[Comments reopened. Deutsche Bemerkungen begrüßt.]
Follow up article on the Linden dollar is here.
In 2005 I began working as a venture consultant for some
entrepreneurs and investors trying to develop a fairly ambitious “real-money-trading”
(RMT) business idea. My work resulted in
my collection of a large amount of RMT market data for most of the popular massively multiplayer games and
virtual worlds. Although the new venture
was never pursued due to my analysis of the true RMT market, one game caught
our particular interest: SecondLife, operated by Linden Research Inc. (privately held, San
Francisco CA).
Unlike the makers of nearly all other online games, the
operators of SecondLife not only allow and encourage the exchange of game
currency for real money, but they actually facilitate
it. As early as 2005 I began noticing a
rumbling in interest-focused blogs about the exploding market that was SecondLife. Touted as a pioneering future Metaverse on the industry’s
most informed blog, TerraNova, an array of journalists,
academics, and company executives have claimed that SecondLife boasts an
economy complete with in-game banks, multiple currency exchanges, a floating
currency exchange rate, and a burgeoning in-game commerce and business base.
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