The Once and Future Linden Dollar

In the beginning... Linden Labs was concerned that SecondLife would grow faster than they would be able to add new hardware, bandwidth and staffing.

SecondLife itself would die an unusuable laggy death if they were unable to keep up with world growth. Likewise, it would be financially disasterous for Linden Labs to over-deploy costly surplus infrastructure and not be able to grow their population base quickly enough to pay for the investment.

What was needed was a way to 'control' the rate of content growth.

Introducing the generic and transferable 'Upload Credit': The humble L$.

Trivially easy to increase or throttle the influx of new upload credits each week, depending on how much surplus capacity was available. Sink-holes are a useful way to drain excess credits from circulation.

Each player was guaranteed a base upload allowance, and more if they merited it... as as a fun SecondLife incentive. The nifty part of the plan was that players could trade their upload credits for content within the game as well, giving content creators the ability to upload yet more content.

As currency for avatar-to-avatar land transfers the L$ was an obvious choice, which opened the door to the US$ meddling with the value and exchange of upload credits.

It was only a matter of time before outside agencies began brokering transfers of L$'s directly. And, the L$ grew from something that was useful as a tool to something that had value in and of itself. That the L$ is really backed by 'the right to upload a specific amount of content'is something that most players wouldn't even think of then or now.

Linden Labs still requires some form of content throttling even if the reigns are slack at the moment, new players are too likely to flood SecondLife with useless content to be stored at Linden Lab's expense. If they have to pay someone, even if it's not Linden Labs, it slows them down enough to be managable.

Of course, there are those that think that Linden Labs is heedlessly floodingL$'s into SecondLife and that this practice must stop. There are others that think that removal of stipends would sour new/existing players on SecondLife enough that it would harm the influx of consumers in SecondLife.

I'm undecided. If we're going to solve problems we need something that works for Linden Labs as well as it works for us. So I ask...

IF Linden Labs:

1: publishes the clear and limited rules by which L$'s enter and leave circulation, and

2: issues a completely seperate and NON-TRANSFERABLE base+merit form of upload credit

3: caps the volume of L$'s in circulation based on population,

Question 1: Will the L$ have enough of a value basis to continue being a strong tradable currency? Or, will the removal of the only concrete thing backing the L$ result in excessive market manipulation profiting a minority of players and ultimately causing the value spiral up (or down) to the point where the L$ is rendered useless?

Question 2: If a seperate non-transferable upload credit system is what it will take to stabilize the L$... How should it be managed? Should it include dwell bonuses? Rating bonuses? Should you be issued more upload credits but have them expire if not used? Or fewer and be required to stockpile them? What use would they have to players that don't use them? Should you get credits back for destroying all copies a piece of uploaded content, or deleting unused content?