Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: Bitcoin
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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meme I made last year, explaining Second Life's strange connection to the 2024 presidential election, was quaintly out of date, but that was sadly not to be.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…
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If the Trump/Vance 2024 presidential campaign seems odd to you (to say the least), here's another bit of weirdness to contemplate: Without the early success of Second Life, it's very likely that the Trump/Vance campaign would not even exist. I'm quite serious. But to understand what I mean, we need to go back into ancient…
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Reader Joey1058 has a fair point about my comparing the oranges of Linden Dollars to the apples of Bitcoin: The US designated crypto as a commodity. So asking to use BTC as a currency is like asking to use gold and silver as an everyday currency again. The L$ is an inworld currency, and has…
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With Bitcoin's experiencing an utter bloodbath today, this may come across as "I told ya so", but hopefully not. For nearly 10 years, Bitcoin promoters and major investors have never been able to answer a question I started asking in 2013, and kept asking over the years: If Bitcoin is such an important virtual currency,…
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With global sanctions hitting Putin-aligned Russian oligarchs and their troves of ill-gotten gains, there's been speculation that these billionaires will hide their assets in cryptocurrency — a suspicion perhaps heightened by the fact that some crypto firms are refusing to shut down access by Russians to their exchange platforms. How realistic a concern is this,…
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Remember Larry David's cryptocurrency ad for last weekend's Superbowl, where Larry kvetches his way through human history, always being wrong about great inventions and breakthroughs? It was funny! Looking at the charts of two leading app trackers, however, it also had little or no impact on promoting downloads of the actual cryptocurrency app, FTX Crypto…
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Pictured at right: Top locations by usage of Bitcoin over the Lightning Network as of today. Three weeks after Bitcoin officially became legal tender in El Salvador, its President claims that 2.1 million Salvadorans — a third of the entire country's population — are "using" Bitcoin. And while it's probably true there's about that many…
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Good points from reader Erik Mondrian, on how Linden Dollars help drive the success of Bitcoin, and why L$ is still more often used than BTC to buy goods and services: The other issue that I think is important to bring up in this context is exchange rate, which weighs the scale even further toward…
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Pretty interesting article from the news section of Bitcoin.com, explaining how Linden Dollars helped drive up the value of Bitcoin back in the early days of the cryptocurrency roughly a decade ago: During these nascent times, a few fiat currencies were trading with Bitcoin. At this time, Second Life’s Linden dollars (L$) were also exchanged…
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When I read that the FBI had seized $2.3 million in Bitcoin paid to Colonial Pipeline hackers earlier this week, my first thought was: This proves that Bitcoin can't be free from the powers that be, because it rides on rails that they control. Because as it happens, that's the title of a post I…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 