I mentioned before in A Break that I had an idea for an Android app that I intended to develop, and later in Dockerising ALL THE THINGS I confirmed I had begun development.
Well I now feel it’s time to announce the name of the project, what it is, and that it should be ready to release soon. But first, here’s the icon I’ve created to represent it:
The Name
It’s called Liquidity:
Noun
liquidity (countable and uncountable, plural liquidities)
- (uncountable) The state or property of being liquid.
-
(economics, countable) An asset’s property of being able to be sold without affecting its value; the degree to which it can be easily converted into cash.
Some stocks are traded so rarely that they lack liquidity.
- (finance) Availability of cash over short term: ability to service short-term debt.
Credit and thanks for this definition are due to Wiktionary.
The Purpose
It’s a currency for board games. So rather than dealing with cash or plastic cards, each player runs Liquidity on their phone and joins the game’s Liquidity representation (this can be created by any player, but by default the creator will then be the one who issues currency, i.e. they control the ‘Bank’ entity). Players can then see each others’ balances and make transfers to individual or multiple other players.
The advantages over cash or plastic cards are:
- It’s quicker to set-up and use (provided most players have an Android phone; multiple players can be represented on one phone to accommodate non-Androids). No counting cash & change or handing cards over to the banker who can become a bottleneck in games that have one.
- Money is as secure as the phone that controls the account it’s in. For those that guard their phone without even thinking about it, this makes it more secure than cash on the table or handing over their card to the banker, and without any extra effort. If your phone has a PIN, pass-phrase or biometric authentication enabled, your in game currency is protected by it too by virtue of being held by the phone.
- Since each transaction is recorded, that data is made available for players to view too – it’s not just current balances. So distractions can be more readily recovered from and cheating more easily detected.
The ETA
Soon!