Writes Ben Hardesty: “It appears that Linden Labs, the company that created and runs the virtual world Second Life, is now mandating central banking in the virtual world. Now, in the real world, Linden Labs owns the product that they created, and thus rightly can mandate whatever rules they want for people who choose to use their virtual world. However, it sure is funny to see the company acting like a virtual government, stepping in, and ‘protecting’ its citizens from their own stupid financial decisions. I can’t help but wonder, though, why they can’t just enforce rules against fraud for the virtual banks that renege on their contracts.
“As a funny aside, if you check out the WSJ article in that blog post, you will see that Linden Labs’ decision resulted in exactly what any rational person could have predicted: virtual bank runs and massive shut-downs of financial services. I guess what they really need is for a virtual Ben Bernanke to get in his virtual helicopter and dump virtual Linden dollars.”
2:41 pm on January 25, 2008 Email Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
