[Opensim-dev] Currency

[Len Brown]

I still experience an occasional hiccup with the Second Life money system so
i remain slightly wary of it.  Since money transactions remain a very buggy
and unreliable thing when it comes to virtual worlds, I've learned many new
ways to make financial gains without any in-world monetary implementations
at all.

At present I am gradually leasing out 25 regions from my own servers.  I
simply request payment be made via PayPal within the first 7 days of each
month and thus far I've not experienced any issues at all.  Everyone seems
very happy and I simplify things by only leasing out full regions rather
than trying to divide them up and lease out portions of regions.

While an in-world money system would at times be nice, and eventually will
come into being through optional plugins, I am quite happy managing my
virtual world properties through PayPal payments.

- Len W. Brown

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 9:07 AM, J Ross Nicoll
<jrn2005 at cs.st-andrews.ac.uk>wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Opensim-dev mailing list
> Opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-dev/attachments/20090714/785f56fb/attachment-0001.html>