Enabling a larger volume of Currency Exchange

this is something that LL should already had started.

GOM is not so "open" as it claims. and like usual some love it, others hate it.

i hate it.

some countrys have a nacional bank, that also sells and buys currency, but they don't sell cloths or vehicles. i dont see why Mulch Ennui is so upset.

well... there is also USA, where the president controls not only the money but also military industry, and so on...

send him a jacket

In the last month, there have been about 22,600 different people in Second Life who have bought something in-world.

In the same period, there have been about 2,300 people who have purchased currency from the two biggest currency sellers.

So the fraction of people who have bought anything who have purchased currency is about 10%.

My assertion is that if currency purchasing is extremely simple, that number can be greatly increased. I think this data roughly supports that assertion. More importantly, though, I think that a rational examination of the current process for buying currency suggests that only a fairly small set of residents will be so motivated to buy currency.

Another point I wanted to make in response to Alan's suggestion that we increase the availability or visibility of the premium account: It doesn't make sense (given the goals I described at the beginning of this thread) to push premium accounts harder to achieve this goal, because the linden dollars gotten from having a premium account are NOT creating revenues for content creators. Our goal here is to do something here if it puts money into the pockets of content creators. More premium accounts will not achieve that goal.

who the hell are YOU?

lol, that was philip, he already admitted it was an alt

Another point I wanted to make in response to Alan's suggestion...

I thank you for continuing to steadfastly decline to respond the the concern of half of the posters in this thread.

I cannot accept the conclusion that you are obdurately stupid so I must conclude that the concerns expressed by Merwan, Mulch, Brace, Satai, Eloise, myself, and many others in other threads about the ethics of your firm in regard to its customers and your usurpation of content is not of interest to you.

But, don't worry, I can't imagine that your broad erosion of trust amongst the game's content creators, evangelists, and game supporters will have much effect on your bottom line. I mean we're just a few vocal upstarts who pale in comparison to the 40,000 other "residents" and are likely wholly unrepresentative of any other subset of the population.

Alan, respectfully I disagree with your assesment of the importance of this capability. The process of signing up at a third party site to buy currency is incredibly indirect and I don't think anyone could argue that if as a new resident of Second Life you find something that you want to buy that is in excess of L$1000 or so, that you are actually likely to do it.

Philip, at this point it seems appropriate to let things simmer for a few days while people overcome their initial reaction, and then do one or more town halls to enlighten them on the benefits of these changes.
The forums are too anonymous, they beget animosity. There is no reply you can post to this thread that will be met with satisfaction.

Minimally we will need to charge on transactions to cover the credit card fees which we will have to pay to bill the buyers.

Philip is absolutely right: integrating currency purchase into SL removes several roadblocks and makes infusion of US$ into Second Life's economy much easier.

Here is the direct results:

o Less US$ lost to pay people in Hongkong. IGE, hi!
o Less US$ lost to make PayPal rich
o Less US$ lost to all the PayPal scammers
o More people spending US$ because it is so much faster and easier

Many of our customers who bought land got their L$ from IGE because GOM was too complicated for them or did not accept credit cards. So people bought L$ for 4.80 US$ per block and we ended up selling the same L$ for 4.00 U$ or less after PayPal fees etc. At some stage we started to sell off L$ ourselves, but dealing with fraud, chargebacks and PayPal's customer service is also not an ideal situation.

As such what Philip plans, absolutely makes sense for Second Life as a whole. It is an optimization that strengthens the SL economy. There will be huge savings and considerable growth resulting from this. We should all thank Zeppi and Ricky from GOM for pioneering the open market trading concept and it is exciting to see their concept to be expanded and integrated into SL itself. Now this situation is rather unconventional, which explains why Linden Lab probably just needs a bit more time to talk with our friends at GOM and come to a fair agreement.

There are also nasty rumors about Linden Lab securing thousands and thousands of U.S. dollars for a well-known in world group to develop a web based sales system, with no bid or application process or public announcement. I truly hope that is just a rumor... if not, it would really be a slap in the face to those of us who have spent our own time and money out of pocket to develop dynamic third-party sites.

Philip,

Opinion:
From your stated goals, I do not see why this system is needed when there are ample 3rd party options in IGE, GOM and Anshe and anyone who wants to sell on eBay. I have used GOM and IGE and find no problems with their services as they exist.
.

In the last month, there have been about 22,600 different people in Second Life who have bought something in-world.

In the same period, there have been about 2,300 people who have purchased currency from the two biggest currency sellers.

So the fraction of people who have bought anything who have purchased currency is about 10%.

Philip, at this point it seems appropriate to let things simmer for a few days while people overcome their initial reaction, and then do one or more town halls to enlighten them on the benefits of these changes.

Mulch, please. Your post just served to reinforce my statement.
The forums are practically useless for anything serious. They are filled with hate and venomous verbiage.
As for the history page, it's a wiki. If you dont know what a wiki is, well, its a page that anyone can edit. Including you. I would very much like to see an article written on it and I'm offering up to L$1000 for anyone who writes it, or any other article that contributes to documenting the history of SL. Contact me for more details.
I did not say I considered myself enlightened, or tried to shield Philip from anything.
I posted something aimed directly at him, with no intention of insulting anyone.
If you construed my post as an attack on you, I apologize.
As for the Hitler remarks, that was simply out of line and I refuse to comment on them.

(Please accept my apologies for being (relatively) tight-lipped until now. It wasn't until last night that things became crystal clear for us.)


Until we raised the last set of questions in the hotline forum, LL's plan, as explained to us by Philip (in email and over the phone), was to build a system that allows users to put their L$ up for sale through the SL web site. Other users would be able to do a single click purchase through the website or the client. This system would match buyer and seller, charge the buyer's credit card and automatically deliver to them. This system is almost complete and ready for what they're calling "beta testing".

If my description was unclear, let me say it plainly: the system described is a direct duplication of GOM's functionality with the addition of credit card billind. And this is taken from communications with LL - it is not speculation on our part. You might not believe it, but that's your choice.

LL has had someone working on this carbon copy of our market for a couple of months now. His name is Peter. I'm sure he's cruising these forums. Say 'hi' Peter. Don't be shy! For the record, I have no problem with what Peter is doing. To the best of my knowledge, he's a fellow developer - not a policy-maker.

When we raised the issue in the hotline, Philip wrote to us saying that he was sad we couldn't make things work out between us. We responded reminding him of what had happened to that point. Our history is what follows.

"The Interview"
---------------

LL called us up last winter and wanted us to come to SF to talk about integrating GOM into the system somehow. We were extremely excited about the prospect. It was something that Cory and I had been batting back and forth for a while. The trip turned into job interviews. There was all sorts of talk about having us work for them, helping to manage the in-world economy. We told them about all the cool things we were planning to do with the site, and about all the even cooler things we could do if we had direct access to SL databases. The data alone was enough to make us giddy.

When we returned, we didn't hear from them for two and a half weeks. When they did respond, they made it clear that they didn't want any more remote developers. This was okay - it's their choice. It sucked, but that was okay.

Instead we talked about other ways to get them what they wanted: better access to the market for everyone.

We talked contracts and APIs, but it was clear that a decision had been made after our trip that LL was going to have an internal market one way or another. The way Philip was talking made us feel backed into a corner. It was then and there that we realized that this company, with millions of dollars in the bank, could easily hire developers to build what we had, and with their access to SL users' billing info, could easily blow our market out of the water. When we were in SF, they told us of an internal policy of theirs not to compete with their customers, but in this particular case it seemed they were willing to break the rules.

We complained bitterly that if they were going to take what we had built, that we should be compensated in some way. We had laid the ground work. We had done the R&D. We had taken the risks. All the while, LL stood by and encouraged us. And now that we had proven that the market could work and that people would use it, they wanted it. Philip argued that compared to their regular billing, the market would barely contribute to their revenues so that GOM wasn't worth much of anything to them. We explained that without their intervention, at our current growth rates, we were on track to be making enough money for Tom or I to actually take GOM on full time. He didn't seem to care.

"The Offer"
-----------

I guess we complained enough. Philip finally sent us a purchase offer for cash and stock. The stock was apparently the same as what they give each of their developers. The cash was piddly - no matter how you look at it. It wasn't even in the same order of magnitude that we would have expected. Everyone we consulted told us that the offer was insulting.

We replied with a counter offer of a more reasonable amount, but still much lower than a proper valuation of the company would have produced.

Philip replied saying that we were obviously talking about two different things. He continued by withdrawing the cash offer and suggesting that we just take the stocks and that we sit on an advisory committee to help them build their market.

We were stunned. We declined of course. We couldn't figure out what was going on. Philip wasn't negotiating a purchase. It was almost as if he was just trying to get us to go away. He could later claim that he made an offer - an attempt to work with us - but that we were too unreasonable to accept it.

Things were quiet for a few weeks, but knowing as we did that they had a developer on the task was bothering us. Should we be blowing our brains out writing new code in an effort to compete with an unlaunched and severely monopolistic service? Or should we be pursuing other options? We asked for a little clarification and didn't get any.

At the time, they had posted for the VP position. Other users were questioning their intentions and so we asked for clarification in public - in the hotline forum - and you all know how that turned out.


When Philip told us he was sad, we reminded him what had gone on before. He said he would like to look further into the integration API.

Again, we were stunned. And happy! We thought for a moment that our bitching and moaning had actually accomplished something. I chatted with him and explained exactly what should be done to build a generic "banking" API which would allow what Philip referred to as "banks" to plug into their trading system and sell L$.

Again let me make this clear: what we proposed was a system that would allow IGE and Anshe and anyone else for that matter (meeting the requirements) to sell L$ through SL's one-click interface. We were not asking for sole access.

The system we described was a simple XML-RPC API over SSL. SL.com would poke GOM (and any other 'bank systems') when a user wanted to buy. We would respond with a time-sensitive quote. If the user agreed to purchase, SL.com would poke us again with the order. We would respond that 'yes that order was filled' or 'no, that quote had expired'. We would have to do some fancy analysis to determine a safe price on the off chance the market moved before the order got filled, but between Tom (a financial engineer for one of Canada's largest banks) and I (an experience software engineer and long-time trading system geek), it would not have been all that hard.

Philip went off for a day and then came back to us. He said that they wanted to push this out in a very short period of time, and that we should do things his way for now to help with the beta test, and some time in the future they'd reconsider our API. It would have required too much work on their part he said.

And what was his way? We were to scrape SL.com pages and use their HTML user forms in the existing system that Peter has built. When a GOM user posted an order, we would relay it to SL.com through these clumsy (and brittle) HTTP scrapes and posts. When an order was filled or cancelled at GOM, we would cancel the order at SL.com. When an order was filled at SL.com, we would have to scrape some status page to find out.

Now first of all, any web developer knows that XML-RPC is dead easy these days and provides a much more stable and robust way of communicating between sites. That was too much work they said - they needed it done now.

Second of all, that asynchronous communication between sites could easily lead to order status chaos. Say for instance Joe placed an order at GOM to sell. GOM would notify SL.com. Then say that someone filled his order at GOM. If someone else also filled the order at SL.com before GOM got a chance to update them, that order would have been filled twice and someone would be losing the cash. We assumed (and Philip didn't argue) that it would be us.

And third, this made it clear that they had no intention of dropping the idea of running their own market. They wanted us to spend our time and energy twisting our site to help them beta test a system that would eventually put us out of business.

We thought these were all pretty compelling reasons to go with our alternative.

Philip's response was roughly this: "You're just throwing up roadblocks. We'll find someone else to help us beta test."

With a wave of his hand, he dismissed two rather experienced people - and two of his long-time customers - and their concerns.

Now over the year and a half that we've been servicing Second Life, we've had to put up with a fair amount of bullshit from LL. This, however, is above and beyond.

Anshe, I'm guessing you'll be the guinea pig for this one. If they tell you that only big-time sellers will have access to this system, be careful. It will greatly increase your volume for the beta test period, but if (when) they decide to open selling to the general public, you too will no longer be able to compete.

Tom and I are very disappointed in the way this has turned out. We're still trying to figure out where we stand and what we should do. Again, we apologize for keeping most of this quiet. We were really hoping that it would work out well and that we'd have one big happy announcement to make at the end of it all.

Now, I just don't know what to think.

J