[Opensim-dev] Currency

[J Ross Nicoll]

I think this illustrates extremely well why most of the devs don't want
to touch a money system. Making a proper monetary system means ensuring
that transactions happen, or do not, you can't get 7 copies of the same
transaction that then have to be unpicked by hand. I wouldn't be averse
to writing a money module if I had time (so, not this year), but I'd
want to do it properly so you can't get into this sort of mess...

Len Brown wrote:

> 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!


-- 
The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland : No
SC013532