Population and Economic Data

Here's the first in a series of data releases. Thanks for your patience -- eventually we'll be providing this information on the community website in the marketplace section. For now, please bear with us while we post here.

Please keep in mind that these data are provided 'as is' from the Second Life servers and are subject to revision, and we can't warrant the accuracy or completeness of what's included.

A couple of things to note about the data in this report:
- the first column represents unique account log-ins on a trailing 30 day basis
- we're in the process of recovering L$ from cancelled accounts, and will begin to include that total into the sinks total. Until then the month over month change in total L$ supply will not match with the sources/sinks.

Please feel free to spend some time with the data, and let us know if you have any questions.

On a related note, I've updated the advanced view of the LindeX Market Data page. I've removed the list of open orders (you can still see this at the bottom of the buy and sell pages) and replaced it with some basic LindeX stats from the last 30 days. We realize this doesn't contain all the data you all would like to see, as Robin said we're hoping to have more comprehensive metrics available on the community site in the future.

https://secondlife.com/currency/market.php

Cheers,
Lawrence

Lawrence, how about a total number of L$ on the market right now?

I think it would be an interesting and usefull figure to have (displayed where the open/close/average/ etc. data is at the top).

Thanks Robin, Jillian and Lawrence.

Question, what was the reason of the sudden rise of source in L$ on January?

I told you, those Lindens are slick. They aren't going to
give away data that makes them look bad. They are going
to release data that makes people think SL economy
smells like roses.

Nice trick. Now people can't see the order book pushing the price down
unless they click the (sell) button...

Gotta love it when slick tricks try to mask perception.

What kind of mind automtically assumes that everything the Lindens do is done for nefarious reasons?

SL is a business, and Linden Labs runs it as such. Nothing more, nothing less.

A Beautiful Mind.

Go away, your posts are a bunch of garbage. We wanted data and they are giving it to us. You will never be happy here so move on to some other place that WILL make you happy.

I did a quick copy/paste from the market earlier into an excel sheet and sum'd it and it was around 19 million linden for sale.. It's not a real analysis, just a quick snapshot..

I noticed income has more than doubled and sinks aren't keeping up.. Without more being pulled out of the economy for good there's no way this economy is gonna stabilize and stay that way.

The traffice bonus is being pulled.

Nope. You'll just have to deal..

Just what I've been saying forever... Shame nobody listens.
But hey, no skin off my back. They'll just have to learn the
hard way. More Inflow than Outflow of newly minted linden
dollars every week equals money supply inflation.

Keep up the good work Zalandra, we need more great minds
speaking out in a sea of ignorance.

How big of a dent will that have in a L$28,300,000 avg. added
into the SL economy every month? Nearly US$100,000 would have
to flood into SL every month just to neutralize this glut.
No matter how you slice it, until the Stipends are cut to zero,
the money supply will grow, forcing the value of the Linden Dollar
into the toliet. Odds are that we'll hit L$350 before Dec. 31st, 2006.
Translated, that is US$2.85 for 1000 Linden Dollars. A long cry from
the days of L$250 (US$4.00).

By my calculations, SL will have L$1,000,000,000/billion
Linden Dollars in circulation by July/August 2007.

yah what I'd lawrence to add is a dynamic figure on the page thats shown with the other data - I think it would be interesting, and you shouldn't have to go through all that just to find out what it is IMO.

In case folks thought I meant 'right now' as in making this post - instead of 'right now' refreshing the Lindex page.

Ok RBD, what is the solution then? Please enlighten us.

Hey- RBD is annoying sometimes, but it's good to have someone so painfully paranoid that it forces us "normals" to see things from a dif. perspective.

You don't have to agree with someone to benifit from seeing their viewpoint.

How sad is it that even threads about DATA!!! turn into flames???

Anyways, just wanted to say thanks to LL for making this stuff available.

His solution is to cut any money supply (stipends), which is economic suicide. If that happened, I might as well leave SL because everyone else would leave too.
What does need to happen is a balance of money supply given out per person equaling money supply taken out per person.
So yes, RBD, if there are more people in SL, there does need to be more Lindens available per person. If that average per person does goes up, cut the amount given out each week or whatever. It looks like they are starting to do that and they said if that doesn't help they would cut more out. That may mean cutting the stipend down maybe from 500 per week to 400 per week. It does not mean cutting it down to nothing.
If the money supply per week given out was 0, it is obvious the money sinks would run it dry even if it took several months. So RBD solution to cut stipends to nothing is ridiculous and has not suggested any other solution. Almost every post he does write makes me sick and has no use for this forum at all other than to annoy anyone else trying to give good input into the Land and Economy forum.

I think that says it all....

Ok, so am I right to assume that sources in L$ is money being directly created by LL, where as sinks in L$ is money being directly taken out by LL?

If so, considering a yearly cycle, 395,225,962L$ where created by LL, with an increase of 44,715 unique logins over the period. Thats 8839L$ per unique login change (an extra person) created by LL. Considering there is a surplus (assumed) in the economy right now, with what a new user is likely to spend (based on my experiance and experiance of other friends who recently joined), that would be the direct source of inflation.

Assuming this is all true, it was quite interesting to see the average monthly creation of L$ fall per new unique login and the stabalising affect that had on the exchange rate. When this average went up to 45,135L$ in Aug05, the exchange rate shot up the next month Sep05 by 20L$/$.

Am I right or did I read that all wrong? Never read an economics book which had sinks in it lol

When i came in SL i got around $950-$1500 wk in stipend based on ratings bonuses, then that was cut out, so if the glut is causing the economy to weaken...that no makes sense to me. All the free accounts get is $50/week, so that cant be all of the problem..

Is it possible...and this is just me asking, that since the Lindens got the monopoly on Exchange, they are selling newly created L, as well as that we put up for sale, hence creating a glut? The reason i ask is i noted the big decline in the actual worth of L, when GOM went down ...

If this is possible, i can see why they are cutting out stipend etc, why give away newly created L, when they have proved were suckers enuff to buy it ??

hmmm...

Thanks for posting the data Robin.

For everyone else:

Having calculated some correlations: supply:logins, GDP:logins and GDPupply are all tightly correlated (R^2>0.9) - probably to no one's surprise. Predicting causality from correlations is always dangerous, but it is interesting to speculate what reducing supply will do to logins and GDP on the basis of these numbers. It does suggest, quite strongly, that doing away with dwell will probably slow the economy somewhat, and may slow the growth of SL too - despite all the people saying here that dwell is not significant. It also suggests that the basic stipend and certainly removal of all stipends might be an unpalatablely large kick in the teeth of the economy and SL's growth, despite Vasudha's comments.

There's a batch of correlations with 0.7 > R^2 > 0.6 and it's only down here we get correlations to the exchange rate, with both ERupply moderately (but still statistically significantly) correlated, but also sources to each of supply, GDP and logins. ER:logins is just on the border of significance (p=0.499, r^2 0.57)This would suggest that the unpalatable option of reducing the size of SL is more likely to reduce the ER than reducing sources of money (ERources R^2 = 0.56, NS).

The thing that does surprise me is the lack of correlation of sinks to ANYTHING. The highest R^2 value is 0.408 (sinks:GDP, nowhere near statistical significance. This rather strongly suggests that the economy isn't about content... what's left? Oh land of course as some people have been saying for a while.

Is there any chance that these could be released in a format that Excel95 can read? I would be interested to see them but am prevented as my (admittedly old) version of Excel can't cope. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting this.

Regards

Phoe

To talk to myself for a while, download Microsoft Excel viewer. Sorted )

Phoe