As earlier indications suggested, Linden Lab has just announced an official Linden Dollar (L$) Authorized Reseller Program. Currently, Resellers include AnsheX, Bulido, vForEx, VirWoX, ZoHaIslands, but the company is taking applications for others. These are no longer third party vendors indepedently handling Linden Dollars vendors freely on their own. Rather, as the announcement explains:
These sites are authorized by Linden Lab to purchase L$ on the LindeX and then resell those L$ using a variety of international currencies and payment methods. To be clear: per the Terms of Service, these resellers will not be allowed to purchase L$ outside of the LindeX (i.e. they will not be able to buy L$ back from users and cash people out). The list of Authorized Resellers participating in the pilot program is available here.
This comes less than a week after Linden Lab updated Second Life's Terms of Service to forbid trading of Linden Dollars on exchanges other than the LindeX, Second Life’s official L$ exchange. The whole thing feels very hasty and ad hoc. Here's why:
This disorganized hastiness offers credence to RL lawyer Vaki Zenovka's assessment that Linden Lab issued this new policy to comply with US Treasury guidelines, which just went into effect (I believe). The highly restrictive Reseller Terms of Service also seem to confirm that. Here's just one clause:
Reseller shall take commercially reasonable measures to avoid (and ensure that its service providers and processors take such measures to avoid) downloading, exporting or re-exporting, or otherwise selling Linden Dollars (i) into (or using a financial institution located in or to a national or resident of) Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, or any other country to which the United States has embargoed goods; or (ii) to anyone on the United States Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals or the United States Commerce Department’s Table of Deny Orders.
So Kim Jun-Un, if you were planning to support your country with Linden Dollars along with World of Warcraft gold... dude, you are shit out of luck.
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I did a check, and buying L$ using GBP on VirWoX looks a slightly better deal than buying direct and using my Card company's price for USD.
There's another 4% vanishes when you convert L$ to USD on the LindeX, to pay tier, but the people without Paypal already had to deal with that.
The LindeX market data for the 17th May looks wrong: the volume is incredibly low. It's way less than the usual range.
Posted by: Wolf Baginski | Saturday, May 18, 2013 at 02:48 AM