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Virtual Currency Becomes Real In South Korea
garylian writes "Massively is reporting that the South Korean Supreme Court has stated that virtual currency is the equivalent of real-world money. For those of you who might not be drawing the link, the core there is that selling in-game currency for real money is essentially just an exchange of currency and perfectly legal in South Korea. This could have sweeping implications for RMT operations the world over, not to mention free-to-play games and... well, online games in general. The official story is available online from JoongAng Daily."
They need to do better jobs keeping track of currency levels in different games. As virtual currency becomes more common in game settings, better cryptography needs to be used to make sure that people don't change the numbers. Similarly, there becomes issues with income taxes and the like. In the long run we should probably all switch to cryptographically anonymous currency anyways which can be easily implemented using blind signatures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature so that even the bankers don't know who used which bills for which transactions. Unfortunately, many large institutions (such as governments) will likely resist such systems because they lead to a substantial loss of control.
You're probably referring to the "Liberty Dollar".
Issuing a competing, aka "complementary" currency is not illegal! See, Ithaca hours, the Matole Petole, and a number of others.
What made the Liberty coins illegal was that they had too close a resemblance to actual US currency, and were being advertised in ways that might lead people to believe they were legal tender. There may have been some other frauds revolving around the organization that sold them also.
The fact that they minted silver (and maybe gold too, I don't recall) didn't make them illegal. The aforementioned Petole is silver, and nobody bothers them. They don't try to pass their coins off as valid US currency though, just 1.0 oz. fine silver. Nothing illegal about that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The gamer blog has it wrong, the article poster didn't help, and the Slashdot "editors" blew it as usual. Read the article in JoongAng Daily (which they offer in English). The key issue here is that online gambling is illegal in Korea, and two game players were charged criminally for making money from an online game. The Supreme Court of Korea ruled that they were not gambling, so they don't get fined.
This decision doesn't affect relationships between players and game operators. It's not about EULA enforceability or property rights. It's a criminal law issue. If you trade game currency, you're not going to be fined or go to jail in Korea. Whether a game site can ban you is a separate issue.
See local currencies and list of community currencies in the United States in Wikipedia.
Yes, it is illegal. See 18 USC Chapter 25 486:
Liberty Dollars were not authorized by law, and therefore the minting of same is illegal.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
What part of "intended for use as" do you not understand?
Liberty dollars are minted with the intended use as current money.
Actually, no it would not be reasonable to anything of the sort. The reason it is not reasonable is because the liberty dollars are intended for use as current money, regardless of whether or not the federal government uses silver and/or gold coins as current money.
But, liberty dollars are not for private use. If they were for private use, then the minters of the liberty dollars would not encourage people to try to pay for things with liberty dollars.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Actually Ron Paul, if he were abiding by the Austrian Economics playbook, (as he usually does) would never tell you that gold has "intrinsic" value, because nothing has an "intrinsic" value. Value is determined entirely by the transaction participants according to their own desires, and only at a specific point in time. Today, gold is worth ~1000/troy ounce to most Americans. Next week, post nuclear holocaust, you may have a hard time giving people 1oz of gold in exchange for 1 bag of radiation-free ramen.
What Paul and most clever people _will_ tell you is that gold is very useful as a medium of exchange and a store of value within socieites because it is very hard to systematically manipulate [read: inflate], and because it is much better at both functions than "fractional cows".
It was not an accident that many societies all independantly settled on weights of precious metals as their unit of monetary exchange and value.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
That's mostly because gold does a good job at possessing the characteristics of a medium of exchange:
1. transportability
2. divisibility
3. high market value in relation to volume and weight
4. recognizability
5. resistance to counterfeiting
6. memory
Other materials with similar characteristics have "maintained a value" the same way gold has--not because of any intrinsic store of value.
~ roscivs