Slashdot Mirror
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.
Every time you die in-game you can write off the armor repair costs on your taxes!
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.
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()?
Given that the "currency" (units, seashells, whatever) have some intrinsic value in that you put labor into the creation of some sort of work product there needs to be a guarantee of the currency, someone or some-thing (government, bank, etc...) who backs up that currency with assets. Also an exchange would need to be established to control the conversion of this new currency into other units. If you do not have these mechanisms in place then your new currency is as valuable as wampum was to the American Indians.
When the European powers moved into the Americas they discovered that wampum was being used as a currency for the exchange of services and commodities and as a means of having portable wealth. The colonies, companies and fur-trappers would bring in mass-produced glass beads from Europe where they had very little value and exchange these to the Indians for furs, food and land. Within a few decades the entire system of wampum devalued itself and had collapsed.
Virtual currency is just 1's and 0's on a computer (our real currency is more like that now than it ever was). How easy would it be to create the equivalent of glass beads in our virtual wampum on-line society?
Tisha Hayes
No more than the ability of the Zimbabwe government to print Zimbabwe dollars, or the Chinese to print yuans, or the US to print US dollars does.
In other words, none at all, if the game currency is "printed" then the exchange rate will devalue it - just like already happens in every MMO game I've seen.
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.
I suppose it's OK, if you can pay it with Linden Dollars.
I seriously don't see how this'll work. Real money has the "I promise to pay the bearer" (or similar) thingy, virtual currencies don't. This seems like a pretty huge difference, I don't think the South Koreans have properly thought about it. Imagine if I did pay my income tax with Linden Dollars... Do I only get virtual health care? (I'm a Brit... I realise in the US this isn't funny).
As long as I can't buy real things with my virtual money then it's not real money! As soon as I can, well then I guess it is (as long as the goods have title, I have to be able to resell them).
Regarding the risks to holders of a company-backed rather than a state-backed currency, I don't really see the big deal. I trust Blizzard much more than I would trust the national bank of Zimbabwe, and yet Zimbabwe dollars are traded in international markets and exchange rates are published. According to Oanda's currency converter, a million Zimbabwe Dollars will exchange for exactly US$2,702.70 today. Why are we treating WoW gold differently? It can't be because we trust Mugabe's financial wizards more than we trust Blizzard.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.