Which supply will run out first?

If they keep allowing a certain person to keep bidding on sims then there will be a neverending source of recycled sims for auction.

It depends where thing settle out, vs how much space is available at colocation facilities.

If SL hits a balance point and there's still lots of server space available, land will hit a stable pricepoint and become a comodity. If SL hits a balance point and there's a 10% overdemand for land, then there won't be enough profit incentive in creating additional server space. If that's the case, there will be continued speculation & rancor.

One thing that makes me curious is, what happens when SL is no longer the "hot thing" and the average sim becomes 50% abandoned (or 90% in the ones with particularly excessive ad farms)?

As for security & such - inventory and linden supply would still be managed by LL, unless the open source sims totally opt out and go independent, possibly with a 3rd party inventory management provider.

My vote is buyers.
There is only 30k at any given time active players.
Majority of people who come here don't come thus don't buy anything.

I think these numbers would be more pertinent:

Residents Logged-In During Last 7 Days 435,120
Residents Logged-In During Last 14 Days 653,697

*copied from SL website today.

There are a plethora of buyers and 16 sims a day will probably just maintain the 12-13/m2 mark when the dust settles from the weekend dump.

At the end of february there were 66,838 premium members. Those are the ones who can buy mainland, basics can't.

In February LL added about 205 mainland sims, and the amount of land for sale increased by about 50 sims in the same period, or in other words: 1 in 4 auctioned sim's worth of parcels is still for sale in-world a month later.

That tells me there is a plethora of land dealers, but it doesn't show a plethora of demand from end-users buying land at a pace that outraces supply, quite the opposite.

And of that number, I would estimate at least 6,838 of them are land dealers! There is an awful lot of yellow on the sim maps when one turns on the show land for sale option.

I tried a bit of small-time land dealing, I noticed that I seemed to be buying/selling to/from the same people about 80-90% of the time. That didn't seem to be a good sign to me.

I agree. The land dealers are the market makers and they are the ones responsible for these shortlived opportunities for cheap land. They control the market and keep it competitive. When is everyone going to realize that land dealers are advantageous to any type of land buyer. If you don't like the market, wait a week.

I think sl may be different and shouldn't fall into the general catagory of 'online games' I have played thousands of games over the last 20 years and none have ever had a shelf life longer than a few months for me. Play a game move on to the next. Even with the inception of MMO games I havnt really changed my habits, I may stick around 4 - 6 months rather than 2 before getting bored, but I still get bored and didn't think twice about giving up my vast fortune in Eve or WOW to move on to something else. But nothing has ever captivated me like SL has. And the only reason for that is that I can earn money. I got bored with SL 6 months after I started playing and pretty much quit, but sales in world increased and it drew me back. I tried quiting again 6 months after that and failed. Basically when a good game come out, San andreas, oblivion, BF2 for example I will stop playing SL for months to play the new game, but i always come back. I cannot leave now. There is too much money coming in so I am kinda trapped here, ive learnt to accept that I am in SL for the long run and have learned to enjoy the game again despite it's flaws. SO IMO SL has a unique appeal right now and that will increase the length of it appeal.