had happened that day. Then people 
> could scrutinise and if someone had entered something wrong, we correct 
> it by hand.

Some sort of transaction history would certainly be a requirement.

adam