EVE Online is referenced in this very article! They had a digital housing crisis and solved it with a digital land value tax (of sorts). That was a long time ago, though.
The current state of EVE sees "land" (read: turf) apportioned by violence, which actually is a very crude (and violent) approximation of Harberger taxes! You must constantly pay something to defend your territory, and that scales with how valuable it is, because others will make escalating bids -- denominated in violence -- to acquire your land from you. So you want to pay enough to defend it without paying so much its no longer worth holding. I'm working on a policy paper about digital real estate and I'm calling this method "Blood taxes" with EVE as the central example.
The computing power (proof of work) required to mine Bitcoin scales according to the current hashrate. Since the supply is fixed, the only way to grab a larger market share of the hashrate is to spend more money on more computing power.
Exactly. The poster's "Blood taxes" -- ownership consensus through escalating violence -- is reminiscent of PoW schemes which establish a distributed consensus through escalating hashrate.
both war and industry in eve are plain old fun for certain types of people. but at the corp/alliance level, the point of industry is to fuel the war machine and the point of war is to defend industry. this is broken up by some occasional massive (and surprisingly expensive in USD) fights that are just for fun.
It may be that war is best played out virtually if it means we can scratch that itch without so much collateral damage, but I’ve also heard it said war is the ultimate “proof of work”, which branch of humanity can afford to burn more resources? Anyway, your comment reminded me of a song I haven’t listened to in some time:
“is war as old as gravity?”
“are there animals that like peace, and animals that like war?”
“is making war an instinct we inherited from our hunting, or our farming ancestors?”
Just do an Eve Online and let people fight each other for it. Its a game, who cares