From: Rasah Tigereye
But... but... but... $L... $USD... Aren't most land owners, especially island owners, tied to the L/USD exchange rate since they depend on their $L sales to help with the tier? I thought the whole economy of SecondLife depended on exchanges between users and LindenLab for land, and in turn between players and content developers for $L to pay for that land?
I also had that perception. But in some general experience I've had, although this
does happen a lot, it's not the be-all-end-all. There are at least a reasonable number of content creators who set their tier according to what they're prepared to pay IRL and just use the L$ they earn to buy other people's content. I was going to say "smaller" content creators but that's not quite true - I believe at least one such person owns an island, and many of them
share island ownership. Most of them, also, are
not "bad" content creators (some are
), they just create content for vertical markets.
From: someone
So, if someone has $100, that money is only $100 if they were in their own little world completely apart from everything and everyone else, but they exist in the whole of the SL economy, where $100 is loosing its value.
The L$100 is only losing its value if currency value is propagated into SL as price changes, and most of the people described above have no real interest in doing that. That's probably why there's such a huge argument starting about it on some of the other forums - if a market is dominated by creators who don't cash out, then they can't count on other creators in the same market raising their prices too, meaning that they'll lose out in terms of what they can buy from markets where creators
do cash out and thus can raise their prices.
From: someone
I mean, how is what they are saying any different from, say, a German in the 1930s saying that their 100 Deutchmarks are still worth the same to them, and will always be the same to them, especially since they earn and spend their Deutchmarks within Germany, while everyone else's prices increase due to its huge decline in value, with their 100 Deutchmakrs eventually being worth almost nothing?
Because Germany couldn't function as a closed system - there's some things it will have to import/export. SL
could function as a closed system - it would just mean that content creators would be limited to being of the type described above, who pays their tier themselves and then uses earned L$ to boost their experience. Yes, SL would not work
as well, it would be much smaller and would lack a lot of quality content, but it wouldn't collapse completely like a RL country would.
