Here's the policy link.
Wow, look like my blog is going to be short, brief and soon to be dated unless I cover land or fashion as it won't be long til no SL financial market will exist at all save the one in player's personal accounts. After all the rampant fraud in the SL financial community,LL has stepped in and said "sorry, no more banks". The unfortunate problem is that this mostly likely will impact depositors at those institutions far more than the bank operators themselves.
Personally, if I were LL, I would have opened a central virtual bank and regulated the markets so as to make more money off the venture and try to help improve sl communities, but that's not what happened. Of course, cost considerations had to be included so it's much easier just to say, "get rid of them all."
That said, it was a fun streak and if you knew who to invest with and did the safe smart thing you could make a profit; but most people are honestly clueless on how to judge such things in a virtual environment. It's so much more different than the real world and takes a lot of expierence so I can see where the Lab's coming from in their actions.
Anyhow, on 01/22/2007 every link and location on this blog will practically cease to exist because if you read the verbatim terminology of the disclosure anyone paying interest or offering a return on investment which is processed through an ATM for linden or any other currency would be shut down on that date; this would include any incorporated company on any sl exchange that paid a dividend. I'm even having to close up DGD, which is a bit painful, it had so much potential and the loss on investment value of the companies at liquidation cost is not a pretty picture at all. But one thing I can say, I'll be closing at higher than IPO value, and it makes me proud I can at least return some value to the SL community in less than 1 years term of operation, most real companies fail in that time.
It's a sad state of affairs that has lead to this day, but if you read my backlogs you can see that fraud is perhaps one of the most rampant dangers inside of second life. There's cheats and scams everywhere and many are not skeptical enough to dodge them all.
Hopefully things will change in time and virtual investing will become a way of the future, but for now... LL has deemed it just not plausible or viable, especially at some of the ridiculous rates promised.
If things change, of course, this blog will continue, but if it doesn't, this may be adieu.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
LL Pulling the Plug on all Virtual Banking/Trading.. etc.
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2 comments:
Linden Lab has decided that capitalism is too much of a risk for its user, even though they operate within a mostly capitalist society. Many economic parallels come to mind, such as the Great Depression and the Panic of 1837 (caused by Jackson's idiotic banking policies). However, what we are describing here is more on par with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century.
As far as I can tell, cooperative economic efforts are now pretty much destroyed. Civilisations rarely survive with sole propriatorships being the only valid model. The natural result will be something of a feudal economy, where land is the only true commodity, and Linden Lab has set itself as the dominant vassel lord.
Perhaps that's always been their goal the whole time.
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