toy money v. real money

i think it would be cool if:

1. make the linden $ into game money only
   
2. find a way to make micropayments in us$
   
3. increase l$ stipends
   
4. give people the option to sell things for l$ or us$
   
5. remove l$ land auctions - us$ auctions only
   

this would maintain the for-profit endeavors in sl, but would make it possible for people who come to sl for a non-monetary reasons to do things without worrying about having enough l$.

I like LL's relationship with the Gaming Open Market. It gives poor college students like yours truly a chance to make some relatively easy money.

instead of getting l$ you could get us$ and save on the exchange fees.

Yeah, but then they'd have to siphon everything into my PayPal account, or something. I wouldn't wanna get a bunch of tiny checks in the mail, and I'm not sure how much eBay/PayPal approves of gaming currency exchange, officially.

i think you've missed my point. though i wasn't very clear.

getting tiny checks would be annoying. thus hopefully whatever ll did to make micropayments possible would need to address that.

also, if you're getting us$ directly through ll instead of l$ which needs to go through an exchange to become us$, then there is no concern about whether or not ebay/paypal approve of gaming currency exchange.

Ah, but it places the burden on Linden Labs to be arbiter of sales, buyer protection, copyright watchdog, ad infinitum. It doesn't take a degree in Rocket Science to realize they just don't have the resources at this time.

Also, the Linden is in many ways a living currency instead of "monopoly money" - simply because it is so tied to the USD and is used to buy and sell real goods (read: pieces of code the users created).

but isn't this burden already on ll for l$ sales?

so wouldn't it be more efficient to do this with us$ instead of l$?
and doesn't that mean, even more, that ll needs to take up the burden or arbiter?

To answer both: Hells no. The point is LL simply cannot take on that sort of liability. They've considered closer ties to the sources of USD before, and were met with very mixed opinions.

In the long term, after things become more open, it might be possible to shift responsibility away from LL and do this. For now though? Don't hold your breath.

This is the solution for the teen grid.

I believe, though it may hurt, the teen grid should be toy money only.

the L$ is play money... as much as a peice of paper the government says is equal to 1, 5, 10, , 50, or 100 USD. What is 1 USD worth? Tha't depends on what anyone else is willing to trade for it, and what you personally value it for. If they were to start giving away more L$ per week, you would see prices go up as the value of the L$ goes down. That's inflation. If you want to buy things with real USD, that's possible now. Hank Ramos created a system, where you could buy L$ certificates with your credit card and redeem them at participating vendors.

Dont you mean "virtual" money?

Toy money is what you get in the Monopoly box.

Denominating in-world transactions in US$ would add a layer of tax headaches that simply wouldn't be worth it. So long as the Lindens are doing nothing more than twiddling bits on a h/d that represent a virtual currency, they can tell the IRS to go screw themselves.

- Ace

Also the Lindens keep out of a lot of legal obligations because L$ isn't real money. If they decided to drop all out accounts to 0L$ right now they could and their is nothing we could do but cry. But if we had accounts with real money in them and something went wrong and that money ended up digitally lost, we could sue til the cows came home.

From my understanding, all money is play money.

DNA

virtual toy money?

liability is one of those things proven in a court of law.

i suspect ll would be found liable if something big enough happened. but i'm not a lawyer.

that sounds about right.
that might be insurmountable.

i think we could still sue over the l$, but suing over usd would be more productive.

I would also suspect that LL might run into some banking regulations if they become a manager of US$ on the behalf of their clients.

- Ace

that's true. it happened to paypal.
does gom have this problem?

Nope can't sue over Linden's. They aren't ours. They belong to SL, I know thats a hard concept to understand. Not owning something you can sell. Think of it like this, L$ are like a teddy bear that LL lets us hold. Now IGE and GOM really want to hold as many teddy bears as possible, so they are willing to pay us REAL MONEY for the privilege of holding the teddy bear(these are really cute teddy bears) but the teddy bear still belongs to SL no matter who is holding it. And if they want it back they can take it back whenever they want and their terms of service state that. No matter how much time, money, and love you have invested in it, its still their toy and if they want to rip it's head off in front of you, you have no legal recourse.

However actual US dollars are different. Just because your money is in the bank doesn't mean that the bank owns it. You still own it. So that would be an opposite case where you are letting the bank hold YOUR teddy bear, so if they mess it up, you have legal recourse.

ya know... there are alot of barriers...
on the other hand if ll could solve the micropayment problem, they could make it really big.

The micropayment thing is the least of their problems. They could just do like SL exchange. Let the person decide when they want to cash out by hitting a button. The bigger problems would be holding on to people's RL money.

if the did micropayment without holding it?

Then they would be responsible for all transactions. Again with the liabilities.

so the major barrier to micropayment is risk-factor