New World Notes

Insider Attributes Massive Linden Dollar Fluctuations to Some Large Second Life Businesses Rapidly Liquidating L$ Holdings (Land Barons, Say?)

Since my Friday post, the Linden Dollar sell rate continues creeping up, with people selling large blocks of L$ at historically high rates. At right are the very top sell orders last night, with the largest listed quantity, L$11,186,781, worth around $4,200 now in real dollars at an exchange rate of L$265 to $1 dollar. Thing is, just last month, when the exchange rate was closer to L$250/$1, that same block would be worth hundreds of real dollars more.

What's going on? I asked Linden Lab for a response on Thursday but still haven't received a reply. I also talked with an anonymous Linden insider with knowledge of this subject, and this person discounts the popular conspiracy theories raging among SL content creators, suggesting that Linden Lab itself is somehow manipulating the exchange rate. 

"We were super-transparent about this years ago," my source told me, "and I doubt it's changed significantly in the time since I left. Linden Lab doesn't control the rates, the market does. If a number of larger businesses that have been holding significant L$ decide to liquidate and are willing to push the rate temporarily less financially favorably for sellers in exchange for more rapid exchange, then short-term small fluctuations like this happen. It's not a bug, it's a feature."

But why would those larger businesses want to sell so much Linden Dollars all of a sudden? I believe the most plausible theory -- and I stress theory -- is also the most benign: Private sim owners are cashing in L$ to take advantage of Linden Lab's recently announced offer of grandfathered maintenance rates (after paying a "buy-down" fee of $600):

Why Augmented Reality Won't Scale, Explained in Six Nightmare Minutes

"Augmented reality is more likely to go mass market than virtual reality" is something many people in technology (including me) say, but then you watch something like this and think, "... or maybe not":

HYPER-REALITY from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Of course people who are willing to pay for premium augmented reality won't have to get a barrage of ads tossed at them 24/7, but for anyone who's not wealthy, something like this is more likely what awaits them. Which makes me think people will just stick to looking at their phones. (Which has about as much ads, but at least they can always look away.)

More from the video project's site:

Watch Polygon Play Politicized Pizza Troll in Second Life

After a long delay, Polygon's Griffin McElroy is back in Second Life for pizza and political-flavored quasi-trolling hijinks. (Watch Part 1 from last September here.) Unlike the many trolls besieging SL lately, Griffin and pal are pretty good-natured smartasses. If anything, I just wish they'd visit cooler, more popular sites in SL. As one of them casually notes, it's sad to see so many well-made places seem like ghost towns. In fact, I'd put it regular NWN readers: What are the best SL sites with lots of regular users with a sense of humor for these guys to visit next? 

Ready Player One 3D Avatar Creation Contest: Winners Get $1000 & Chance to Appear in Spielberg's Adaptation

Cool avatar design contest run for Steven Spielberg's upcoming adaptation of the Ernest Cline novel: Design a 3D avatar in a typical file format (.ma, .mb, .obj, .fbx, .ztl), follow the rules and submit here, and five entries win $1000 and a chance to have that model depicted in OASIS, the film's version of Ready Player's metaverse. Looks like a full-mesh version of a Second Life avatar could work as an entry (long as you send it in original file form.)

If you do submit, let me know: I'd love to feature submissions in upcoming New World Notes posts!

Watch Ernest Cline's announcement of the contest below. And yes, Cline used to hang out in Second Life before the novel was published.

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Top Second Life Creators Concerned About Increasing Linden $ Sell Rate, Massive Block of L$ Put Up for Sale
• High Fidelity Launches Compatibility for Oculus DK2 for Macs, Explains How Other VR Devs Can Do the Same UPDATE: Palmer Luckey Says "Not Exactly a Breakthrough", UPDATE 2: Philip Rosedale & Lead HiFi Dev Respond
• Dream On: Despite Little Usage of Cardboard, Google Launching Full VR Platform for Android
• No, Linden Lab's Board Isn't "Ashamed" of SL's Virtual Porn
• OK, Gear VR Has Probably Sold Over 1 Million Units

Top Second Life Creators Concerned About Increasing Linden $ Sell Rate, Massive Block of L$ Put Up for Sale

Top Second Life content creators have been expressing concern over instability in the Linden Dollar market to me and on various online forums over the last few weeks, culminating in an urgent message I just received from Juliette Westerburg of Tres Blah (also co-creator of SL’s famed Mon Tissu brand).

“The [Linden Dollar] sell rate keeps creeping up. There’s 21 million sitting at a sell rate of 254 right now.” She shows me the LindeX screen capture above, taken by another well-known content creator. 21M in Linden Dollars is roughly USD$86,000, at least at current rates. “We used to cash out at L$249 back in April. Also, this grid helps to show how the market has been increasing.”

These increases may not seem like much, but for content creators who literally make a real life living from their SL content, they can make a fairly significant dent, while adding to long-term anxiety:

High Fidelity Launches Compatibility for Oculus DK2 for Macs, Explains How Other VR Devs Can Do the Same UPDATE: Palmer Luckey Says "Not Exactly a Breakthrough", UPDATE 2: Philip Rosedale & Lead HiFi Dev Respond

High Fidelity just quietly announced a pretty significant breakthrough [see Update below] for Oculus and virtual reality in general: Support for running its virtual world on Oculus -- on a Mac. As Mac-using VR fans know, Oculus stopped active Mac support around a year ago, and unless I missed it, this makes High Fidelity the first and only Oculus application compatible for Mac (if you have a Mac with a high-end GPU, that is, with an AMD Radeon R9 suggested).

High Fidelity CTO Brad Hefta-Gaub tells me this required very little code or effort:

"The actual process of getting Oculus working on the Mac was pretty easy for us because we'd built our architecture with cross-platform in mind. Less then 100 lines of code were required to enable this support."

More on how they did that -- and how other VR developers who want Oculus/Mac compatibility for their own Oculus apps might do likewise:

Dream On: Despite Little Usage of Cardboard, Google Launching Full VR Platform for Android

Undaunted by unproven consumer interest, let alone any skepticism from tech journalists -- seriously, has anyone with CNET, VentureBeat, The Verge, etc. actually offered any pushback? -- here's Google's long-expected full VR platform for Android.

And unlike Facebook and other tech giants, Google actually knows there's little consumer interest in VR from their own data:

Because from Google's own data, it seems more like 300,000-500,000 people use Cardboard with any high degree of engagement.... Looking at third party Cardboard apps, only a handful have been downloaded between 100,000 to 500,000 times -- most of the rest, much less... 350,000 hours of video may seem like a lot -- but split between 5,000,000 Cardboard units, that's an average of .07 hours viewing per user. I.E., a bit more than 4 minutes. Total.

If you think Google is still bullish on VR because Google's bright minds know something you don't, you may very well be wrong. Like Google was wrong about Google Lively, or for that matter Google Glass.

Oh well, let's watch the video anyway:

Confirming Real Life Now Cyberpunk Novel, Hacker Steals Virtual Currency to Aid Fight Against Apocalyptic Terrorists

Actual news, not @GreatDismal novel: Robin Hood hacker donates $11K of stolen Bitcoin to help fight ISIS https://t.co/MhnyEoz3Sn

— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) May 19, 2016

Seriously, says Newsweek:

A Kurdish region of Syria that borders territory held by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has received an $11,000 donation in allegedly stolen bitcoin from a vigilante hacker. The pseudonymous Phineas Fisher donated 25 bitcoins to a crowdfunding campaign set up by members of the Rojava region’s economic committee, described by Fisher as “one of the most inspiring revolutionary projects in the world.”

Ironically, this means that a virtual currency often associated with funding terrorism is now helping fund the fight against terrorism. Perhaps even more ironically, the Kurdish peshmerga are pretty much the only people with an actual serious motive for using Bitcoin to buy goods and services -- because no one else does.

No, Linden Lab's Board Isn't "Ashamed" of SL's Virtual Porn

And SLer named Cathartes Aura posted a comment on last's post on Project Sansar which makes some good points, but also argues that Linden Lab is financing Sansar because Linden Lab's board is "ashamed" of Second Life and its many sex pervs, and it's a new variation on a commonly-repeated myth:

IMO the board members of LL never liked or appreciated what their money created... Why do they care that sex exists in SL? IMO it's because the board/VC's were ashamed of SL and its residents. They thought of us as the "weirds"... The "freaks"... Not exactly what they had in mind - they wanted a g-rated world only and we gave them something very different.

I frequently read some version of that assertion from one anonymous avatar or another, so to set the record straight: There's no evidence whatsoever that Linden Lab's board was or is ashamed of virtual sex and Second Life's assorted "freaks" -- in fact, the board has consistently tolerated the creation of adult-themed content in SL.

I've talked several times at length with Mitch Kapor, Linden Lab's founding lead investor and board member, and have never heard a dint of anything like animus or shame about SL's many sexual subcultures. In fact, in a long 2009 interview, he told me this: "I still think that in the evolving world of Second Life there’ll be room for peaceful co-existence of many styles and usage... in order to achieve the full potential." He said this as SL was amidst a mass market launch and partnerships with major companies, most especially IBM. During that conversation, the only time he mentioned anything about sexual content was in relationship to griefing. Or as he aptly put it: "There's a lot of work that needs to be done in the flying penis department... it is kind of mandatory now."

Based on that talk and many others with Linden executives (while I was working with the company as the "embedded journalist" and afterward), along with the major policy decisions the board approved, I believe the general attitude is something like this: