I’ve been contemplating ways to alter the economy to help with many of the concerns expressed here recently. One thing occurred to me and I thought perhaps I’d see what the assembled wisdom thinks. What if we did this: Remove the Fortune Cap. Remove (or at least reduce) the Weekly windfall tax. But, we begin to make thot owners (aka majority share holders) responsible for the dividends. Meaning, the dividends that are distributed to the shareholders are paid for by the thot owner. The thot owner would have the ability to set the dividend rate and this information would be posted. Remember that dividends are partially calculated by the number of click throughs on a thot’s link. Therefor owners would have to pay out money in an amount that is a function of: the rate they set, the number of click throughs, and the number of shares owned by the public. I can think of many implications to something like this, but I want to know what you think. Discuss amongst yourselves…
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well first off i’d like to recommend a message board be setup.. blogs are great but their are’nt the best way to get mass feedback or discussion, better used as a journal then medium for discussion.
as for the idea.. it is very interesting.. but the devils in the details..
are you suggesting that all the dividends goes to the majority share holder first?
or are you suggesting that a specific thollar amount be split?
or are you suggesting a given %? such as i get 90% and let the rest of the share holders have 10% to split?
I’m all for removing the fortune cap and windfall tax, but I’m not too sure I like the idea of the thot owner (I presume you mean controlling shareholder, if the original one has been bought out) having the option of keeping the gazzilions produced for the dividends. Looking at how many controlling shareholders never add more shares, I can’t really see an incentive for them to spread it out. Unless the dividends created where stored so the controlling shareholder only had the option to use the money to add more shares or pay out dividends (and maybe keep 50% or so for themselves).
My original thinking was that we would eliminate the dividend payment to the thot owner. The dividend would only be distributed among the public shareholders. Currently owners are making much more money from the sale of shares than they are from dividends. This might create an incentive among owners to reduce the number of public shares, but that would limit their ability to make a profit from the thot, which would now be tied exclusively tied to the sale of shares.
i like the idea. making a thot owner more responsible would also make being the thot owner a little bit more involved, discouraging thot control of more than the controller can handle. Adjusting the dividend rate could encourage or discourage investment in the thot, rather than the current method of throwing 458 trillion shares out there, and using peoples greed to sell the thot.
The changing of the dividend rate should also be communicated to the thot shareholders via a message, so the thot controller will think twice before lowering the rate. If dividends were divided by share price, a quick ratio, like a p/e ratio, could show where some decent deals were for income.
The amount of shares on the market also should effect the share price- when someone puts out a trillion shares, it should be extremely difficult for that thot to see an increase in share price- supply and demand based. These multi trillion share IPOs need to be quashed- it’s a silly manipulation of the current system. If google had had an IPO consisting of an obscene amount of shares, it wouldn’t be at 600/share now- it would be much, much lower. When more shares are offered for a stock, in the real world, stockholders get a little peeved- but here, it seems to have no effect- just putting that out there.
The influx of new thollars into the market should also be reduced, as it is absolutely apparent that there is massive inflation within the thotconomy (like that?).
I agree. The dividend should be set by the owner, causes more competition for all members. The Fortune cap should be removed! Stocks can’t grow if the money from dividends can’t be reinvested in them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
well if the owner does’nt get dividends then i’d just avoid being the controller and just keep a very high stock in it.. 2nd or 3rd largest holder, my money is coming from dividends.. returns from sold shares is chump change… actually that would be a overstatement.
Thats just going to end up with all shares giving minimum dividends.I’ll prefer infinite shares,since they would concentrate money in single stocks.
And if main index is calculated by price*number of stockholders,this would not matter much to public.
These stock would have less market cap anyway.
I think i found some inconsistency in split stocks.
they reduce the value of the stocks after split if it large enough. e.g.(most of capital is invested in one stock)
Net Worth: $111,100,994,393,611,587,026,944
Stock split and number of shares increase x2 but
Net Worth: $55,550,497,192,131,719,856,128 now.
there is some mechanism which causes price to drop more then expected after split.Its exactly half of value.
after several splits its further reduced by 1/2,1/4 etc.
split stocks are bugged.
umm . . . i’m not sure i like the dividend idea.
i know that I would never make another thot, again. Reduces my profit and requires me to stay active? ahhh . . . no.
I don’t know how it works now, but. If the market capitalization was both the product of tradng prices and increased with each click. (eg 1 click = add value of 1 share). Then could the dividends come out of the cap? Much better than having the owner directly pay. Owner should get dividends too, because if you own a share it’s fair to get what everyone else gets.
I agree with whoever that if a stock has loads and loads of shares then it should be harder to go up in price. Seems to make sense.
How often are dividends paid. Should be once a day to keep it simple.
Oh, and the initial market cap for paying dividends from could be the value of shares kept by the owner on startup. If a cap goes to zero then no dividends.
As long as you get rid of the GOD DAMN windfall tax it will be an improvement.
Yeah,i agree too. If this annoying tax is removed i’ll gladly agree to this system.
It making me sell shares to continue invest each 30minutes
and removing any capital to 1Billion.
considering that i’m making operation with trillions and quadrillions each day this seems like an anachronism.
Removing the billionaire cap before fixing the economy would be silly. It would leave all beta players with an enormous advantage and most likely end up with everyone’s money being taken away. I’ve got over a million billion thollars stashed away in safe stocks and so long as I can keep a fair chunk of it, I don’t care how much ‘cash’ is sucked away in temporary caps. Is it really that importnat to make endless easy money on a site that isn’t even finished yet, when you already have maximum control over the market?
Once people are limited and can’t easily make billions every hour then remove the cap. Not before. I’m going to wait it out.
Will there be a function to give thollars to your friends in future? Or loan it for interest. I want to open a bank. lol.
maximum control over the market? Doesn’t matters.
No anyone has patience to buy up dozens of stocks per minute.
what matters is potential control i.e. More thollars.
If there was no windfalls and stats of 100 richest users were displayed publicly there would some competetion :
Like Most Succesful stockholder or something.
My only request once the economy is fixed (growth rates and inflation are a more realistic), you wipe the site clean so everybody has a freash start.
I think that would be fair.
Yes, the scoreboard definitely needs to be reset once this comes out of beta. The account amounts of the top players is outright silly… at this point they have more “dollars” than the combined GDP of the entire planet thousands of times over.
“this comes out of beta.” has a long way to go.
There very few features implemented and the system has alot of bugs.Its somewhat unbalanced and lacks user-friendliness in few areas.
Regardless, the site grows daily. see
http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=thotmarket.com
well i can tell you now if the accounts are cleared when it is released from beta i’ll probably just be done.. im not trying to build up money for nothing, the sites just not that compiling yet, but i see the penitential for it later.
I’m not against clearing of accounts.
I’m against bad design.Taxes,frozen shares,comment limits in stocks(kills any discussion),stocks getting deleted randomly.
im seeing a lot of perfectly valid stocks being delisted.. one example is “GOOG” which is google.com.. some how it took a 120.88 thollar nose dive down to 0.01 (1 cent) and will be delisted by days end.. all shares are owned and i know there is quite a few stock holders.. 4chan was also removed yesterday.. another popular stock which was not spam..
windcaster Says:
“im seeing a lot of perfectly valid stocks being delisted”
Yeah, there are other stocks going down the gutter, e.g. FALO1. With that Fallout stock I’ve made my first million. I want to rescue it for memories sake but there are no shares available. *Sigh*
I think it’s inevitable that the accounts are cleared once the beta is over. Everything else would be very unfair for new players.
The idea that stock owners have to pay the dividend is interesting. Lets see – the owner of a stock gets money accordant how ofter the link was clicked and to attract shareholders he has to pay a decent dividend. Yeah, it may work.
Oh, and I like the new browse options.
several of my thots took unexplained dives to 2 cents and their buy/sell pages don’t even exist anymore. 😦
They appear to have gone into negative values, so that may be the reason.
I think one of the main things thotmarket needs is either a forum or some sort of pm system, or maybe even a chatroom for each thot that only shareholders can enter. This could be used to discuss everything alot more, which can only do good really.
And I don’t think sharing money between players will do any good. I can just see people opening up heaps of new accounts, putting the $1000 in a popular stock with high dividends, then coming back a few weeks later to sell the stocks and give all the money to their main account.
“I think it’s inevitable that the accounts are cleared once the beta is over. Everything else would be very unfair for new players.”
well whats fair? even if the site was done.. all bugs worked out and accounts reset.. there will always be the rich and the new.. thats like it is in any persistent system.
but i dont see this site as a game that can be won or compete against others.. the stocks out there you can’t stop anyone from buying or selling it.. the money you have can’t be used to kill off another persons account.. it does however give you capital to invest and build what you want to.. at least.. it hopefully will when everything is settled.. there is money to be made regardless if you have a billion or 1000, it’s just slower the less you have because you have to build up momentum (capital) like pushing a car.. it’s hard at first but once its’ rolling it’s easier.
i guess what im saying is.. i dont wanna push a car again
Um, Just a little bug I encountered just now, I made a thot with about 14 trillion shares at 10 cents each, then a few minutes later the price somehow jumped up to 16000 and split, no idea why it happened or if its been happening alot, but, while I like having whatever the amount of money is called when it has 18 zero’s, it seems a bit unfair to everyone else.
slowly just about every thot on my list is being reduced to 0.01 stock price.. some of them losing several 100 thollars in stock price in one go.. no rhyme or reason as to why, i do not believe it’s selling of the stock as they still have high stock holder investment in some of them.
1.Webmaster does not disclose how the mechanics of the game work. e.g how large is the dive for selling stocks and how much it increase after buying,what makes the splitted stocks lose their value in half and why stocks can’t have more then 9e18 shares.
2.$1,000,000,000,000,000,000 is the absolute limit on capital. So that market cap can’t exceed it and account balance either. competition as outlined in my post would be worthless.
3.There is need to remove large amount of money from the system without annoying people.
currently there is no money sink which would draw
thollars away voluntarily.
>currently there is no money sink which would draw
>thollars away voluntarily.
hm… we could ask people to par with their money for the cause of saving virtual children of Nigeria or some other such nonsense, and then have that scoreboard with whoever disposes of more money. could be fun…
also, I want to say that I’m in favor of the proposal made by rworkman.
Or there could just be something to do with thollars instead of just investing them.
Total reset would be nice right about now anyway. Considering that so many thots crash to 0.01 for no apparent reason or are disabled altogether, the system is kinda very messed up right now. In addition bunch of duplicates have been posted to replace the losses, which kinda makes things even messier.
I think i got the idea how stocks “crash” to 0.01
Someone or several people buy stocks in bulk(with rising capital its common to have several billions of stocks):
After the prices rise,majority sell them for large profit,
but in process (which moves most of shares to available status) price drops in response to sell-off of so much stock.The system calculates price drops by amount*number of sell orders,but is sensitive and drastic in regards to changes to price so that selling
15% of expensive stock total shares would make much more then 15% price drop(more like 50%).
selling by players of 50% stock supply would probably bring it to 0.01
FASOURCE (10000000 shares) $0.01 -22556938020.07
well that was annoying …
can you at least give us someway to remove delisted stocks from our lists, thanks to this crash bug ive got more delisted stock than current stock. It would also be nice to be able to restart stocks after delisting. As ive been trying to set one up for the black mesa source mod, and both have fallen victim to this crashing.
We need a forum for these kinds of communications, The sale tax of stocks is 50% is it based of off the amount of money you have?
Another bug?
“10-01-2007 (Mon) Return (YOUTUBE) -$17326301362.00
10-01-2007 (Mon) Return (YOUTUBE) -$277400.00
Bank Balance: $-8,452,189,330”
So how can this happen?
Can’t edit my post so here is another one
additional information:
Thot Symbol: Private Owned: Public Owned: Available Trade Price: Change:
YOUTUBE 77205011 (55%) 62794989 0 $-277.40 -353.51
Hm, it got correctet a little bit later. But now that stock is at $0.01 (+277.41)
“7Z” is the latest victim, it’s at 0.01, frozen shares.. expected to be delisted by days end.
midnight is right though.. the price fluxuatoins are to wild and people do exactly that.. sell it then buy it back at a cheaper price.. but they been doing that for a long time.. although this last 2 days it seems to be even more dramatic..
it’s unclear if that is whats going on.. i dont think it is though.. since i seen stocks tumbling several 100 thollars down to 0.01 in a single cycle.
well aint this nice: -5,350,399,895
my bank account now has a minus value.. i was buying stock as the bank cap took place so it completed just afterwords and sent me into negative.
also this hour the thots: “NERDS” & “COAL” have nose dived to 1 cent..
at this rate my whole porfoilo will be delisted in about a week.. yanking the money out of those thots (whats left at 1cent stock valuation) is somewhat pointless cause bank cap will just take it anyway.
there is about a dozen thots that i really really wanna keep.. if they get delisted because of what ever this is going on i’ll be done with the site.. beta or no beta.
i dont think it’s people selling stock off because at least 1 thot i seen this happen to actually showed a gain on it’s ticker.
I know how you feel windcaster, i lost over 15.5bn shares in bms404 overnight, and one of the shares dropped over $116m in value within a half hour…
im trying to maintain two thots at the moment, but everytime it gets higher, im dreading i’ll see a “SPLIT” sign over it, and then the end is nigh for that thot.
at the moment ive got over $700bn invested. if it happens overnight again, i’ll bankrupt, and that will make continuing a bit pointless.
It might be an idea to set a minimum offer price of $2 a share, as you never see shares in reality starting at $.01 or $.02
Gain shown is after the stock dived to 0.01?
there are some bugs which result in negative market cap
selling shares above 9223372036854775807 will overflow the shares numbers to negative,(and freeze the stocks ) and when people click twice on sell shares the system sometimes acts as if actions happened at the same time(selling twice the shares and reducing market cap).
Also there is rare bug when you add too many shares to a stock it may either remove the shares or turn the stocks available into negative.
(it seems the negative market cap is fixed today)
Also,the retroactive power of the new rules is somewhat unfair.I don’t think the majority would like that.
some players(who invested alot of their capital) in such stocks(and usually less then 1Billion net worth),would be pissed to have majority of their investments deleted.
There is still incentive to create purely commercial stocks,and the rules would be circumvented eventually.
More laws and more supervision, doesn’t seems like a sound policy for user-driven sites.
Especially when the current system is in hyperinflation and with artificial taxes.
Here is a hint:if you don’t intend to players accumulate such capital,don’t tax it if you can’t prevent it from occurring in the system in the first place.taxes are wrong approach to virtual economies.
usually there is such arrangement:
resources are scarce and players must expend effort to accumulate these resources.
Rising stocks multiply your investement easily.
resources are transfered from players to players;
here the system allocates static resources,which are transferred from system to stockholder and back:
not from stock owner to stock owner.This can be exploited in many ways,since the system is allowing any trade that fits the restrictions.
supply and demand:resources are valued by demand,and prices reflect supply with demand being a factor in price stability.
here,the demand leads to rises prices,but supply is variable (depends on controller).The supply depends on one player who can change stock count.
the demand for cheap stocks is huge,for purpose of accumulating thollars and tax evasion at the same time.Investing in (cheap)stocks is the only secure way of storing capital(thanks to the system deficiencies)
and the only sound investement strategy for both rich and poor:the return from prices rise justify any risk taken in buying cheap stocks.
The supply can be increased in anytime,rising prices again because of constant demand.Even if supply is huge,a tiny constant demand will propel the prices higher and higher.Supply can’t lower value of the stocks.
thats why i deem this economy unbalanced.
Its not the drive to create money stocks which are you going to remove,its the inherent flaws in the system which allow “get rich quick” schemes.Fixing Greed is impossible,fixing the system is.
deleting money stocks,would show that you can’t
make the economy work without supervision and constant enforcement.Not to mention it would be
costing time and energy you could spend improving the system and enjoying your life.if you have one.
currently the system removes the money in these ways:
1.failed investment,remove the difference between invested and current capital.
2.Buying stocks by primary shareholder:this however returns back all the money at moment the other players buy stock.
3.New IPOs which fail to turn profit.
4.taxes:selling and windfall both unfairly removes largest chucks of profit,
but fail in general to prevent players from getting rich.Its just making them
ignore the dividends and invest on stocks for pure value fo the stock.
i.e. doesn’t matter if the stock is unpopular and rarely clicked,the money still there. dividends are worthless with taxes.
sellign taxes: limited between 50% and 10% of total stock value,but
profit can be much higher to compensate.Its just an annoyance when you lose part of value you invested and have to recalculate how much you can spend in other stocks again.
Selling large amount of stocks is discouraged:
anything above 1000000000000000000 will not register and may turn the balance negative,and if you do not manage to spend the money,
it will be gone with next windfall tax(or temp fortune cap as its new name).
there has to be a way(not the stupid dividends by owner) which would
be an investment for stockholder yet have more risk then stocks themself(to remove money from the system) or more stable without any profit.
Trading in derivatives(like betting on the stocks future price) .
if you invest in future of stock X for 1 cycle,you can lose all the money
if the bet fails,and get multiply of investment(by amount of rise in %)if it does rise.
Making comments cost 1 million thollars for each additional comment in 1 hour.
new type of super-expensive currency which can be converted at stable rate for thollars,but cannot be used as investment(e.g.
1trillion thollars would buy a single red gem which can be reliably converted back to thollars).make a list of 100 people with most gems to create competition.This can be enhanced with 1trillion of red gems give a blue gem,and make a list of 100 people with the most blue gems,
and so forth,with each successive step demands more investment.
Making the system more expensive for newbies(with the stupid dividends for stocks by owner) discourages growth of site.
These are general ideas for makes the money leave the system.
They would work only when the taxes are gone,not before.
Buggy. Despite buying out a thot by purchasing 1000s of shares yesterday, now it is delisted, but still on my portfolio. There are others still in my portfolio that appear to have been deleted too. Very Buggy.
10-02-2007 (Tue) Temp Fortune Cap -$108100916720140000.00
with 1e9 limit its equivalent to 99.9999990749385% tax
what is point in dividends?
I think with each update the system gets worse and worse. I realize the site owner said that he isn’t a developer, so maybe he can use a hand? hardcode.net@gmail.com
At this rate, the only stocks left will be the ones that say “LOLZ LOTZ UF SHAREZ!”
And thats because people like stocks with many shares
and complain when stocks freeze.
I already noted frozen stocks as inherent flaw in the system(and another major thing is that stocks are investment for profit and not for the links,because there is not way to store money besides stocks).
what the webmaster is against – human nature(e.g. greed and dislike for rigid rules)
Does anyone read my suggestions?
MidniteNeko i like the idea of creating a drain for thollars, however I believe that gems are a tad to simple. Perhaps if we could buy things that people would want to buy like lets say a house or land. Things that people could associate with status. These would also be super expensive, like the gems idea, and could serve as a neat way for people to show others how rich they are. Another idea is that we could have a system where users can buy up land of the world. This concept is shown in another online game called cybernations (cybernations.net) where users create a nation and then grow, to gain more land etc. That game uses a google map to show how much land is bought by a user. This could be done to solve this problem giving people a steady drain for their thollars.
Ok, i have a suggestion for the owner of this site. Remove the fortune cap, or alot of maintained shares are going to die out quickly. Getting back today i read this in the accounts..
10-03-2007 (Wed) Temp Fortune Cap -$6474370672.00
10-03-2007 (Wed) Dividend (SPEC) +$14707672.00
10-03-2007 (Wed) Return (SPEC at $152.25) +$6459663000.00
10-03-2007 (Wed) Temp Fortune Cap -$199440899962.40
10-03-2007 (Wed) Return (GMT at $185.90) +$200409645950.80
which means someone managed to sell all of his or her shares in something, then spend 200 bn buying 100% of the available shares in both stocks. meaning that the price will rise dramatically, but without shares available to sell will drop drastically.
as portfolio value is not affected by the fortune cap, people can basically destroy shares like these by buying up all of them. I could have easily rectified the mater by plowing the $206bn back into making more shares available, but the fortune cap means that i only have 1/ 200th of the available funds to put out shares to replace those sold, and are now at a more expensive price to provide. Essentially meaning its a non sustainable market, and all shares will eventually die out due to the inability to maintain sufficient stocks. as it was there were over a billion shares available in GMT before i left thois morning and in one go, these were bought up. Only having enough money to buy around 2000000 more to sustain the market, all it will take is another multi billionaire to switch stocks and buy up the $400m worth of available shares. Had the fortune cap not been in place, the shares would be available to maintain this.
Active stocks shows stocks which are not frozen,but it shows them based on market cap instead of amount of unfrozen stocks.e.g. stock which has 7 trillions shares
with 10 available and huge market cap will show in one of first pages.
i can almost assure you that person was midnite.. he bought up a shit load of stock in thots i control.. probably half my portfolio.. i continued to add shares till i got tired of it and just let them freeze.. i know he’ll pull his money out as soon as bank cap’s lifted anyway.
now as far as thollar sinks maybe give people the option of advertising on your site using thollars.. add some buttons/banners people can buy them for x amount of page views for y amount of thollars.. have one banner near the top that could be the trophy spot, unlike the other spots where you just rent the banner/button for x amount of page views the top banner would be yours untill someone else offered an even higher thollar amount for..
so i offer 1 trillion thollars for the top banner i get to display my banner on that spot untill someone else offers up 1trillion+ i’d say make it +10% that way people can’t scoop it out from under you for 1 thollar or something silly.
well whoever it was managed to kill Spectre, so thanks to them for that.
The gems value is not the store of thollars(stocks are much more profitable),but the competition within table of top gem owners.gems can’t be used in economy.
“i continued to add shares till i got tired of it and just let them freeze.”
I usually buy shares because they are there.
If your stock occupies a position in active list,
I’ll try to buy it until its off the list,and then invest in another stock.
I have enough quadrillions to spare.
I seriously think that If we remove the capital gains tax, then theres gunna be some guy thats going to take over the market. Weekly windfall tax is fair enough, but i really dont want all of my trillions of shares taken by one guy whos going to make all of the profit.
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