SL Old Enough to Be Top "Today I Learned" Post on Reddit

Now officially 12 years old, you know a virtual world is old when it's a top post in Reddit's extremely popular Today I Learned subreddit, which is usually reserved for stories from WWII and whatnot. (And Reddit being Reddit, the top upvoted comment is... about what you'd expect.)

Note to fellow Redditors, however: Anshe Chung never became an actual millionaire through her Second Life real estate holdings. As I explained at the time (2006) on GigaOM:

To begin with, only part of it is based in actual Linden Dollars. “Anshe has ‘cash’ holdings of several million Linden Dollars”,her company announcement reads. If “several” meant L$3,000,000, that would be around $12,000, at market rates, which are now around L$250/US$1; still, even converting this currency to US dollars would mean selling it on the open market, and to have such a large bloc of cash hitting the LindeX currency exchange would surely devalue it.

The “millionaire” claim is primarily based on the stated value of Anshe Chung’s 550 islands, with a baseline price (when it’s first sold by Linden Lab) of $1675, meaning $921,250 total. But again, to sell all of those regions to other SL subscribers at that rate or higher, without devaluation setting in, would be a monumental task.

To make things even more complicated, CNN’s legal affairs blogger (and isn’t it surreal to cite that source for a story on a virtual world?) reports that “[a] spokesperson for Linden Lab told me she could not immediately verify Chung’s claim, because Chung’s property is held in many different names”– in other words, a single avatar is not, in fact, a millionaire. (Anshe’s SL real estate operation has numerous employees on staff.)

So all that established, a more accurate statement would be this:

If Anshe Chung gradually sold all her Second Life assets over a long span of time (to prevent market devaluation), and if all the assets actually owned by various avatars working for Anshe were successfully transferred back to her, and if the internal economy remained stable, and if Second Life had no serious interruptions of service through hacking, scalability failures, sale of the company, or other unforeseen incidents, then after a long and arduous process, Ailin Graef and her husband would have well over $1,000,000.

That’s a long way off from being a virtual world millionaire.

Then again, still pretty impressive -- even moreseo because Anshe started off with zero Linden Dollars, and earned enough with her husband to launch an office in Wuhan, China, and launch at least one other virtual world-related company.

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Comments

[Guntram Graef]

As Ailin's business partner and husband I can confirm that nothing about her announcement back in 2006 was exaggerated.

[sams son]

You have to ask yourself, Hamlet - why it is important to me to denigrate her achievement? If Palmer Lucky or Zuckerberg were the first millionaire in SL, would he have gotten amazing publicity but without all the innuendo and caveats? Get off your sexist high horse. What she did was amazing. Deal with it.

[RoblemVR]

More sour grapes, how sad and predictable. Really nothing to add to this, it all speaks for itself.

[Carlos Loff]

Second Life is not a Game, this Journalist did not do it's whole homework