What are Ginko Bonds worth?

Well thats true , they have to fund the bureaucracy. Thats the problem. Its so badly managed its hugely expensive.

Doesnt make it a scam really. Its Graft instead.



--The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.

Our children are getting scamed out of the life they could have.

100% of child support taken should be paid 100% for child support to the kids, as we already have other taxes to fund the child support agency. That would be double-taxation if they are funding the agency with child support money -- a scam.

I hate to be negative here, but isn't talking about it in an SL forum not the most effective way of dealing with this? The shorted parties need to contact their local representative (city, county, state, etc) and ask for help in wading through the bureaucracy. That's why we pay them. My Congresswoman helped some friends of mine get their passports issued when they'd been in the queue for 9 months. A lot of times, local representatives LOVE to help the little guy. Looks good on their records, and they can use it in future election campaigns.

Contacting the local represententives over the GPB issue may make some headway.

As for child support, there have been many different attempts. Tons of people sat in and lined up around the capital for some kind of change to be made -- nada. Ballot measures have been made -- not enough funds to get enough signatures in the alloted time limit. California has two main women in congress, and neither one has done anything to help families in general and fairly. (look at their track record on their website... all biased SIGs) As you have seen, the bogus percentages are what the represententives look at and get mislead by.

If you knew that your business is going to make 60 billions dollars a year, and that helps pay you pay-check, would you screw some non-custodial parent over it? Is it worthwhile?

I think most residents who are in SL for fun and creativity, do not want Real Life encrouching on it.

There's enough scammers in Real Life, we don't need to go out of our way to attract money scammers into SL.

I see this thread is still running, (I have been away on holiday for the last 2 weeks). I thought about this while on holiday!

I agree with Rebecca.

A brief review of the Linden Blog over the last 2 weeks while I have been away (and after my last post on this thread) tells me that Linden Labs will not accept any responsibility for the Ginko fiasco, neither will they regulate to prevent such issues in the future, and that is despite the semi official support given to Ginko by Gov Linden leading to an initial conclusion where a case could be made Linden bear some moral or even legal liability for this problem.

Putting aside the issue of Second Life being a game or platform, I am aware from first life financial experience a lack of regulation in financial services will always lead to trouble.

As the Linden Dollar is freely convertible to real life currency it (the Linden Dollar) is the equal of a fiat currency. Therefore first life law is perhaps applicable to this problem. Personally I would suggest all those who have lost money via Ginko should consult first life legal authorities.

Finally I also think financial services within Second Life that involve one avatar holding another avatars Linden Dollars for profit or gain should be banned, unless that business relationship is formalised by first life law or regulation

I agree, as i've said many times, SL is nothing more and nothing less than an ISP with a payment processor integrated.

If they do not ban it, then they endorse its presence in Second Life.

Of course, they cannot be liable for every single thing that goes on in SL - however when there is potential for such huge fraud (as appears to have happened in the Ginko case) then they really ought to step in and say "no more".

In my more generous moments, I can kinda see LL's point here: for one thing, they surely can't adjudicate every in-world business dispute, and also, to the extent that they did intervene they'd incur liability for any RL implications of their decisions (and in what jurisdiction?... it just gets horrifically messy very quickly).

Which leaves the choice: unregulated financial services, or no purely in-world financial services at all. We've certainly learned from the Ginko fiasco that the former has negative marginal utility (except perhaps to Ginko Guy himself). The latter means that those folks who want to "play with money" don't get to have as much fun in SL, I guess, and some valuable services aren't performed. (We all store L$s "under the mattress" of our alt accounts; in-world enterprises obtain capital exclusively by RL means; not sure what others.)

The only options that come to mind are active in-world services provided by RL institutions (but would Bank of America really want ATMs programmed in LSL??), or some "trust network" of self-appointed in-world overseers (but there's no real mechanism for ensuring that all transactions are visible to an auditor, and no chain of authority from which enforcement could be effected--the most they could do is issue reports and publish verbal sanctions).

Is there an option I'm missing?

The if you want to invest your proffits from Second Life, cash out and invest them in your first life, option.


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It spares all the negitives of a lack of regulation, and it allows for metered risk investing.


Of course you have to pay taxes then. But Tax Evasion really isnt one of the more legal aspects to "investing" in SL Ponzi Schemes.

Yes. Many.

The current RL banks are only regulated by a governmental power. That same governmental power doesn't exist in a virtual world, so as you see above people want to just ban it from the virtual world as the only answer. I highly doubt prohibition on financial services is the best answer.

What a virtual world needs is non-governmental agencies that can regulate financial services.

A simple one, for example, is to make every ATM send a log of all transacations to one of these secondary audit agencies. This opton is an option to keep books closed to the public but open to just these auditor agencies.

On the ban, I disagree because there is potential to create new businesses to replace what people are so dependent upon with their RL government to provide.

Oh, and business in space (whenever we get there) most likely will be no different than business in a virtual world. Like virtual worlds, there are no governmental boundaries in space, so we'll need something similar to what virtual world's can provide.

ATM logs wouldn't do a damn to stop what happened with Ginko.

I would agree with the ban, because this "fictional" currency banking & investment scheme becomes a way to circumvent the laws of probably every jurisdiction concerning banking and investments. It's nice in theory, but there is too much potential for fraud, and too little accountability.

The truth is Financial Services in Second Life falls under the same juristictions as any other online investment scheme.

If the building next door to LL was a regular old 2D net provider and people used websites located on their servers for investment schemes and scams - the same rules would apply.

There is simply a smoke screen obscuring that becuase Second Life is a "virtual world" with "Fake money"

In reality it is no more or less virrtual than any website - a fact that has contantly been driven home time and again by those who WANT second life to be a seperate world.

This is actually what Rebbecah is suggesting - make SL the virtual world many wish it was, sever all these heavy ties with the real world. It cant do that tied to the real US economy by the currency being openly tradable for USD and even brokered by LL.

You cant have it both ways, not really -

It either is just a web hosting service, and the value of the L$ is subject to actual US regualtions - Which the gambling ban sure would suggest.

Or its a virtual world. In which case you shouldnt be able to buy in , or cash out with Linden Lab approval.

As of right now the smoke and mirrors of the "Virtual world" has people blinded to whats happeing in SL "financial markets". It wont remain that way forever.

Thing is in SL if you do well you have these fictional dollars that they may or may not let you cash out and if so in only "limited" amounts.
From what I read its very difficult to increase your limits. If it was just a traditional 2d internet business you get the money directly.
Anyway not that really matters or effects me at this point what I like to know is how to Opt out of getting mail from WSE since Ginko was kind enough to share my email that I don't remember giving them.
Anyone know how to Opt out of WSE stupid announcements?

The ban or purified "fake money" as suggested does not work since the Intellectual Property is not fake. Remember that just because it is virtual does not mean it is not real. There is a big difference between virtual currency and fake money, which is how you play Monopoly.

Virtual currency, rather it has real money value or not, is a medium of exchange for IP. The IP itself could exist anywhere in this world, so there is no single government control of it. It does not default to U.S. only just because LL is located in the U.S.

You get a limited right to use the IP. You can use the linden dollar as the medium of exchange of that IP.

When I first heard about SL, the idea of Lindens being convertible to real money, sounded exciting. In the back of my mind, however I knew that it was ultimately illegal. Now I wonder how I managed to repress this obvious reality?

Recently, Linden carelessly induced a run on the bank. Not covering the loss of Lindens is irresponsible and sets a horrible example. Are they cultivating money scams for their own profit?

IP is a different issue, because it is one of personal creativity and the right to own what you make or what you buy with the "monopoly money," But it IS monopoly money and even LL defines it as a fictional currency of "no value," but it is "real" within the virtual reality.

Ip theft would probably decrease tremendously, were the rabid real world profit motive removed and whatever is created would be as it should be an act of love, art and invention.

The problem there Rebecca is that if you remove the so called real world profit element you also remove the incentive to create or manage. Active Worlds, another virtual reality world is (I believe) free to use and build, but it is virtually dead.

I think SL is a bit like the curates egg, which is good in part. Personally I have no problem with content creators, virtual land management, and scriptwriters being paid for their work. After all they do add value. That in turn drives the Second Life economy. It is fair a labourer is paid for his or her virtual work.

But like many others here what I am against is fraud and scams. I am personally not saying Ginko definitely falls into this camp but the fact of the matter is it runs a high risk of failing, and my own research shows considerable real life sums of money are involved. I have met several avatars who have had upwards of one million Lindens within Ginko and it seems quite common to meet people with deposits in the hundreds of thousands.

Make SL more like WoW would be my view (the economic model not the war) or perhaps a type of EBay. Tolerate the sale and purchase of Lindens on a modest basis for individuals, require positive ID verification for volume business users, and ban certain high-risk activities or "investing" unless that person is duly authorised to conduct that activity in first life.

Just a personal view of course but the Ginko business leaves a nasty taste. It is not the only area of risk within SL, there are still other "banks" trading and of course the WSE, all of which could cause a stink, although in the WSE's case I can understand the business model behind it and would try to find a way in which it could trade if monitored and regulated, perehaps as an OTC market maker in real life

This accepts several assertions that I no longer take as given. What I take to be the fundamental point is valid: the gambling ban was made necessary by the RL value of the L$ (however the lawyers dance around that wording)--otherwise in-world "gambling" couldn't have existed at all, only "pretend gambling." I no longer find believable, however, that the gambling ban had anything to do with the run on the bank, nor that the collapse of Ginko was caused by external forces at all. I think, rather, the conversion of bank deposits to GPBs was fore-ordained in May when the first GPBs were issued, and that everything else was a convenient smokescreen for securities fraud.

Leaving that aside, there is some appeal to the idea of a completely token L$ with no means of purchase or sale with RL currency. Although I don't follow the logic that links in-world IP rights to a RL-valued currency, there is also appeal to doing away with all in-world IP rights as well, making everything full-perm. But at this point, the latter is no more a "taking" than the former: either one would get LL in a whole lot of legal trouble. And that would be a very different virtual world than the one we know as SL. Indeed, if it weren't for those two features, almost nobody would have heard of SL--the media couldn't care less unless there's RL money involved--so there wouldn't have been much IP around to share, and not many people to share it among.

However appealing one might find a virtual world that lacked the difficulties of RL-valued currency and/or IP constraints, those conditions would really have to exist from its inception; for SL to move in either of those directions now would seem legally impossible.

Whatever problems comes of unhinging the $Linden from real money conversion--thats nothing compared to the legal outcome of not doing so.

Yes! With those that work closely with Ginko and invested in gambling found out that they are really in deep-doo-doo, so they ran. That left Ginko going back to its core business of website advertisements, which doesn't scale.



Once there is good evidence to show that the L$ can be money even without U.S. dollar value, it was enough to show that gambling with L$ can not be called pretend gambling in any way.




This is simple. The virtual world itself can be completely destroyed but the IP and its rights to it still exist.

Pictures are an easy example. Take a real-life photo and copyright it. Upload it to SL. Under the DMCA, it is yours as long as you don't give full perms. Destroy the virtual world, and the real-life copy is still yours and the copyright still exists.

What "smokescreen" people want to make-up seems more like a lack of knowledge into how the technology works.

There was a point made about LL's induced run on the bank, which is only true to the point that LL wants to protect its economy. It was the wrong way to do it. LL should have been more careful to understand that people invested in these schemes because they truly believed in them, and that LL is responsible for the virtual world that helped create such schemes.

Would it be a solution to just take all of the money Ginko had and sell it on the Lindex at a low rate to recover it all? heh

Sorry, but I'm still not following. I accept (and have in fact argued somewhere) that there's an unsatisfying asymmetry between the enforceability of in-world rights to intellectual property versus that of L$-valued "property." But I don't see the logical or legal linkage. Taking the cited example, the same is true whether or not L$s have RL value, isn't it? The only difference I see is whether those who hold the IP rights are compensated with RL value. (Unless the idea is that there's an implicit license granted to the virtual world by making the IP available there--which the SL ToS tries very hard to nullify; or unless the issue is how easy it is to infringe IP with the technology, but that, too, is orthogonal to whether there's any RL compensation involved.)

Let me assert that there really is no fake world. There is a virtual world as in virtualization of real world properties. A virtual world can orthogonally provide all the properties of the real-world except the contiguous physical relation and reaction of the real-world. The key word I used there is "contiguous" being that transactions in a virtual world can instantly happen almost randomly anywhere in the real-world, but of course without entropy; however, real-world transactions are limited to the physical relation like proximity of matter.

Where that physical relation, or the transaction itself, occurs is where the jurisdiction of any government applies. If the transaction occurs within a certain jurisdiction than it is governed by that particular jurisdiction.

It real-world, it is easy to see where the transaction happens as you pass dollars from one to another, but in the virtual-world you really don't know where the actual transaction occurs. That does not imply these transaction have asymmetric properties.

To the question if L$ could have RL value, yes it can and it does but it is not existentially defined like like for each U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar is backed by real natural resources (or suppose to be for the brievity of this case) while the L$ is backed by IP that either does or does not have value. Either way, L$ gives you the right to exchange IP that is worth something or not.

The photo is the simple case since it is easy for many to see. In other cases, the IP could actually be services or leases. IP goes much further than just natural resources.

What's probably unsatified is the hybird-ness with the U.S. dollar. The LindeX should be treated like any other exchange like those on the forex then that would remove the hybrid-ness (and smokescreen).

As unsatisfying as the assymetry is, I think that this is the nature of SL in that there exist things in SL that are wholly under LL control (for the moment, pending Bragg vs. LR etc) such as land, and things which beyond the medium-length arm of Linden Law (namely, IP rights). All this though, is irrelevant to whether the L$ is convertible for USD or not. When you sell something in-world you're not selling for USD or even the USD equivalent of L$. You sell for however many linden dollars. If the linden dollar value collapsed or skyrocketed the next day, you can't revisit the transaction. It just doesn't matter what the linden dollar is otherwise tradeable for, the deal, as struck, is the deal you have.

This comes full circle to the core of the issue relating to financial services within Second Life

In first life the analogy above is a reasonably accurate description of how markets work. Individual governments have limited tools to control and regulate markets, BUT they do have two collective tools that normally function fairly well, that is a discount or minimum lending rate for credit, and a regulatory framework.

Within Second Life Linden Labs can only undertake those functions and to date they have refused to do so, unless it directly effects their own commercial interests.

Thus in theory a new enterprise could apply for a listing on Second Life’s virtual stock exchange via an IPO, and regardless of what is contained within the prospectus, refuse to honour it post initial listing. This has happened, avatars have run off with the IPO monies raised from prospective investors, and there is no recourse that I have seen to date.

Also various Uncle Tom Cobbles and all can start a virtual bank, offer sky-high rates of interest on deposited Linden dollars, and when the new deposits dry up, can default on the deposited capital, again with no effective recourse.

In first life these actions can lead to consequences, aka Lord Black (still pending on appeal) Enron, WorldCom, and the like.

But in Second Life to date (and to my own knowledge) there is very little if zero recourse.

How then can any financial market work, except to potentially enrich the few at the expense of the many?

Personally I have no material investment in any virtual financial market and neither have I lost any money (except some personal time spent thinking and researching it, when I could have been doing other more profitable things)

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As a footnote to the above post there is one partial exception, and that is the Dreamland Continents run by Anshe Chung (and Master Quantro). There, they do appear to have some rules of conduct, which could include confiscation of land and property in a default