[Opensim-dev] Currency

[Len Brown]

This reminds me of a situation I encountered in Second Life last Autumn.  I
logged in on a Saturday morning and decided to sell a piece of land I no
longer needed.  I set the asking price at 10,000 Lindens.

Right about that time Linden Lad encountered a problem and began a rolling
restart of their servers.  Somehow the money system got "stuck" and when
someone bought my land it did not register with the Linden Lab servers.

The result was that, over the course of the next 20 minutes 7 people
"bought" my land.  When the dust settled I had one actual owner of my land
and 7 actual purchases.  As you might imagine, a lot of people were very
angry that I got their Lindens and they got nothing in return.

I communicated to them all and tried to explain the situation but most
called me a liar since "this never happened before.  I then contacted Linden
Lab tech support (after waiting nearly an hour on hold) and was told NOT to
refund the Lindens as they would resolve the "glitch."

After 24 hours and some very hostile people demanding their money back I
decided to go ahead and send each of them the 10,000 Lindens they gave me.
Almost a week later I logged in to find my account nearly 70,000 Lindens
overdrawn!

That was last Autumn and to this day Linden Lab never restored the Lindens I
lost.

So this is just one small example of why I am personally very happy to see
that the monetary system is not tied in with the core OpenSim code.  I'm not
at all against the money system, but definitely feel it's best kept as a
separate module for me to decide when and if I want to implement it on my
own servers now.

- Len
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