Well, I wish this snarky meme I made last year, explaining Second Life's strange connection to the 2024 presidential election, was quaintly out of date, but that was sadly not to be. In the news from just the last few days, we have:
- Donald Trump Names XRP, SOL, ADA, BTC and ETH as Part of U.S. Crypto Reserve
- Donald Trump-Linked Firm May be Looking to Start NFT and Metaverse Platform
Without the early success of Second Life, it's very likely that these programs — let alone Trump's re-election in 2024 — would have never come into being.
As I explained last year when it still seemed like a fun, James Burke-ian, Connections-esque thought experiment:
While it launched in 2003, Second Life first began gaining heavy media attention in 2004, after creator Linden Lab made an innovative announcement for the time: They made it possible to trade the virtual world's internal currency, Linden Dollars, for US dollars.
"The world will increasingly buy and sell and trade these things we are making [in Second Life]," as Philip Rosedale explained to me back then. "So I think that real digital worlds will naturally have real economies and real exchange with real life."
The move drove growing Silicon Valley excitement around the Second Life economy, leading to the hype wave of 2006-2008 fueled by the infamous BusinessWeek cover story and a slew of other coverage. Linden Dollars were mainly used to buy content in SL itself, though people began to experiment with using it to buy non-SL items. (For instance, someone experimented with selling PC graphics cards for L$.)
And then, in 2009, Bitcoin was invented.
The digital currency attracted growing excitement among hardcore technophiles, but the problem back then was this: There was no easy, legal way to buy and sell Bitcoin for US$.
Enter Linden Dollars. As I write in my book:
Linden Dollars helped drive up the value of the cryptocurrency shortly after its inception in 2009, when purchasing Bitcoin with standard fiat cash was nigh impossible.
For a while, there were even in-world ATMs where Bitcoin could be purchased for Linden Dollars, and vice versa. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey once recounted to me, entirely bemused, a time when he purchased Bitcoin from someone who insisted that they meet each other as avatars in Second Life, to finalize the transaction.
Without Second Life, in other worlds, it's quite likely Bitcoin and crypto in general might not have achieved enough escape velocity to enjoy the market euphoria it went on to attract.
But don't take my word for it, here's what Bitcoin News wrote recently:
When people think about Bitcoin’s past they sometimes refer to subjects like Mt Gox, the Silk Road, or the famous pizza transaction. Although, people often forget that the online virtual world Second Life played an important role during the Bitcoin network’s early years. In fact, some large Linden Dollar (L$) holders who swapped their virtual tokens for bitcoin may be crypto millionaires today.
Bitcoin might eventually have become a hot commodity without Linden Dollars, but without that early traction leading to real cash fortunes, I doubt it.
In any case, many of the Silicon Valley elite now hold vast swathes of Bitcoin, and are hoping for a better economic climate to sell them in.
Enter Trump.
Much more here, tying everything together. It's definitely not the most tragic ironies we're dealing with now, likely not even in the top 500 items in that list. But to me, the keenest irony remains this: While Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest would likely not exist without Linden Dollars, it's still the case that Linden Dollars are used more often on a regular basis to buy goods and services than them. But unlike the other virtual currencies, Linden Dollars have no pull in the White House.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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