On 10/18/06, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
Huh? You're good at coding-type comments, but from my limited brain you seem to have missed his main point. Can virtual-world economics impact/sink real-world economies? That's not entirely obvious to me. Or at least, it's by no means intuitive. Remember too that this is just ONE game here. Soon, there will be thousands, many of which may not even exist long enough for taxation to be enforced. And indeed, that might drive some worlds to become very temporary. And what if the exchange rate is no longer to USD but for, say, CPU time or disk space or gold or silver? Tim May's ghost will be leaping for joy. (Oh wait: Tim May IS Tim May's ghost.)
In fact, the only way for such an environment to be reliably taxed is for the feds to tax every computer interface that links to the net, and it's just too late for that. Or perhaps, the Feds will just grab a slice of every transaction that exits a bank account, irregarless of where it's ostensibly going.
As far as I'm concerned, these are just tip-of-the-iceburg issues here. When we start considering trans-world untaxed (ie, not by real-world governments) digital coinage then things become unclear very quickly (and despite the existence of trans-world exchanges, these are still closely bound to the USD). Oh, and it seems obvious that if these online economies keep growing, some of the game operators will want a tiny tiny slice of each transaction, which may drive them to make games free just to get the discount revenue.
But his essential points stand, even if the specific implementations suggested aren't yet feasible.
It is really intesting that there is a real exchange for this game, but trading game-gold and so on for real world money is surely nothing new. Ebay does it all the time. Surely it'll regulate itself. As in, if it becomes easy to print money inside the game, the money will just be less valuable. People will pay less real money for it. I probably need to sit down and come up with a real reply to this ... but I'm just wondering how this is so different from any external trading that almost all online games have [obviously the exchange is one factor...]. -- mic