Can We Stop Linden from Being Posted for Sale for 48 Hours?

I was looking at the average volume this week (around 7.3 million per day on average) and noticed that if people stoped feeding lindens into the lindex for just 48 hours, the price of lindens would drop down to below L$280/$1US, assuming the same volume average over the next 48 hours. I know it won't happen, but it's an interesting fact I thought I'd share

Why are you trying to control the market when the problem
is with the Ecomomic Policy Linden Labs has in place?

Maybe because the real issue is as I ahve said all along..someone hoarding and glutting the market with large blocks in an attempt to create a panic, misdirect and force ppl into buying more fo thier L's.

Thats life.... That is capitalism... Some people end up at the
top and others at the bottom. If you are nice, I'll give you a tour
from 20,000ft...

I think LL needs to experiment with controlling the market.

First, they'll need to shut down ige/slexchange though. Which might be a bit sad..

Hahahahah...... Shut down IGE and SLEX? Puhlez... Don't forget about eBay too...

LL shutting down 3rd party exchanges is like the DEA shutting down drug dealers. For every one they knock out, 5 more spring up.

Don't you know the old saying? "It's better to keep your enemies close"?

If LL took down IGE, believe me that will have opened pandora's box and made
the problem 500x worse.

That's not capitolism that's megalomania actually. And once again in a RL market it is highly illegal. Once again you should watch the movie Wall Street and see what hapens to ppl who try fixing and controlling the market for thier own ends. Can you say SEC, IRS, Treasury Dept? They'd all be knocking at your door.

So shut it all down for good. Make it a violation of the ToS to cash out to anyone but Linden and make it so that ppl can only purchase L's from Linden. Easy enough and you get baught you get your account pulled and all L's funds in said account seized. Set a selling price and a buying price. That would stabilize it nicely and end the panic.

I can't believe I agree with RBD. lol What impact do you think it would have on the market if IGE closed their holdings in the linden by liquidating them on Lindex? 3rd party exchanges like IGE and to a lesser extent SLex help stabilize the market IMO not destabilize.

Indeed I wonder how many others besides me would quit doing business in SL? Bet Jonas and Lewis would love that. lol

What are you smoking? Gordon Gecko was Da Man...
He was on top of the world until he let a snot nose rookie
get into the mix.

No, the rule of thumb from Wall Street the Movie is to be
a robber baron and leave the rookies to sweep the streets...

Gecko is God.

Gekko: The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own.



Gordon Gekko: You see that building over there? I bought it three years ago. My first real estate transaction. I sold it ten months later and made $800,000 profit. It was better than sex. At the time it was all the money in the world. Now it's a day's pay.

Ohh wonderful.. Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy.. Can we speed up
the clock and bring this day of celebration sooner? lol

We need to drop some dead weight in SL...

The question is, why do these people want to manipulate the market so honest consumers have to pay more for their L$?

Because they are all Socialists who want to control everything
they don't like, so they can mold it into their vision of Utopia.

And they never read History books which show them time and
time again that a controlled market place leads to artifically
high up prices that hurt more than they help. Guess they are
blind to what is happening in Socialist France with all the rioting.



The great flaw of socialism is that it doesn't have a functioning price
system to send all the signals to consumers and producers as to what
something is worth; that these prices are at the very heart of what
makes a functioning economy work. You can think of them as traffic
signals. And if you don't have them, what you get is a system that
doesn't work, or you get chaos.
Daniel Yergin
Commanding Heights
The Battle for the World Economy

Wall Street was Hollywood feeding the American public what they wanted to hear. Man gets rich by cheating. Man believes he is above the law. Man gets taken down. All of the other rich bastages are idot inhertiors. That's what the average person wants to see.

That's a real crime, if you ask me. Why? Because it hides the real issue, which is that most people have no clue how to become wealthy, and that all of the advertisers paying for television and other media don't want you that way.

Sure, people love to hear when a rich man is proven a thief, but there are a lot more poor theives than rich ones. And the news doesn't care when a man gets wealthy in a straightforward, honest way. I have known several wealthy men who were good people. One of whom was responsible for rehabbing 100+ houses per year in the city I live in. These houses were in bad neighborhoods. In rehabbing them, he greatly lowered the crime rate, while helping a lot of lower income families find affordable housing. Then he started a major real estate investment group to pass that knowledge down and to bring in other people who could help beginning investors out.

The real crime is the load of manure that is fed to the middle class as the smart way to invest. Save your money, put it into a mutual fund inside an IRA, buy and hold, no matter what, and pray you have enough money to retire on.

Let me retranslate that out of sales speak and tell you what the rich hear when they hear that sales pitch:

"Let me get this straight...You want me to abdicate my control to you, a person who is only paid by how much he sells, rather then what his clinents make. You want to put that money into a fee based derivitive (financial tool - mutual fund) that mostly steps you back from having to take the blame if anything goes bad. You further want me to put that into an IRA or 401k, which by government law takes away most of the tools that I would have to counteract a downward trending market. Furthermore, you expect me to make all of my profits in the 1/3 of the market time that the market is rising, rather than utilizing all of the tools to protect, insure against, and take advantage of sideways and downward trending markets as well. You don't even want me to park my money to the side when a negative market takes 25% to 50% of the value of your clients' portfolios. Instead you want me to take the beating because otherwise I might close my account and move it elsewhere if I get too liquid. Then you want me to treat this like a savings plan, and at the end of my life hope that I have saved enough while you and your company have lived off of the fees?"

If you think that this is too harsh, then ask the next financial advisor you talk to just how many clients he has helped to get to SEC Accredited status, which is a way of asking how many people he has turned into wealthy, informed investors. Most of the financial advisors I ask about this don't even know what that means, let alone have anyone that they have helped to get there.

Sorry, went off on a tanget there. Let me get back on target.


Past experience with anti-inflation trading holidays indicates that turning off the Lindex for a day or so would spark a panic and run on the market that would make the previous devaluation look tame. Don't forget that you would also be scaring off a fair amount of people who might think twice about putting a spare USD $10 or $20 into the game. Why do that if it looks like the whole shebang may be folding any minute. Why put money into a game that you might not get to play tomorrow? You and I might understand what is going on, but most newbys wouldn't.

Catnip

Excellent point.

I have to wonder however, if there is something more intelligent about the way that the current system is being handled.

An expanding economy requires an expanding currency system. In the last few months, we have seen more than a 70% increase in the signup statistic on the front page. I honestly have mixed feelings about the hard call to change their system. I can see two benefits to the current system. (1) It is cheeper for the newby starting out. They can buy more with a smaller amount of real world currency. And (2) There is a high possibility that most merchants could actually be making more money then before. Sure, the Linden is devalued, but because we are having so many more people come in, gross receipts could actually be outpacing the devaluation. I don't have any hard figures that would truely prove this out one way or the other, though.

Here's the real cause of the devaluation, and why LL won't change it:

Take a look on the front page. LL marketing has been working overtime to bring SL into the RL media spotlight. The more that they do this, the more people who sign up to see what the article was talking about. They sign up, check out the clubs, see that they have $500L to play with, and buy some stuff. After the first night, 50% of them have probably seen what they wanted to see and abandon their accounts. 95-98% will most likely abandon their account within two weeks. The remaining 2-5% will stay on and integrate into the communities. That small number will then start bringing in more people via word of mouth. Those are the people who will actually buy Linden and acquire land to continue playing.

LL is not goint to change this dynamic for anyone because they know their business model. The business cycle for a massively pmultiplayer game is 3-5 years (Everquest has been an abberation to this model). It's possible to go on longer, but most systems peak at that point and decline as their fanbase migrates to other games. That means that they have, at most, 3-5 years to capture as much of the market as they can and make a profit.

They won't get rid of the stipend. People are wasting their breath asking. The reason for this is that they have to give that large wave of new people somethng to play with to find the 3-5% that will stay. They won't shut down the market system because it is integral to their market differentiation. Namely that you can actully acquire real world wealth in the game if you have the business accumen to do so. If they got rid of that, then the media simply wouldn't care about yet another online game.

I know that the people who are calling for massive change probably won't agree with me, but I bet that we won't be seeing a change to the stipends or the market system anytime soon.

Catnip