"Collateral Units" as described here should not be confused with the Collateral Leverage Points described elsewhere.
The Collateral Units referred to in this article are a simple mechanic for gaming which can be implemented using NFTs.
These Collateral Units can be used as one of the forms of collateral the Collateral Leverage Points system makes use of.
They are a game-mechanic that can be useful for "abstracting away" levels of detail that a particular game sub-game or part of a game prefers not to dive into at a given moment, providing an economic model without worrying about the details of what actual materials, labour, title deeds, payrolls, inventory, "goodwill", reputation, community standing, "etcetera etcetera etcetera" might turn out to be involved at a more detailed scale or even user-interface of play.
They can also be used to provide different business-sectors or economies, and possibly even "technology by technology" across a "tech tree" to represent investing into particular technologies, although the Galactic Milieu has not used them in that particular way yet; the current state of research into that usage is still at the stage of thinking out how one might relate the per-technology Collateral Units to the "tech tree" that perhaps ought to itself be having some influence or involvement beyond merely determining what the latest new technology available to invest in might be.
Implementation is relatively simple, it could be done using NFTs by maintaining an expandable (appendable-to) linked list of expandable (appendable-to) linked lists, with each member Unit minted by purchase or brought into existence by the mechanic as a consequence of the purchase being uniquely numbered within the particular set of Units.
Because it is abstract, it can have a wide range of uses, and a wide range of backstories / rationalisations in games.
The mechanic is rather simple:
When a Unit is appended to a list by a "minting" (purchase of a new Unit created by the act of purchase), a "Units minted" counter increments and IF it is now an even number THEN "bumping" takes place.
"Bumping" consists of [ moving the top (earliest) Unit on the list to the "next" list, WITH the new-additions-to-that-list counter incrementing, with the even number "bumping", just like the "Units minted" counter incrementing on the first / top (earliest) list ] AND ALSO generating a new Unit "out of nothing", appending it to the first list.
I'll re-state that in other words, hopefully for clarity:
When an entity brings a new Unit into existence by purchasing something "of value" for the purpose of creating (minting) a new Unit, not only is a new Unit created and appended onto the (first) list of Units, but also every other such act causes a "bumping" operation which takes the oldest item off the list to put on the next list and also creates "out of nothing" another new Unit which gets appended to the end of the list without counting toward whether it is time to do another "bumping".
It is thus every second "minting", rather than every second appending of a Unit to the list, that causes a "bumping". Units conjured out of nothing and appended don't count as possible bump-triggers.
Note that where I wrote above that something of value is purchased, what really happens is that the currency used to buy with goes into a stash or "treasury" for this collection of Units; the total value of that treasury divided by the number of Units on that first list at any given time is the calculated / calculable value - the "liquidation value" - of the Units on that first list. The in game something of value is just some non-perishable figment/item of the game; often it is left as an abstraction to be invented later by backstory writers and such.
So much for the first list, which is the one whose units can be bought, sold, or liquidated (deconstructed; turned back into the currency the particular collection of Collateral Units is denominated in).
One of the things that makes this a useful and interesting mechanic is that the number of Units on that first list can change over time and also, thanks to the "liquidation" mechanism, so can the amount of currency in the stash / treasury which the particular collection of Units serves to "lock up".
Basically the Collateral Units mechanic serves as a mechanism for locking away currency, but a reversible way; the currency locked up in it can be released back into use by "liquidating" the Units.
That first list is the only one of the lists whose members are available for liquidation; the rest of the lists are kind of more and more abstract possibly-nothings, possibly-signifant-somethings, fuel for plenty of rationalising and backstorying; things like "brand names" and "brand recognition" and "community standing" and "being a cultural tradition" and so on and so on and so on have been used, this is where the abstractness of the mechanic can be so useful in games.
The second and subsequent lists "bump" too; every second time a Unit is moved from a list to its "next" list, it causes a "bumping" event for that list too. However, it is only on the first list that the resulting creation of a new unit "out of nothing" appends the newly conjured unit onto the end of the same list. On all the other lists, the conjured unit is appended to the end of the FIRST list.
That sounds like an exception when stated that way, but it is not an exception if stated in the possibly simpler to grasp form "ALL the lists append the new Unit conjured by a bumping onto the end of the FIRST list".
This means that if for example we backstory a Unit as being a mom and pop shop somewhere, not only does its coming into existence potentially (by the "bumping" mechanism) trigger some other something that is part of the same economy to spawn a new Unit for (in storyline possibly "of") itself, but someday when some other thing happens in that economy the mom and pop store's operator's kids might open another branch, or maybe mom and pop might start a franchise of it, opening another one themselves, or maybe all along they might have been picking up used materials resulting from liquidations and one day they have enough to build another store, or to build a nice house worth, like their store is/was, one Collateral Unit; or maybe they simply expand the store, increasing its value by one Collateral Unit.
The point is, the storyline details don't matter to the game-mechanic. From a game-mechanic perspective it is simply a wonderful little mechanic that backstory authors and fan-fiction writers and rationalisers and rationalisations can have a "field day" with while even extremely non-intelligent computers can execute the mechanic with mindless ease. :)
I am not sure I have really conveyed the mechanic to my readers so far, but as the post was supposed to be about the mechanic possibly being under-used, I will try to address that before ending the post...
The Collateral Units mechanic is so far only used wrapped into Corps or Treasuries; players, so far, do not / have not traded in Collateral Units.
With the recent popularity of NFTs, combined with how simple an implementation in/as NFTs would or could be, maybe it could be time to revisit the idea of opening the mechanism to the players more directly than simply having some of the Corps they can own shares of or Treasuries the treasury-based currencies they use happen to hold various Collateral Units?
I fully expect to discover that a whole lot of people find my explanation almost unintelligible, maybe someone who manages to decipher it (assuming anyone manages to) could re-state it more intelligibly?
(Failing that, compilable code that compiles to executable executables might suffice? 😄)
-MarkM-