Every person will have a chip bodypart which is put in the cortex of their brain. This chip will store various information about the user, including their name, money balance, and various other things.
This chip allows the characters to leave a paper trail on the various devices they use, which could store a log of actions done by various people, accessible through hacking.
Would love to hear from the community on your thoughts on this potential system for payment and IDing. This system would also limit the amount of jobs you can take, since your job information would be stored in the chip.
The chip certainly solves a lot of problems. It sounds like an iteration of the SIC chip from Sindome.
You could also take a leaf from Tuluk’s handbook and maybe have it as some form of barcode tattoo (Idiocracy reference).
Everyone gets an ID and they choose how they want to display that little thing? Some might like a lanyard, maybe a clip-on, maybe in their wallet or on dog-tags? Could be hounded to have it on display when going around more secure areas (think IRL walking into some places)
I just really like the idea of physical identification, but that’s just my opinion. This does cause more issues than the version of having it be a chip in someone.
Certainly the SIC and this chip would share its identification purpose, although not the communicative one; I really like the barcode tattoo idea, although we’d need to define our character description style for it.
I personally also would prefer if this was physical, but I definitely notice the benefits both code-wise and in-game of having the currency be digitalized through cyberware.
My initial thought toward this is that it doesn’t sound like there’s any sort of backing to what you have stored on that chip. I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, it opens up more opportunities for gray/black market, shadow, crime, etc. types of RP. On the other hand, if you die, and that chip is destroyed, coming back to literally nothing is pretty punishing.
I’d like to see some sort of middle ground between kid gloves - no one can steal anything from you - and all in - you could be robbed blind and there’s nothing you could do about it. There are also deeper implications to allowing hacking that chip. On an individual level, it would be much harder to defend against cyber attacks than if the chip was basically a read-only form of ID that could only be amended or changed by registered organizations.
As to the physical Vs. digital debate, it could be done either way with a similar interface. Code wise, if you have 100 players, and you want to do physical IDs, then you’d have 100 ID cards, chits, whatever. Instead of dispensing ID objects, these could be represented as flavor text when a command is used. flash ID for verification purposes. The down side being is that you can’t accidentally leave it somewhere, but, I tend to believe that’s a problem of the past.
Yeah such a system I think would come with a lot of particularities such as maybe having to offload your money to some kind of backup which would be cool potentially.
As for a physical ID, the question is what happens if you do lose it though? That would be my holdback with such a system
I guess what I’m trying to feel out is: Who controls the money? If it’s stored on a chip in your head, or a device you carry around, who or what on the other end of transactions goes, “Yep, this person has the amount they say they do, and this is recognized as legal tender”. If the premise is that the currency is stored on the device, and that’s all, then what makes shops or even other players respect and accept this currency.
If there’s to be a backup, who controls it? Would it be like TARring up your media collection and storing it on an external hard drive that you don’t ever touch unless you need to recover? Or would there be an institution that handles such things. I fear that without some sort of backbone, we could end up having colonists like that guy who found an old hard drive that had enough bit coin to make him rich, but without the means of accessing the block chain stored on it.
Also, if we’re going to have to store things ourselves that are relevant to our ongoing survival, how soon after character generation would it be feasible to expect lodging.
My thought on who controls the currency or what makes it be validated would be similar to how you user fingerprints nowadays; through some kind of encryption that has allowed to determine that that currency is legal. You would be storing the currencies either on your chip (on your person), or in a flash drive to store somewhere.
But is that what people like? What other methods would you all prefer?
I think lodging should be easy to come by, at least cheap one.
So one game I can think of which I think this does well, is Awake Mud (CE) in the way that currency is stored in your bank account, but you withdraw amounts to physical objects (credsticks or similar if memory serves me correctly.) It means you can be robbed, but how much you risk drawing out or how long you leave it till you deposit into your account, is up to you. I don’t have a huge preference for having tangible, physical currency over virtualized currency that’s held in chip form, I think the latter is probably better codedly and more realistic for this world, though could be problematic when trading with races with less advanced technology in the future.