Bank Run in Second Life

Jamie found an interesting bit about a bank run in Second Life. The recent ban on gambling combined with a $12k theft from the 2L stock market has caused people to try to get their money back. The article mentions that this could supposedly affect 8.5M players even tho most estimates of actual hard core players in the system are in the 5 to low 6 figure range.

Comments

Vast exaggeration

[DaleGlass]

Ginko is a resident run bank, which has nothing really special about it. You can it on their own a href="https://ginkofinancial.com/">website: They only claim to have 18,875 accounts, quite a few of which probably were created as a test. Nowhere near the 8.5 million claimed.

Ginko's problem was their insane interest rates, which IIRC varied somewhere between 100% and 30% per year. I think it was 70% for a quite long time. People accused it of being a Ponzi scheme, which given that enormous interest sounds likely. That's why I never put a cent in it :-)

Re:Vast exaggeration

[UbuntuDupe]

Okay, I think I have some expertise on this, because I actually ran an SL "bank" (under a broad definition of "bank", but I called it a bank). I can tell you that 100% interest rate in SL is NOT "insane", and I can tell you how to "earn" that kind of interest without a Ponzi scheme.

First, some background: (as of '03 when I played) in SL, they make it so that they "recharge" your money to a certain level each week, sort of like welfare. The day of the week varies between people. So, if you store your money with a trusted party, it will look like you're poor and you'll get money despite not being poor. I believe at the time it was something like LD 7000 that they would recharge you to. My bank served the function of the trusted party: I'd hold their money (through a script) over their recharge day.

Oh, and yes, I was very open about this, and told admins I was doing it. They didn't care.

Now, this doesn't explain how exactly you'd employ someone's money to make more money (like the banks claimed). However, it shows how, using some tricks, you can start with e.g. LD 7000, and "earn" 7000 more each week ... that's definitely more than a 100% yearly effective interest rate!