While Bitcoin may be popular for use in extortion shake-downs, it seems to be waning as a unit of exchange for virtual currency: A few months ago (in a post I just noticed, so I'm playing preliminary catch-up here) Second Life blogger "Webspelunker" went looking for Bitcoin exchanges in Second Life and came up empty:
I went back to the Bitcoin exchanges I’d visited in my earlier Bitcoin story only to find them all closed. Further, any other references to Bitcoins that I could find just led to dead ends. Currency exchanges only traded in Lindens for RL currencies. Where are the bitcoins? Maybe there’s another story here!
Maybe, or maybe not. I visited a Bitcoin dispensary in Second Life earlier this month, squirting out free samples of Bitcoin (in very small amounts) "for anyone wanting to educate themselves or experiemnt with Bitcoin" as the land owner told me, so there's still some access to Bitcoin in SL. Then again, if I'm reading it right, the Virtual World Exchange lists the last exchange of Bitcoin for Linden Dollars as being over 5 months ago. (Which means long before Linden Lab withdrew its support for third party Linden Dollar exchanges.) In any case, we seem far from the heady days of 2012 when Bitcoin owners were buying over USD$650K in Linden Dollars per month on a single exchange, and Palmer Luckey himself was going into SL to trade himself some Bitcoin.
Anyway, like I said, this is a very preliminary report, and I'm looking into it further - stand by.
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LL made it against SL's TOS to use 3rd party exchnages in May 2013, except their own Lindex exchange. That's why. You even reported on the beginnings of it here: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/05/linden-dollar-terms-of-service-change.html
After this, Linden quickly turned around and introduced the "authorized L$ reseller" program, as described here: https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/More-Options-for-Buying-Linden-Dollars/ba-p/2011355 which allowed authorized exchanges to sell Linden dollars (but not accept them for exchange in the other direction).
This all happened much earlier than the 5 months ago that you're reporting here. The more recent change linked to in your post was the conclusion of the "authorized reseller" program, finally preventing exchange in either direction.
The fact that Bitcoin can't be bought in SL is simply a reflection that exchanges have been following SL's TOS changes introduced in may 2013. It's not a reflection on Bitcoin or any other currency.
Posted by: megabucks | Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 05:04 PM