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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."
It's lucrative for the government to say that. After all, now they can add tax between exchanges, in top of the service costs too.
So we can sue Linden Labs for currency manipulation cause... oh wait the US does that all the time so I guess it's legal?
It all starts at 0
I wonder if this will make the value of the South Korean Won drop. Because it would almost make it possible to print money. Of course I guess you'd just need to value different game's currencies differently and then have published exchange rates. Its interesting.
Assuming the South Korean currency is not backed something solid (like gold), then their currency is just as virtual as online virtual currency -- it has no actual intrinsic value.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I can go to a bank in South Korea and exchange my WoW gold for Won? No? Then how about EvE's ISK? No?
Why could that be? Maybe because the issuers of that "currency" are companies, not countries, and no country on this planet backs it with its real economy? And "forging" it is about as trivial as changing a few lines in a database because no game company follows banking standards concerning security (not to mention auditing)? And let's not talk about Blizzard or CCP letting those printing presses roll whenever they feel like without any oversight from any kind of national bank.
In short, the whole deal is BS squared.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So in a game such as EQ (the only MMO I've played) you could kill people (on pvp servers) and take their gold. Clearly this is part of the game, but is it something you could be arrested for now?
You're marked as "funny", but I think it's a valid question. If I play a game of basketball with someone, and steal their wallet, that's a crime. How's that different than MMORPG gold theft; because the rules say stealing is okay? Then how is that different from a casino, where "skill" or luck allows either one party to take the money from the other party? Sounds like gambling to me, which is illegal in SK.
Article is horribly misrepresenting the Korean supreme court ruling.
It claimed such an exchange was not criminal.
It did not:
-Create any kind of exchange between virtual/real currencies.
-Create any kind of obligation on gaming companies to be accountable to player's virtual bank accounts.
-Negate the EULAs of the majority of games which state RMT is a violation of your use of their services and will result in your account being banned from their servers.
In other words, Bliz can continue to cancel your WOW account, they just can't arrest you. In Korea.
-.-
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
You forgot to add
WHERE playernickname = 'mynickname'
in both sql statements.
It would suck if everyone else also would be Really Rich wouldn't it?
Also, real banks would use Oracle, not sql server as the database.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
If by "real" you mean "non-tangible", that's been the case for centuries, and was finally recognized when we went off the gold standard. The Fed alters the money supply, not by printing money, but by altering the amount of money people agree exists.
If you're a big bank and the Fed loans you a million dollars, nothing tangible changes. Everyone just agrees you have a million dollars at your disposal because the Fed says there is. If they alter their interest rates to make borrowing attractive, suddenly there's lot more money floating around in the economy. If the raise interest rates so you (as a big bank) don't want to have so much debt to them on your books, suddenly you start demanding people you've lent money pay you back so you can pay your bills. That sucks money out of the economy, even though nothing tangible has happened (like zapping a pile of gold with a disintegration ray).
It's really simple in a completely non-intuitive way.
But that's not the sense I mean when I say "real money". "Real money" is something anybody with any sense would agree is money. In-game money has many of the characteristics of "real money"; it is liquid, and you can exchange it for some things of value. It lacks the property that anybody of any sense would treat it as "just as good as money", which means you can't trade it for just about anything the way you can real money. You've got to barter it for something else people agree is money before it has that all important universal buying power.
There's an obvious reason for this. The company that operates the game would literally have system that could generate unlimited amounts of money. Banks can be a *little bit* like that. They can create travelers checks and other documents that say "pay to the bearer such and so", but they have to carry those as liabilities on their books. They can't print as much of this money as they like without altering their ability to pay their obligations to people who demand something "as good as" what the Fed provides. The game company has no incentive to limit the amount of money it creates, other than its impact on game play. If the government gave me the power to make *real* virtual money without any kind of downside, I wouldn't care about what it did to my game.
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