Thoughts on the LindeX exchange...

Apologies if this came up during the Open Gaming Market drama back in the day...

Me and several friends created our own MUD codebase over the past six years, and now we're starting to create a fantasy game world for the engine to demonstrate some of its prety cool features. Currently, we're a staff of 2.5, so we obviously need to either get volunteers or contract out to skilled writers. Assuming the later, we need a good way to pay them. I was thinking a screening process and then half down, half on completion.

Currently, our options are PayPal and... well, that's pretty much it. But then I had this crazy idea that I could have the builders make an SL account and then pay them in L$ from mine. This seems at first disingenious because of the added hassle, but SL has several advantages like micropayments, less fraud potential (i.e., PayPal inexplicably locking our funds {it happens!}), faster and simpler conversion (CC only), a less strict environment, et cetera...

My overall question is, since LL makes money off currency conversions and other transactions, why don't they carefully open up their currency system to other institutions and games? I think the potential for profit is definitely there, especially if the L$ miraculously becomes the defacto micropayment solution. I'm no financial whiz, and I don't understand the complexities of the situation all that well, but the idea doesn't seem too implausible.

The money we make on transactions is minimal -- enough to cover the fees that we pay to manage payouts and run the exchange.

That said, there are others already running their own currency exchanges. While not for other worlds or for games, I don't see why you couldn't do something similar.

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