Saw this today and it got me wondering..
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=19193> Second Life, which was created by Linden Labs
> <
http://www.lindenlabs.com/> of San Francisco, is an online world
> where players can buy and sell all kinds of goods and services. The
> game's economy is based on fictional currency, called Linden dollars.
> But those dollars do have real-world value: players can buy or sell
> Linden dollars at a rate of about L$270 to $1 on the Lindex market.
> Second Life's website even boasts that "thousands of residents are
> making part or all of their real life income from their Second Life
> businesses."
Imagine building a new virtual world characterized by secure open source
software, anonymous encrypted access along the lines of Tor
(
http://tor.eff.org), with holographic memory redundancy (distributed
across participant computers around the globe, say running on virtual
machines provided by web browsers) such that no single government, gang
or corporation could feasibly destroy the virtual banks and markets and
individual identities.
Perhaps there would be little apparent benefit to those of us in the
west, where we have relative opportunity and freedom and federal bank
insurance, but it could be hugely valuable for people in less fortunate
parts of the world where typical organizing principles involve physical
force and isolation (or murder) of anyone that might cause trouble.
Basically any person that felt that things were out of whack in their
immediate environment could use a secure virtual identity to continue
with productive work until conditions blew over (e.g. the crazy
administration left office). Basically, trade with people that could
see your virtual track record and benefit from your skills, but who
would well understand ahead of time they had no way to physically find you.
Just as using virtual hosted operating system (e.g. in VMware) comes at
an efficiency cost compared to a native operating system, one would
expect virtual economic life would less efficient than `real' life (e.g.
having to coordinate to find people in your geographic vicinity to
convert your virtual money to local currency). One might even imagine
cooperating governments to facilitate identity migration (along the
lines of a defection).
Locked
