Casinos - dead and gone w/ new policy?

Interesting.

1) Well, the risk of the Company failing due to some folks wanting to run a casino here will drop to near zero.

2) Mainland land value will go up. The odds of having a casino dropped into your region are now essentially zero.

3) People will leave - the entire gambling sector. It's not insignificant. Let's watch the economic indicators for August.


Really interesting will be the fate of the 'banks' and the 'stock exchanges'.

No they're not, some are a lottery which is why some countries don't allow them.

There, you are withdrawing money out of PP to physically give to bookies. You are not using PP to electronicaly send money to a gambling site. The UIGEA only applies to the electronic transfer of money to gambling sites.

The final auction prices of whole sims has dropped lately and it's the same few avatars buying them all. The prices are still reasonably high because the property is prime waterfront. Even .2-.4L/m2 is still pretty significant if it is a lasting correction.

Oh behave, I can use paypal to fund gambling.

As long as rotating ads are legal, mainland will not become more desirable. As bad as lag is, it does not molest your eyeballs.

There are lotteries in WoW? Having playing the game for over 2 years, I would like to know where such lotteries are located and how much I must pay to enter.

And which sites will allow US citizens to transfer money via Paypal?

This one hit the nail dead on the head.

Right in Europe they had two competitions recently, one was an art contest and therefore considered skill. I think twelve countires were allowed into this one because Blizzard have to have a corporate presence.

The other competion was an answer this question competion, which was considered a lottery and only five or so countries were allowed into this one.

Problem is, you have assets in-world on those sims. Assets which aren't in your inventory. The backup/restoration process would involve each sim being shutdown *prior* to a snapshot being taken to prevent users dropping more assets in there which could never be recovered (anything dropped after the snapshot was taken will not be reflected on the new machine.) Then they have to restore the backed-up snapshot on a machine in another data centre (perhaps in a foreign country?)...but wait a minute, we haven't even done the asset server yet.

This is why I'm asking. I think it *would* be a mammoth job to transfer the data of several thousands servers outside the US, particularly because the whole of Second Life would have to be taken offline once the first link (the asset server) is removed. That's why I was trying to get an opinion from somebody with a better understanding of LL's specific configuration (sim backup/restoration is in no way comparable to website backup/restoration).

I'll bet $5000L this doesn't end well.

Paypal for a start. Is this a trick question?

So in neither case did the contestants actually have to place a wager and then have the results of the contest determined by chance, correct?

just host a website in some african country with poker games and have ppl pay an object to transfer funds

problems solved, think out of the box

Hehe...I suppose I could have phrased that better.

Anyhow, it's better to go to the source to answer this question: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/ua/use/index_frame&ed=gambling

No, the second competion was considered a lottery, that's why less countries could enter. It was chance as to whose answer would be drawn out, ergo it was a lottery, ergo different rules applied depending upon where you lived.

I think that most of SL is pretty static and that there's a timestamp that gets update when an object is changed. They could snapshot the grid, move it elsewhere then refresh the things that have updated. They'd also need to track what got deleted and changed by scripts but that's not too horrible of a task.

There would be a blackout while they changed things to point to the new grid then a brownout while things that changed on the US grid moved to the Casinostan grid.

This simply serves as another example of how completely unreliable Linden Labs policies are. In less than a year with no intervening events they have taken a complete 180 degree turn on their position as to whether gambling in Second Life falls under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Meanwhile the effect and in all likelihod the purpose of publicizing their position when the Act was originally passed was to give comfort to people who wished to invest money in gambling machines and generally stimulate a virtual economy which relies significantly on gambling. Now they have effectively disenfranchised all of those people who invested money in machines and land in connection with gambling. This will only serve to hurt the virtual economy of Second Life as it clearly illustrates that Linden Labs can and will enact policies which will devalue virtual assets on one day for which the development they may have tried to previously encourage with complete disregard for the impact on its customers. Today it is gambling, tomorrow it may be any other virtual industry on the server.

Fair enough. But getting back on subject, it is not gambling in the form that is prohibited by the UIGEA, so this is not a fair comparison. Therefore, Blizzard does not have the same concerns that LL would face should they continue to hold a presence in the US.

You must not have heard our liberals talking about how gambling preys on the poor then, forget liberal and conservative, STATIST is the correct term. People who want to control others.

Well, I hope it's not the shoe industry. That would just be wrong.

But seriously, it's easy to see the only other industry that would be shut down would be the other remaining vice in SL. Everyone else should feel pretty safe.

Well it's a fair comparison with regards to local laws applying. I asked earlier, how many US states is prostitution illegal in? This is a very cowardly move by LL and the real question is, what's next?

You think Raymond? How about if they decide our virtual earnings even in game are tax deductable? What is to stop that happening if LL bow down so easily?

So much for panic. It's been over an hour since the news broke and LindenX is still at 265.

LL didn't have a choice here, be sure and thank your elected representatives for banning internet gambling....