Abstract This article presents pioneering research on measuring virtual wealth in an open virtual world for diagnosing the health of virtual worlds. It proved the existence of an open virtual world by proving the existence of a free choice of virtual currencies for virtual goods between distinct

What happens when the domains of HCI design and money intersect? This paper presents analyses from an ethnographic study of virtual currency use in China to discuss implications for game design, and HCI design more broadly. We found that how virtual currency is perceived, obtained, and spent can

What happens when the domains of HCI design and money intersect? This paper presents analyses from an ethnographic study of virtual currency use in China to discuss implications for game design, and HCI design more broadly. We found that how virtual currency is perceived, obtained, and spent can

To examine whether the recent price patterns and transaction costs of Bitcoin represent a general characteristic of decentralized virtual currencies, we analyze virtual currencies in online games that have been voluntarily managed by individuals since 1990s. We find that matured game currencies

currency (VC), a form of incentive, in a vibrant online community in order to highlight emergent practices that were enabled, facilitated and manifested through exchanges of virtual currency among users. Our study shows evidence that these user appropriations of VC help sustain the community and fulfill

of the role of virtual currency (VC), a form of incentive, in a vibrant online community to highlight emergent practices that were enabled, facilitated and manifested through exchanges of virtual currency among users. Our study shows evidence that these user appropriations of VC help sustain the community

to maximize the bene ts it gets from the network. In order to stimulate cooperation, we introduce a virtual currency and detail the way it can be protected against theft and forgery. We show that this mechanism ful lls our expectations without signi cantly decreasing the performance of the network. 1

As distributed systems increase in popularity and experience resource contention, new resource allocation methods are needed for scalability and manageability. In this thesis, I investigate the use of auctions, a type of market-based methods, as a decentralized resource allocation approach. Agents in auctions individually submit bids that provide critical information, including agents’ private value for resources, for prioritizing resource allocation. Three issues must be addressed for wider acceptance of using auctions. First, I present empirical data of a deployed market-based resource allocator, called Mirage, for allocating sensor network resources. The data provides observations of agent bidding patterns, which varied across values, sizes, and allocation timing. Furthermore, agents exhibited strategic behaviors that validate the need to mitigate such behaviors, which create complexity for both agents and system administrators. Second, I design Roller, an online mechanism that is strategyproof with respect to agents’ submitted values and resource sizes. Roller is also configurable and able to provide different tradeoffs in regard to mis-reports of allocation timing. As agents of distributed

Until recently, the popularity of the virtual currency bitcoin had largely been confined to the tech circles. It started to grab the attention of the mainstream media as its value against the U.S. dollar gyrated wildly earlier this year (see figure), fueled by speculative trades by several hedge

solution to this problem is to use virtual currency mechanisms: nodes have to pay to send packets and they are rewarded when they forward packets of other nodes. Several papers of the literature have shown that such models enforce individual node cooperation. We address in this paper two main issues