Should the Linden Dollar be a Universal Currency?

Don't fall down laughing, I'm serious.

It looks like competing virtual worlds are springing up all over the place. Most of them are too new to be "real" competition for SL, but things move fast in the digital arena. The MMORPG landscape could change in a big hurry.

One thing that SL has that none of the others do is a working economy. The prospect of making money (pittance though it is, ocmpared to most RL jobs) is the engine powering the content creation that's made SL as successful as it is.

Virtual content isn't worth nearly as much as "real life" stuff. After all, it's only pixels and bits. Trying to pay for this stuff with real money is cumbersome...we'd have millions of PayPal and credit card transactions in the less-than-a-dollar range.

SL has invented the L$. It's a microcurrency that's appropriately "sized" for transactions involving virutal creations. And they've encouraged its trading by third parties, in several Real World currencies.

As we approach a time when there are many virtual worlds, with some degree of inter-connectedness, shouldn't we have a means of exchange that is cross-platform? I think the Linden Dollar should be made a standard.

I dont think anyone trusts Linden Lab enough to make the L$ a universal currency lol

aha ahahah ahahahahaha ahahhaahhaa bwahahahahahahahahhahahahhahah

It works more than any other, really. In my opinion anyhow

I'm not sure if that's likely... if there's even a remote possibility that LL can make a claim that they have rights to the term "Linden Dollar" then others may be very cautious/unwilling about adopting it unless LL were to release it into the public domain.

Not sure if I recall it correctly either, but I think the definition of L$ in the TOS is something that's the intellectual property of LL at all times and posession of them merely gives you a limited license to use them in-world... or something to that effect .

might be problematic in a legal sense.

LL cant control what goes on in those other grids.

And theres there are laws I believe about currency which don't apply yet due to SL being a private playground

If size matters, why not just use the Japanese Yen?

Or Italian Lira?

Between grids, no, you can't trust one company to provide the currency.

It would be better to deal with real world currency. The LindeX fee is probably not far from the cost of currency conversion anyway.

Good thought, but it misses the mark, I'm thinking.

What worries me is transaction fees. If you have to pay, say, $1.00 each time you make a transfer (a low fee. This is what PayPal charges for a Mass Payment of any size), then you make transactions of less than about $10 US, or L$2700, unattractive.

And yes...right now, the L$ is proprietary to LL and SL. But they could change that. In many senses, they already have, by allowing third parties (SLX, for example) to trade in L$. Apparently, if a third party agrees to use the Lindex Risk API, that's all the "control" Linden Lab needs. That, and the fact that they "make the market" in L$ by controlling the supply. I don't know if that part could be sustained if the L$ became a de facto standard for linked MMORPG worlds.

But LL also controls the purse strings in that Supply Linden regulates the value of the L. Between grids, that isn't necessarily optimal.

I know for certain that some other grids are not interested in using $L as their currency.

It actually would be pretty cool from a user perspective.


Somehow though I think it more likely that Most of them go to using USD$ and the Euro.

I definitely would not be surprised if at some point LL abandons the L$

I think that the universal currency of virtual worlds should be the Taka

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladeshi_taka

It looks like they already have LOL

Supply Linden is about as trustworthy as the Federal Reserve, in my opinion.

I don't think anyone would trust other virtual world platforms or their interfaces, not to mention all the scammers or hackers that might tap into the cash flows!

One taka is worth about 4 L$

The yen is running aout 100 to 1 with the dollar so 1 yen = 2.6 L$

But I am very intrigued by whole idea of cross platform currency. Different companies comparing GGP (Gross Grid Product). Most likely you will see exchange rates much like real world currency now. The only question would be what would be the base? There is no gold in cyber space. Would the L$ be what all others are compaired to? This does not mean it would necessarily be the most stable, just the most universal; the lowest common demonanator as it were.

"Should the Linden Dollar be a Universal Currency?"

no

A half hour of cybersex will be the basic unit of currency of the future for MMORPGs.

Can't argue with that.

I mean that literally. Rha, if I'd meant to do a poll, I'd've done one. I was rather hoping for a debate. Arguments for and against, you know? A flat "no" sort of ends the discussion right there.

no

you did not ask for a why or why not, just answering the question