Why the rush to sell Lindens?

Why the rush to sell Lindens? The amount of lindens for sale has increased dramatically in the last 48 hours and the price has jumped from a previously pretty stable L$270/US$ to a high this morning of L$294/US$.

I assume this is related to the CopyBot panic, but don't see the logic. Are people afraid that this is the end of SL and no one will buy their extra lindens in the future? That seems pretty unlikely to me.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!!! <--- Don't believe it.

If you want to buy lindens this is a good time to do it, good prices out there compared to the previous month.

yes, and they'll be even better next month.

Permissions of items in SL have effectively ceased to exist. If lindenlabs doesnt do something, Secondlife *as we know it* will be gone pretty soon. Whatever replaces it, whatever secondlife becomes, will prolly be quite fun, buggy as hell compared to other online worlds but not too bad as a game I guess, it'll still be fun.

However that isnt the world and business model some of us researched and invested heavily in. So - those of us who think that a stable base is important for a stable business, are dumping now, before it gets worse.

Its a great month to buy, it'll be better next month, as the lindens do nothing, and the value of the lindendollar nosedives..

I (and suspect many others) have sold all our lindens in protest, in hopes that a lack of market for the Supply Linden will show how critical it is that LL continues to support content creators by staying in the 'copyright enforcement' business and backing up their permission system.

I think it may very well be the end of SL.

Not to be a "chicken Little" But lets look at a sequence of events.

1) CopyBot htis the market. Any can have any object created there for free now.
2) Content creators no longer have a desire to create.
3) Content creators cash out and leave SL.
4) With nothing new to purchase, nor any desire to create new items, SL stagnates.
5) Population begins to dwindle.
6) Population hits a low enough point that LL not longer makes a profit due to it's inablity to atrract ne Residents. Due in part to no means to creat and make L$ within SL, and partly due to the bad publicity to LL for allowing it to happen in the first place.
7) SL is shutdown due to lack of funding/profits.

Doesn't take a genius to see the economic reprecussions here.

~Jessy

Sold all my lindens last night.
I doubt the cheap parcel of good land with privacy linden edge I have for sale will even sell now at this point..
the pessimism feels thick, and heavy.

man you people are dumb...

( buys lindens )

with all these people dumping their lindens in protest and leaving SL for good!

it will only mean people replacing them , people who create high quality products for fewer lindens..

yes the secondlife bubble may have burst ( i dont think so ) but what remains is a more stronger , creative metaverse where creativity not crap corporate yet another flexi dress goes on sale.

Actually its only a relatively small part of the population that makes money here. Of the 1.4 million accounts, only 12,000 of them made more then US$10 in Oct.

So the majority of users are not here because they make money.

1) CopyBot does not allow scripted objects to be copied with full functionality. Copies of objects that rely on scripts will be non-functional prims. Complex objects made up of multiple link sets may be copied in pieces but who is going to put them together?

2) I am a content creator who loved creating things long before I made any money at it, and will continue to do so for the pleasure of it. Most of the enjoyable places to visit in SL are free, created with enourmous amounts of time and energy by those content creators, who probably do not make enough money from thier content to even pay for land tier. They created places for the joy of it and will continue to do so.

3) There is no better place to go, so what would be the point of cashing out to leave?

4) There are still a million things out there to purchase, and a huge customer demand for them. If good quality products are removed from the marketplace, they will be replaced by others or people will make do with what they can buy. Many like me will continue to make things and sell them. Most customers are honest and are not going to use devices like CopyBot to steal stuff. While anyone can build a house or vehicle, most people do not have the skills, or would rather not bother and would rather buy one, either prefab or custom. Products are so cheap, its easier to buy one then to steal it. Why chance having your account closed for stealing?

5) Population is still growing rapidly, over 1.4 million now. Up from 1 million in only what 6 weeks or so? I don't see that trend changing anytime soon.

6) There are lots of reasons people come to SL, making money is only one of them and making a profit is actually true for only a very, very small percentage of residents. Most people come here for the social experience, which will continue. And since they are here they will want to buy clothing, hair, land, houses, vehicles, animations, etc. etc.

7) SL will continue to prosper and grow.

I sold virtually all my L$. Why? Because if this CopyBot mess causes the L$ economy to collapse, I wanted to get my money OUT of the economy while it still had value. Many of my friends did the same.

Think about it.

Content creators can no longer assume that their content will have any value. Anything already in-world that is primarily prims and textures can now be copied, with full-perms, and with the original maker's ID scrubbed clean from the cloned copy. If it can be that easily copied and stolen, in spite of no-copy or no-transfer permissions, the value of their wares drops. Even if their specific items are not directly stolen, the market for new content will fail if free stolen copies of similar goods are readily available at drasticly lower prices, or for free. It appears the Lindens will not act against the thieves until enough individual abuse reports are filed, AFTER the damage has been done. If the Lindens do not act harshly against the thieves, the situation will get worse, and the economy WILL collapse.

Honestly, I doubt that I could possibly get a reasonable price if I rushed to sell my transferrable inventory items now. If I were leaving SL forever, I would start selling them anyway, and would cash those out too. But I hope that SL will eventually rebound from this, and that those virtual posessions will still be usable, even if the new economy that results makes the value of the L$ look like the Mexican Peso.

If, when all this stabalizes, a home designer can't sell a house for more than L$100, you'll see very few house designers remaining in business. Not because they aren't making big bucks on each sale, but because they will be unable to pay their land tier or mall rental bills. In my case, the money I make selling dresses, starter homes and other wares that CopyBot threatens the stability of is barely a break-even proposition. If I had to drop the price of a L$300 dress to L$30 to get business, because the market is flooded with L$30 to free rip-offs of designer clothes, I would not bother at all. I'd be losing money every single month.

nobody will miss your store and the linden will remain after you leave...

good luck in the sims.

CopyBot isn't doing anything so far yet, everything that's done so far is at the hands of content creators since they're about the only ones after the ones offering rentals that have excess L$ to sell that they have no need for.
You're setting yourself up for a self-fulfilling phropecy by taking actions based on mass hysteria, rather than actual evidence.

I've asked this before but noone seems to have anything relevant to say on the matter. Prim hair has been copied and offered for sale at least half a dozen times that I read about, in each case the offending content was pulled voluntarily or by LL.
Did it have any impact on sales that's actually meaningful, for anyone, ever? Either the thief's sales are so low that noone is ever going to notice, or they make enough and get caught.

Here's what's missing from your sequence IMO. Retail tenancy drops precipitously. As vacancies increase, rents drop and property values begin to plummet as a reflection of surplus supply. Small estate investors dependent on commercial rents begin to suffer increasing land tier "debt load" (negative cash flow) and begin to sell off holdings.

The well funded will likely weather the storm. It's uncertain if LL will remain viable should residency decline as services do. Assuming the LL solutions arrive on schedule, this will have the effect of a great shakeout for less well-funded entrepreneurs who have over extended themselves. There's like an established economic model at work here.

The big players, the MSFT’s, DELL’s and Well’s, have seen the SL phenomena. SL’s marketing value alone is worth the expense of creating a far more capable and stable environment for the future; an alternative with the financial heft of pooled corporate resources operating under the aegis of an entity, possibly a 501c-3, at arm’s length.

Of course, all of this assumes that copybot creates the ensuing chaos rather than the classic panic "run on the bank" behaviors. This growing sense of panic and the behaviors arising from it tend to support the theory that economic performance is more a matter or perception than reality.

That has to be the shallowest response I've seen yet. I take it you don't create any content in SL. Don't expect any support if and when a glitch in the fabric of SL affects you.

"When bugs and exploits affected the Content Creators, I did not speak out, for I was not a Content Creator...
When bugs and exploits affected the Scripter, I did not speak out, for I was not a Scripter...
When bugs and exploits affected me, there was no-one left in SL to speak out for me..."

I feel this has greatly impacted SL in it's current version...but, I don't see it as the end. Even though many retailers have cashed out (be it a knee-jerk reaction, or in protest), there are many more still open.

Additionally, the number of residents logging in is still quite high (over 11,000 online as I type this)...3 months ago the Linden was above 300 to 1 US dollar...even with the chaos of the past two days, it's still under 300 to 1 (BTW, the closer to 1 to 1 the $L is to the US dollar, the stronger the SL economy is). So, to say SL is crashing is a grand overstatement. Also, if you look at the LindeX Market Data..it appears that the value of the $L is leveling off.

People, in it's simplest form, CopyBot is a terrorist attack on SL. Please try to remember that the greatest weapon a terrorist has is creating fear and panic. We, need to united on this issue, not divide. Division of the community is what will bring an end to SL, not CopyBot or LsLib.

...just one residents opinion.

Wicked.

Hair textures were ripped and used on different hair. This is different from direct cloning because the original hairstyles were still unique from the items sold by the copycats.

It's quite different when now you can have the whole and any hairstyle cloned simply by going to the store and grabbing it off first person who buys them... because why spend money on it yourself when you can have it for free?

Fewer stores?
The players that are the most money oriented are leaving?
People realizing how tenuous it is to depend on SL for a living?
Land set for retail up for sale?
A drop in the price of $L?
Insight into the the architechture and dynamics of a Metaverse?


CopyBot is the best thing to happen to SL in the past year.
--

Well, without reading the rest of the responses, here's why I sold my Lindens first thing:

1. I sell houses, furniture, and accessories.

2. Copybot allows all my products to be copied and taken at will.

3. My products will thus become useless to sell.

4. My land will thus become an expensive, pointless albatross.

5. It makes sense to cash out. (I'm waiting and risking a bit regarding keeping the land a bit longer.)

6. Multiply that by everyone who creates anything with prims, and you get a lot of people whose entire business is now down the drain.

7. Many of those people will be cashing out and selling their land. (I think most are like me, and holding onto the land a bit longer.)

8. Therefore I did the smartest thing for me, and at least got value for my Lindens while the gettin was good. Even so, I sold them at the lowest rate on the chart.

Here's why I closed my store and removed my content from all sales points:

I didn't create them to give them away free. I value them and my year and a half's work more than that. (I value my freebies, too, and work just as conscienciously with them, but I do NOT check transfer.)

As it is, I have sold them for less than others in the market, at very reasonable prices.

So for me, it was a matter of cutting my losses, from a financial point of view.

From a creative point of view, imagine how it would feel if you worked hard to create a product in real life - a house, a sculpture, a
book, a song, whatever - and the minute you put in on the market, everyone came and took a copy without paying you.

To add insult to injury, THEIR name was now on the work.

And now you saw this product all over, used freely by anyone who wanted to, and even sold by unscrupulous others.

Would you stay in business? No, I think you would just keep your houses and songs to yourself if that was going to be the way it was going to be.

coco

Well, that is one way to look at it. ...sometimes it does take something that is perceived as bad to make something better.

Lumpy, if you consider content-creators as solely money-oriented, you need glasses. The money-oriented club owners / casino operators are hardly affected by copybot. So we'll see a decline in content creators and the continuing rise of casino / camping establishments. If that's your idea of 'the best thing to happen to SL in the last year' fine and well. I'd settle for a creative playground any day.

"People, in it's simplest form, CopyBot is a terrorist attack on SL..."

Second Life is not a research project.
Second Life is not the future of the internet.
Second Life is not the future of commerce.

and most importantly...

-It's- -not- -real-

Please. It's a game. It's always been a game.
Built by a game company to make money.

And with the focus on money, money, money by *everyone*,
people are making sure it'll be *no fun*.

The way things are headed, SL could be replaced with a version of AIM
that has a "Pay Me Now!" paypal button next to each chat member.
==

Well, you can thank the Lindens for all that.

THEY COULD HAVE STOPPED THIS THEMSELVES.

They refuse (as of last I looked at the blog, anyway, late last night) to declare copybot and all its derivatives BANNED from SL - just the use of it to copy unauthorized goods. And that's if your unverified, long-since disappeared alt is caught using it that way.

There is NO reason to allow this bot anywhere on the grid. None.

They also refuse to sanction LibSL. Indeed, they have declared their undying support for this group, which they are in, and declare them "very important to SL and to the community."

As opposed, I suppose, to hard-working content creators.

They refuse to even sanction LibSL for openly publishing this code.

All of that backwards thinking doesn't bode well for the company's future, and is yet another reason to cut one's losses.

I need to go read the blog and see if anything better is on it yet. Like I said, I haven't given up entirely, or sold my land yet. But until LL puts some teeth into this, I'm not going to have my goods sitting out there for the taking.

coco

No, things don't have to be attachments to be copied.

Copybot can copy anything made of prims.

coco

Well, the only thing worse that short-sightedness...is narrow-sightedness.

Oh, and to be "just a game"...there has to be a documented "win/loss" end-game, please show me where that exists for SL...

I don't know, I'm sure it has something to do with honesty and willingness to pay for entertainment. I'm still waiting for anyone to show that all of us lowly consumer residents are the thieving trash you all make us out to be. If we weren't all out buying L$ to spend on things in SL you wouldn't even be able to cash out right now.

You didn't even answer my question: show me anyone in world who has ever suffered real, permanent and unrecoverable loss to point of their business becoming worthless as is currently the message of doom, all by having something copied, or even the threat that something could be copied.

Why does anyone still pay for music? It's so easy to get a copy of whatever you want from a friend or from the internet. Surely nobody would make any music any more. And yet... despite the best efforts of the RIAA to alienate honest music buyers, most consumers really are honest people who want to support the artists they enjoy.

Why is SL any different?