And as totally predicted...

[Spica Inventor]

I'm refering more to the tier prices and not the land sale prices. Linden still owns about 20% of the land out there doesn't it? Mainland land? If they reduce those prices then everything and everywhere must follow.

[Kampu Oyen]

I don't think you and I essentially disagree which things are being manipulated or why.

LL clearly has the right to manipulate a lot of different variables in the SL economy.

But the parallel with bonds is somewhat imprecise, and in a way that is potentially important to understanding what's really going on with the SL money supply and things tangent to it as an important variable in total service value.

Central banks do issue bonds, yes. But they don't print bonds for people on demand, or refrain from printing them until somebody asks for them.

Linden dollars will tend to come into existence only when someone pays to produce them with real money, and will tend to cease to exist only when someone spends them in-world or causes them to be destroyed as a commission paid on Marketplace items.

So they're more like bonds written by the person buying them and then accepted by the person issuing them, along with the payment. If banks did that, they would be very much at the mercy of consumers, and would have to make a industry of finding loopholes to cancel the bonds they agree to issue.

LL does that, of course. And, to the extent that it is transparent, it's really a very fair thing to do. If you want to use land or upload a texture or something, you have to agree to cancel some tiny little bonds. Why not?

Understanding this, though, I think it might be somewhat normal for a person to then wonder whether some of the weird transaction activity recently exhibited by marketplace function might not indicate some kind of very desperate attempt to, as you say, "tighten up" the money supply.

I have certainly had that thought. If users can't be adequately persuaded to destroy these microbonds of their own accord, would not a natural next step for a company sufficiently desperate to control its own effective virtual asset values be to create some large pattern of errors in which almost all errors are too small to be legally actionable, and in which the errors uniformly result in the spurious destruction of these microbonds, rather than their spurious creation?

It also occurs to me that if every Linden dollar actually had some kind of serial number (even if not visible to users), that would make the whole system a lot more potentially transparent to auditors or investigators... and that this last point might pretty well explain why such serial numbers "probably" do not exist and will "probably" never exist as long as the Lindens are allowed to generate them and destroy them according to user whimsy without really accounting for them as specific or discrete virtual objects.

I suppose it's a bit like the dollars people spend with their credit cards also not having any serial numbers. Except, of course, that even the number of such dollars generated by credit card companies is at least nominally regulated by government agencies.

Is the Linden dollar really regulated by anyone other than the Lindens?

Even a poker chip in Las Vegas is regulated by entities external to the casino.

(and my point there is....?)

 

[Spica Inventor]

Most dont want to invest the time it takes to create stuff they can make money on or just dont think they are talented enough, but aesthetics remain important to them. Lets face it, very few of the S.L. users are actually creating and marketing things in S.L. but they do want to make their avatars look good or have a private place for their avatars to live and such things, and these are the peeps that finance the other, so it would be good if all involved benefited together as the ratio of creators and purchasers should remain the same. That would increase the population substantially i.m.o. The prices in S.L. as they stand are still keeping hordes of peeps from investing much time in S.L.

[Kampu Oyen]

I think what's keeping the n00bs away, more than anything, is probably just an established reputation for SL being a pain in the a$$ to use for much of anything.

This has been earned not by the low quality of service (open to debate, but don't let's start that), but by the extreme lack of consistency of service.