Onboard - Network of Exchanges

Onboard is a network of exchanges that aims to provide near-instant transfer of stamina from city to city in the CivRealms server. Anyone can create a new Onboard exchange by following this instructable. Onboard exchanges may be created as a for-profit enterprise, they can be sponsored by a city or individual if they believe that a money transfer service will help the economy around them.

Onboard utilizes CivMint and ESTA. The idea of purchasing namelayer codes that open chests with stamina in a different city could provide similar near-instant transfer of stamina across cities but suffers from a few issues, the biggest one being scaling: It would be easy to have four chests in total to facilitate 2-way transfers between two cities, but to connect 6 cities we'd need 2*6^2=72 chests in total and every single exchange operator would require to trust every other exchange operator since they'd need to have codes that give access to every operator's stamina. While going through CivMint/ESTA only helps a bit with the trust issues by moving the requirement for trust to just one person (Tritonio), it helps immensely with the scaling aspect because even if we connected 100 cities through Onboard, each exchange would need just two chests and can operate autonomously from the other exchanges, without even knowing how many there are or who runs them. Additionally using ESTA means that people can take advantage of other features provided by CivMint, like online the ESTA<->RDIA exchange (RDIA is a diamond-backed currency), or trading company stock for ESTA, selling and buying info for ESTA etc.

There will be no central governance for Onboard exchanges. Each operator may start running their own Onboard exchange at any time, with any kind of fee structure they want. Using the Onboard branding is not even required although I kindly ask people to not use it unless they are actually part of the Onboard network of exchanges, which utilizes CivMint and ESTA.

Disclosure and disclaimers:

1. CivMint is not affiliated with the CivRealms server or its administration team. It is a system offered by the CivCrafter Exchange Discord server, which was initially used within civclassics. It is developed and administered by Tritonio.

2. ESTA is not affiliated with the CivRealms server or its administration team. It is a stamina-backed currency created by Tritonio to try and bootstrap the use of CivMint within CivRealms.

3. There is nothing administrator or server sponsored about Onboard, this is a player effort.

Supplies

Basic knowledge of NameLayer, Citadel and ItemExchange.

A Discord account.

Step 1: Create an ESTA Account

If you already have an ESTA account on CivMint skip the step.

Open a chat with CivMint#9416 on Discord and send the command:

create account esta youraccountname

Replace youraccountname with whatever account name you want.

Step 2: Create a Namelayer Group for the Withdrawal Chest

Type in-game:

/nlcg groupname

Replace groupname with whatever name you want for this group.

Now pick a random password and type

/nlsp groupname password

to set that password for your new group. Anyone that knows this password will be able to become a member of this group.

Step 3: Create a Pastebin With the Withdrawal Info

Go to https://pastebin.com and type the following into a new paste:

Type this in the game chat to gain access to the namelayer group of this chest: /nljg groupname password

Like before replace groupname with the name of the namelayer group you created and password with the password you chose. Also, the part that says "Type this...of this chest:" is part of what you need to paste in the pastebin, it's not instructions for you, but for the client that will buy the link to this pastebin.

Post the paste by clicking "Create new paste" and now copy the last part of the pastebin URL you've be taken to. For example if the URL is https://pastebin.com/dQAUwbxh then copy dQAUwbxh to your clipboard.

Step 4: Create an Info Sale Order

Send the following message to CivMint#9416:

sell info 5.01 youraccountname dQAUwbxh

Replace youraccountname with the your account name and dQAUwbxh with whatever was the last part of the pastebin URL in the previous step.

CivMint will reply with:

Created info sale order 85351.

Of course your order number will be different.

Step 5: Create a Withdrawal Chest

Look at the photo to get an idea about how this could look like. It's important to have signs with info about similar to the ones in the photo. The chest, the lever and the trapdoor should be on the unique namelayer group you created in the previous step, that way anyone who buys access to the pastebin, can now join the group and access the contents of the chest. Inside the chest you should put the amount of stamina apples you want to allow users to withdraw. The chest in the photo contains 5 stamina. The order we created in the previous step sells the info to open the chest for 5.01 ESTA, so the fee is 0.01 ESTA. Make sure you replace all three values (5, 0.01 and 5.01) with the correct values for your case. Also, you should replace 85351 in the bottom right sign with whatever was your order ID in the previous step.

Step 6: Create More Withdrawal Chests

Repeat the steps to create more withdrawal chests. Each chest requires its own namelayer group, with its own unique password, which is stored in its own unique pastebin URL, and is sold through its own unique sale order.

Additionally when a withdrawal chest is used, i.e. someone buys your info sale on CivMint, sees the password, joins the group and opens the chest to take the stamina, you will have to kick them off the group by typing in-game

/nl groupname

finding the client in the list of members, clicking on them and then clicking on the leftmost icon (the one that will say it will remove this member), then picking a new password and changing the group password to it, creating a brand new pastebin with the new password, and creating a sale order for that pastebin URL.

Creating and restocking withdrawal chests takes some time (but less than 5 minutes if you are efficient) so make sure that the fee you charge for withdrawals covers the time you spend. I hear that 4-5 stamina/hour is a normal rate so perhaps a fee of 0.4 stamina per withdrawal is enough to compensate you for the time you spend. Given that, you can imagine that offering withdrawals of 3 stamina would be pointless since the client would need to pay 3.4 ESTA to get 3 stamina, that's a 13% fee. So perhaps you can withdrawal of bigger amounts but not to big to make it too risky to keep them in a chest. In the end, you need to find the right amounts since you know better how risky it is to keep stamina in a chest in your city, as well as how much stamina you can keep as a buffer for withdrawals. Don't forget that, if you are aiming for profit, the fees are supposed to compensate you both for the risk you take and for the time you spend.

Step 7: Aquire Some ESTA

If you want to allow clients to deposit stamina and get ESTA, you'll first need to acquire some ESTA yourself. You can do that be meeting with Tritonio and exchanging stamina for ESTA in-person, or you can use the automated exchange in the basement of B3, CivCorp City. That's exchange that this instructable is actually based on.

Step 8: Create a Stash

Once you have some ESTA in your CivMint account, send the following command to CivMint#9416 to stash some of that ESTA. You can think of this process like creating your own Google Play gift cards that can be claimed using a claim password.

stash 4.99 youraccountname

As always, replace youraccountname with your account name.

CivMint will reply with a claim password that can be used by anyone to claim the 4.99 ESTA that you stashed.

Please keep in mind that, as CivMint will tell you, you care about the claim password, not the decryption key, the must longer decryption key is not relevant to this instructable and you can ignore it. Just keep the claim password somewhere for now.

Step 9: Put the Claim Instructions in a Book

Get a written book and put this text in it:

1. Open a chat with CivMint#9416
2. If you don't have an ESTA account send: "create account esta accountname" replacing accountname with your desired account name.
3. Send: "claim xxxxx#xxxxx#xxxxx accountname"

But replace the xxxxx#xxxxx#xxxxx with the stash claim password you got in the previous step.

Now anyone that gets their hands on this book will know how to claim 4.99 ESTA.

Step 10: Create a Deposit Chest

Look at the photo to get an idea about how this could look like. In contrast to the withdrawal chests that can be used once by each client before you need to go and restock them, deposit chests are normal ItemExchange chests (https://github.com/ttk2/ItemExchange). That means that you can sell multiple written books, each with a different claim password in it. In this example we stashed away 4.99 ESTA but we'll sell it for 5 stamina, so that's a 0.01 stamina fee from each sale. Once more you are free to use whatever fee makes sense for you based on the risk of leaving valuables in chests in your area as well as how much you value the time you will spend pasting text in these written books (as well as the tiny cost of a written book which is probably around 0.01 stamina as of May 2020).

Step 11: Create a Book Return Bin

You may be able to reclaim some of the written books by having a hopper to collect them as clients leave the exchange, as shown in the photo.

Step 12: Handle Face-to-face Trade

Deposits and withdrawals can only happen in fixed amounts (5 stamina in the examples in the previous steps) but if you are online, you can exchange between ESTA and stamina at any amount as long as you don't run out of either. This will save you some time restocking chests and it will save your client some time running commands, so you may consider doing it for a slightly lower fee, although it's completely up to you. The command to send 7 ESTA from accountA to accountB is:

send 7 accountA accountB

Either your client will need to send this command this while you are paying him in stamina, or you need to send it while he is paying you in stamina.

Step 13: Balancing ESTA and Stamina

If you end up having too little or too much ESTA you can always meet with Tritonio or other Onboard operators to buy/sell ESTA as required. Tritonio does not currently charge a fee for face-to-face conversions from stamina to ESTA and according to the terms of ESTA (read the full terms), Tritonio will convert ESTA 1:1 to stamina without a fee.

Step 14: Join the Talk

Join our Discord to talk about ESTA and the Onboard network of exchanges https://discord.gg/2eBqxd8.

If you operate an Onboard exchange tell us where it is and you can get access to a private room for Onboard operators.