Ginko Financial

SL can really screw things up sometimes, but your account is the only one that has ever gone into negative. And it did so because of SL problems, which we clearly found out about, because we have a system to deal with SL's flaws.

I am not so sure that if Ginko failed, there would be severe ramifications to the SL economy. They have already converted most of their $L into RL money. The biggest impact would be one of trust for future such endeavors and the loss suffered by it's investors.

You hit the nail on the head! What if Ginko goes on, then maybe next year the damage when the whole scheme fails is not 60000 US$ but hundreds of thousands of US$? Or one million?

Can you imagine how this would be picked up by media? The bad reputation Second Life would get? How many people would leave SL or consider not only Ginko but "that whole Second Life thing" some pyramid scheme?

I more and more feel I would rather want see this whole scheme/bubble burst soon, rather than after it grows bigger.



Unlike Ginko, for all my liabilities I have sufficient funds and assets within Second Life. I did not take any loans and I could buy out all land owners in Dreamland at any time.

No it isn't. Without going into a lesson in banking, it is way more complex than that. Banks are very liquid and do not steal from the taxpayer to provide the deposit insurance.

Secondly, the Banks are extremely concerned with what you do with money leant to you, even if it is fully backed by negotiable securities or hard assets (such as a house, where you would get about 75% loan to value).

I'm not knocking your investment model, but typically people who are investing don't simply see a proposed return and throw in some money. They usually do a little research into what a fund is investing in. It would help make the model seem more viable and less like a Pyramid if investors were able to see just what type of return the invested money is getting and some trended history of those returns over time.

I will agree wholeheartedly that SL can screw things up, break, ect. However, I was able to withdraw money, and then basically your external system did not realise that I had withdrawn that money. However, it took until the next day for my account to correctly reflect a negative balance. In other words, my point here is that I would hope your system dealing with SL's flaws takes less time than a full day to update, because it could have been a much bigger number than 5k, and it appeared to me that the correction was done manually by a person who "caught" the error the next day...

This technology of which you speak is my creation, and I take a good deal of pride in making sure it does it's job, does it fast, and does it as accurately as Second Life and computer technology allow. And when it cannot do that job, I make sure I am awake, 24/7 if need be, to manually correct people's accounts and repair the problem as soon as possible.

That said, the reason why your account is in negatives is because a deposit you made got refunded automatically to you when SL made a communications mistake. Your balance was corrected the amount that was automatically refunded to you by our ATM, which is a standard procedure, but you had already withdrawn your entire account balance, thus putting your account into negatives.

You were contacted by my tech support staff about this issue, you did not reply, nor have you made any attempt to contact us regarding this problem before now.

-Hinoserm

Anything much greater than 5k needs to be manualy approved.

Holy crap Logan. My RL bank's computers have screwed things up, made withdraws to come out before deposits, etc, before and guess who fixed it? Someone who saw the error the next day and fixed it manually. Why is that so bad?

Do you follow those traditions too?

Its true, Anshe never does anything out of the goodness of her heart. There must be some sort of ulterior motive.

I will not go into detail, but while your comment has some truth to it, it's not accurate. I know pretty well how banks work.

BS.

LOL... literaly...

No, I do not. Not that my word means anything to you...

I, personally, made the correction (manually) when the system alerted my staff that your balance didn't match up with the Second Life logs, and my staff alerted me that they didn't know how to handle your account balance being zero.

Every time there is a balance that doesn't match up properly, the system creates a support ticket, and my support staff manually verify your ATM logs against the SL history, and make the proper correction.

And now I say this as someone who firmly believes in automation: This is a process I will not automate, because the Second Life logs are not reliable, and I would rather have to deal with a small loss than the larger loss of angry customers who are upset because the system wouldn't let them take their money out because of my mistake.

Your situation is the first time this setup has resulted in a loss for us, so I will continue to stand by the way my system operates.

-Hinoserm

Um, wait a sec there. How did you try to contact me? It was not through IM or e-mail, because that's the other thing that really kinda surprised me was that as far as I knew, I was not contacted. Actually, the fact that I was not contacted sent up a bigger "red flag" for me than the actual error itself. Hinoserm, if this in fact was as you're saying the only error of this type that ever happened then I compliment you on making a very good system. As Aaron mentions, yes, even real-world banks make mistakes like this.

Nick is the MAN.

Anshe is just pissed over sour grapes.

Jamie's Anshe axiom I: Anshe is evil
Jamie's Anshe axiom II: Anshe is allmighty

From I and II can conclude that all blame always belongs to Anshe

Thankyou for your response, that does make sense to me.

No, you can conclude you're a run of the mill large corporation.

Aw geez, looking at the overall direction this post is now going, I'll say the following:

This will not end well. Please alert me once this post has degraded to the silly animal pics so that I don't miss out. Oh, and "Kthnxbye"...

Interesting theory in the initial post, on which I will not offer an opinion.

Couple background thoughts, however. These are based on the U.S. system of bank regulation.

Someone suggested a prospectus be issued. A prospectus is only as good as the laws that make issuing a fraudulent prospectus a crime. Otherwise, anyone who would engage in a Ponzi scheme could also simply fabricate a prospectus that makes his business look rosy. Ask the fellows who are now in real jail for issuing false financials in several huge securities frauds and convicted of violations of the securities laws.

Real life banks, at least in the US, are regularly audited (without notice) by banking regulators. Those guys go in to make sure that the assets are real and not overstated, and that the liabilities are not understated. They work for the government and are usually honest. Sometimes they catch Ponzi schemes or bad investments. Sometimes they don't. Ask the folks criminally involved in the savings and loan collapses a few decades ago, whose losses the U.S. taxpayer had to cover and eat.

Real life banks are also regulated by various laws administered by branches of the Dept. of the Treasury. Thanks to thousands of banks failing in the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, because they were thinly capitalized, the regulators insist upon minimum amounts of liquidity. They also stand behind banks, ready to loan them money if there is a "run" on the bank, and to seize them and take over if they are about to fail.

Most of those protections came into being *after* millions of small savers lost their life savings in failed banks during the Crash and Depression, and the taxpayers lost billions in the Federal Savings and Loan Bailouts not so long ago.

None of these protections exist in Second Life.

What SL residents do have is the old saying "Caveat Emptor" or "Buyer Beware."

It might be interesting for operators of such businesses to voluntarily submit to some forms of audit or financial examination by a neutral body. Until such a body exists and consumers insist on seeing the result of their audit before investing, the buyer should beware.

Frank

* Join the "Law Society of Second Life" -- a new group of people that study, document and publish about systems of governance, contract formation and enforcement and dispute resolution in SL. *

Nick is a great capitalist and should be honored as such in SL.

Instead he's hounded by a bunch of liberal lackeys who want to put corporate controls on our virtual lives.

Bullsh*t, I say.

If you dont like Ginko's setup, don't invest and keep yer yap SHUT!!!


Nick, you are more the man then any other living SL'er in history. Keep rocking the international business community!!!!

Bahaha. Either you're on crack or Philip is.

I've just hotlined that!

/invalid_link.html

Doesn't matter whether you "consider" it justified...it's against TOS...oh, I forgot, you make your own rules...

Sorry, Carry on...

South America...yet the website isn't registered to someone in South America...I'll let you all "whois" it yourselves...but that puts up a red flag for me.

Nick, I'd be open to hearing your explanation of the difference in locales.