Secondlife should go P2P

Good, you have thought about this.

However, think a bit more. The 'artificial' credit card will have to charge you a transaction tax of some kind. It *can't* be free. Impossible.

There are too many legal liabilities, insurance, fraud issues, securing your servers, etc that you have to deal with. No matter what, someone is going to have to charge a transaction tax of some kind.

And as soon as there is a bit of money involved it becomes a business and that could be the business of SL.

As far as fraud goes, there's already plenty of room for vendor fraud, and reporting and neg rating vendors is the best defense.

Thinking about the credit card idea again... I suppose you may be right, though the cost could be made to be cheaper than that of a centralized Linden Lab "bank".

Even still problems 1 and 3 stand in the way of Linden Lab being the world bank.

-Hiro Pendragon
Serving SL from Varney 200,200

I'm still standing aghast at the idea of asking a company that specializes in forefront streaming technology to become a bank.

The core added-values of the Lindens are:
- streaming technology
- server infrastructure and server infrastructure management
- community

Azelda

The problem with selling server licenses is that an open source version of the server will eventually appear.

I suppose if they sold the server licenses cheap enough, that wouldn't be an issue. But then their profit potential decreases.

I really believe they need to be the ebay/paypal of the metaverse world.

And I agree, that their core competency isn't exactly that, but they do have some knowledge and experience in managing player-to-player transactions.

I'm not sure if I understand your point, but it's pretty hard to get people to buy from the web. It's still gaining acceptance.

Anyone can setup a virtual store and now that we have rpc/email, they can even accept credit card payments direct from in world.

How would the transactions you describe work? The moment I connect to some punk kids server not hosted by LL to use my credit card or make a $L transaction, he can spoof my transactions. Opening up $L transactions to the outside world is scary.

I think the community has a lot of value for two reasons. Company X can approach LL and have a huge game or shopping mall built, on short notice, and pay developers in L$!! If a protocol bridge was created, I would pay $15 us just to appear on the map and maybe a bit more to be listed in the Find menus -> Even though my connection could only support 1 or 2 people in my 'zone'.

If LL was charging 2% on every USD transaction, I would have to spend $750 US a month to beat that. I WISH I COULD!

Well, you can get 100K people paying 15$ / month or you get 100 million people paying 5$ / month.

In order for things to really catch on you need to eliminate all sources of friction.

100 million people logging into virtual worlds and spending an average of $5 USD (not L$'s!) when they can use google and buy that product waaay faster? Google's your main source of friction. Good luck.

Jack,




You just answered your own question.

But google? Do you mean ebay / Yahoo / Amazon?

... and Jack, I think you miss the point that a P2P SL has the potential to not just be widely used, but outright replace the Internet.

-Hiro Pendragon

Heh! We dont even have in-world forums yet I think the days when a Metaverse could replace the internet are a way off yet...

There's no reason why a Metaverse cant work hand-in-hand with the internet, like Flash.

Azelda

It's good to see that people are thinking about this, but we're still about 5-10 years from seeing such a thing.

Keep in mind that by the time we get the bandwidth to do this, the cost to buy sims from LL will have probably dropped to be about equal to the costs that would be incurred to host them from your home.

Well, probably the sims will evolve to use the available bandwidth. It's not like there's any bandwidth to spare right now, there's plenty of things that could be added that eat bandwidth for breakfast.

If I remember rightly Philip wants to add video to SL, that's a chunk straight off. But also, if you have the bandwidth you dont have to limit the sim to 30 avs, you could have 200 or 1000, or 10,000. Try hosting that on a 10meg "pipe".

Azelda

(BUT... that said, in SL right now, the vast majority of time, theres no more than 3-5 avs in each sim. That's about 1.5meg of upstream bandwidth which blows ADSL but almost fits into a DSL and should run ok on a T1.)

Azelda

5-10 years off from what?

By some estimates, there's already a $9M annual GDP and 10K users. That's probably > 10,000% increase. Keep up that growth curve and that's 100 Million in a year.

At some inflection point it will be clear as to where this is exactly going. The momentum will be there. The people won't be, but the indication of where this going will be obvious to people with experience in this space.

Is that point 5-10 years off? Perhaps in the same way that the web as it stands now was 10 years off from 1994.

Yes, all those other 2d websites as well. They all make it too easy to buy a product and all you need is a browser. Learning to click a link doesn't take much time. Learning to use SL isn't as easy as IE or Netscape. Building a website is quick and easy. Building a virtual store takes longer (costs more). The metaverse is cool to us, but to 100 million? It's about as cool as computers were in 1982. People need to evolve a bit, the hardware too.

Blaze, Kex meant 5-10 years until cheap 10MB connections are cheap and common. I'm not denying it's going to replace the websites, eventually, but it will be upwards of 20 years before 100 million people are comfortable enough to spend $5 A MONTH on transactions in a metaverse. If it doesn't load quick, and have a simple interface like the WWW, it's not going to be adopted by the masses. I'm just being realistic.

Blaze I find it funny you mentioned the roaring .com 90's. Suddenly I understand where you get your #'s from and why you are so optimistic. BTW, these concepts are clear to everyone who plays SL, you are just more optimistic than most. Your preaching to the choir Blaze. I agree 100% with what you say, but your a generation too soon.

Sometimes we're a bit too US centric around here. Bring asian countries into the equation, countries where playing games like starcraft is a lucrative profession, and the numbers being toss around aren't that far fetched.

Jack, I agree this will take possibly another 5 years before the Metaverse can catch on to be world-used. Bandwidth is still an issue, so is P2P (as I said earlier in the post), display is another issue (remember Stephenson wrote about light being displayed directly on the retina... my guess is that is still 10-20 years out before that or an equivalently experiential method is developed)

However as per your quote, I think the key is to integrate the Internet into the Metaverse so that it is essentially backwards compatible. And building websites is easy; building good websites can be learned; but building online stores does take a level of expertise, so I don't think your argument necesarily holds that SecondLife / Metaverse would be tough to replace online commerce. If anything, consider how the benefit of having a truly immersive environment would aid sales?
Imagine walking into a virtual Gap or Abercrombie, being able to walk around, see displays, try on clothes virtually... etc... far more useful than what is out there in 2-D now.

As far as your 1982 comment, you're wrong. There are millions of people playing MMOs today. I believe if given the choice between 2-D Internet and an Immersive 3-D Metaverse, the choice is elementary to the latter.

-Hiro Pendragon

No doubt! Imagine configuring your avatar to have your exact measurements .. and then trying on close to see how they fit your avatar as a proxy for you.

Not only would the stores get real time data about who is trying on their clothes and could stock sizes accordingly, but you wouldn't have to go through the hassle of taking on / off the clothes to see if they fit.

Actually, SecondLife should let you input your measurements when configuring your Avatar..