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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.




In your paper, consider drawing a parallel to proof of work schemes.


Can you elaborate?


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.




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