I am a huge fan of Second Life. In my office I have four 32 inch LCD screens, and two of them remain logged into Second Life for the entire time I spend at my desk. I firmly believe that Second Life represents the beginning of something big. I predict that Philip Rosedale, Cory Ondrejka, Gene Yoon and the rest of the team are sitting on a convergent technology that will unite the Internet with all media and replace financial transactions on the net.
Which leads me to some interesting observations. in Second Life, the currency traded within the game is called the Linden (L). Today, one US dollar is worth about L269. If I go to the Second Life website and try to buy L100000 the price is 376.24 or L265.78 per dollar. Interestingly, if I want to buy L100 it only costs .68 cents, and if I want L1000 then one dollar buys L246.35. Supply and demand I suppose, the larger the order the higher the price per L.
I'm on eBay looking around, and just for kicks I type Second Life in and hit search. There are a ton of people selling Lindens on eBay at great prices. So I place an order. I pay $320.99 for L100000, which is L311.53 per dollar. Looking around some more I find another seller, so I place another order and pay $284.98 for L100000, which is an even better deal at L350.90 per dollar. Compared to the Second Life website, I am getting a better deal by L85.12 buying from third party sellers of Lindens. On a large L100000 purchase I save almost $91.26 by going to eBay and you can get an even better deal by going to the sellers directly, thus avoiding the eBay fees.
So how is it that people elsewhere on the net are coming into large amounts of Lindens at prices that are significantly below market rates? Would it be possible to create a script that generated 400 bogus avatars, plugged in false credit card information, collected the L250 grant and paid that cash to a bank account whereby the Lindens are withdrawn and sold on eBay? I would think the Battery Street Braintrust would catch on to that pretty quickly. I would enjoy hearing from other folks who know how this business works and could post some information to the site.
