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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.
What is this "2L" thing? It's not Second Life, because the whole friggin' world abbreviates that to "SL" and nobody is pedantic enough to come up with a totally new abbreviation when a perfectly good one already exists. So what does it mean?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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
If this sort of thing affects your finances in any major way, you're a moron for "investing" your money in a game. Just because Linden Labs decided to publish an exchange rate for their dollars and real dollars doesn't mean their dollars are a good investment vehicle. Their economy is completely unregulated, and their "banks" are run by anonymous people in foreign countries well outside the reach of US laws (the guy they interviewed is in Brazil, for example).
You might as well call playing the slots in Vegas a retirement plan, it's probably less risky.
Every time you use "tho" in place of the actual word "though," God kills a kitten.
You're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's imaginary house...right next to yours. And in the imaginary Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's imaginary house, and a hundred other imaginary houses. Why, you're lending them the money to build, and then, they're going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?...Now wait...now listen...now listen to me. I beg of you not to do this thing. If Potter gets hold of this Virtual Building and Loan there'll never be another decent imaginary house built in this imaginary town. He's already got charge of the imaginary bank. He's got the imaginary bus line. He's got the imaginary department stores. And now he's after us. Why? Well, it's very simple. Because we're cutting in on his business, that's why. And because he wants to keep you living in his imaginary slums and paying the kind of rent he decides. Joe, you lived in one of his imaginary houses, didn't you? Well, have you forgotten? Have you forgotten what he charged you for that imaginary broken-down shack? Here, Ed. You know, you remember last year when things weren't going so well, and you couldn't make your payments. You didn't lose your imaginary house, did you? Do you think Potter would have let you keep it? Can't you understand what's happening here? Don't you see what's happening? Potter isn't selling. Potter's buying! And why? Because we're panicky and he's not. That's why. He's picking up some bargains. Now, we can get through this thing all right. We've got to stick together, though. We've got to have faith in each other.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
FIXED.
+5, Truth
That's a bit disingenuous - I challenge to post a link to a picture of "value." The very notion of value is virtual, since the universe certainly doesn't care whether there's gold in them thar hills.
And don't fall into the trap of thinking that gold is somehow magical in its ability to have value. Gold is only valuable because people say it is, just like the US dollar. The only difference is that the scarcity of gold is based on physics and the relative difficulty of building a supercollider, while the scarcity of US dollars is based on the desire of the US to have a functioning economy.
If you don't believe me, think about how you'd value the following if modern civilization were to collapse - potable water, food, matches, ammunition, tobacco, liquor, coffee, paper, gold. Now imagine everyone else thinking the same thing (because civilization has collapsed).
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Could be "Girl builds computer in online game while online boyfriend watches. Look, he has screen shots."
It allows the government the ability to pay for anything it likes which leads to the inevitable increases in power of the political elite, the banks and the largest multinational corporations which service government interests.
It requires an exponentially increasing economy and debt burden just to maintain the status quo and make interest payments. This has a devastating effect on the environment and human being's work/life balance.
Those are just off the top of my head. There are more disadvantages.
The currency shapes our society.
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This is a real problem. Plenty of vendors sell the unauthorized work of others. In the case of one "artist", I found images just last night that I recognized from another, real world source, signed on each image by the vendor; the clearest example of IP "theft" I can think of, and certainly a lot more flagrant than any music sharing that pisses off RIAA so much. But I don't think it's that big of an issue. This kind of copyright infringement is rampant throughout the Internet. Look at the content of YouTube, for example. And at the same time this is going on, there are genuine, original artists to be found both in Second Life, and YouTube. To some extent, I see this as an example of the marginal value of both venues for creative expression. There aren't enough people in either environment for plagiarists to be recognized for what they are yet. Additionally, there's a tolerance on the internet for copyright infringement ... in part because organizations like RIAA and MPAA have made pests of themselves and created a "fuck you" attitude towards IP, and also in part because people in general tend to be lazy and inconsiderate of the work of others.