If the Trump/Vance 2024 presidential campaign seems odd to you (to say the least), here's another bit of weirdness to contemplate:
Without the early success of Second Life, it's very likely that the Trump/Vance campaign would not even exist.
I'm quite serious. But to understand what I mean, we need to go back into ancient history -- by which I mean 2004:
While it launched in 2003, Second Life first began gaining heavy media attention in 2004, after creator Linden Lab made an innovative announcement for the time: They made it possible to trade the virtual world's internal currency, Linden Dollars, for US dollars.
"The world will increasingly buy and sell and trade these things we are making [in Second Life]," as Philip Rosedale explained to me back then. "So I think that real digital worlds will naturally have real economies and real exchange with real life."
The move drove growing Silicon Valley excitement around the Second Life economy, leading to the hype wave of 2006-2008 fueled by the infamous BusinessWeek cover story and a slew of other coverage. Linden Dollars were mainly used to buy content in SL itself, though people began to experiment with using it to buy non-SL items. (For instance, someone experimented with selling PC graphics cards for L$.)
And then, in 2009, Bitcoin was invented.
The digital currency attracted growing excitement among hardcore technophiles, but the problem back then was this: There was no easy, legal way to buy and sell Bitcoin for US$.
Enter Linden Dollars. As I write in my book:
Continue reading "Second Life's Strange Connection to the 2024 Presidential Election" »
Comparing the BTC Apple to the L$ Orange (Comment of the Week)
Reader Joey1058 has a fair point about my comparing the oranges of Linden Dollars to the apples of Bitcoin:
This is roughly right. Though overall, I'd still say L$ and BTC is a comparison of tangerines and oranges, i.e. citrus fruit with more overlap than apples:
Continue reading "Comparing the BTC Apple to the L$ Orange (Comment of the Week)" »
Posted on Monday, May 16, 2022 at 02:02 PM in Bitcoin, Comment of the Week, Economics of SL | Permalink | Comments (1)
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