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: virtual currency
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Tilia, Linden Lab's spinoff company for processing virtual currency to real money payments in Second Life, Upland (more here), VRChat (more here), and other virtual worlds, was recently acquired by fintech company Thunes: To accelerate its growth in the United States and its presence in the fast-expanding online gaming market, Thunes, a global cross-border payments…
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Philip Rosedale is starting to roll out his FairShare digital currency universal basic income project (read my 2023 interview with him here) with Second Life-based meetings (of course!) and a very active Discord. The FairShare server is already pretty active and chatty, so Philip recommends new users introduce themselves — and ask another member to…
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To illustrate the value proposition of FairShare, a new digital currency project from Philip Rosedale, Philip created this interactive simulation of a free market economy. Left to its own devices, his simulation suggests, this kind of economy will inevitably lead to growing divides between the haves and have nots: Everyone starts with the same amount…
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FairShare is a new project from Philip Rosedale with a snarky tagline that pretty much encapsulates what he has in mind: Eat the Rich, but slowly. “I want to give people something like the Linden Dollar but just as an iPhone app that they basically can use to buy and sell anything from each other,”…
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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 Libra and Diem, the virtual currency project launched by Facebook/Meta in 2019? (Here's what I wrote about it back then.) The Financial Times has a great inside story of what happened to cause that project to collapse. Basically, Facebook happened: What emerges is a picture of Silicon Valley executives who thought they could charge…
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Really interesting conversation on the problem of virtual currency in virtual economies last week kicked off by "Kyz", who explained how difficult it was for them to reliably run a successful business in a virtual world. Replying to the idea that the value of their content is decided by the market, Kyz goes deeper into…
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'I'm blogging Matthew Ball’s must-read, nine part metaverse primer over the Summer; my take on Part 1 (introduction to the framework) is here, my coverage of Part 2 (hardware) is here, with Part 3 (networking) coverage here, Part 4 coverage (computing) here, Part 5 (virtual platforms) here, and Part 6 (open standards) here. Part 7 of Matthew Ball’s Metaverse framework,…
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San Francisco HQ of Tilia owner Linden Lab already owned by an Upland high roller Let's briefly check in on Upland, the virtual real estate acquisition game that's sort of Monopoly meets a mirror world, where virtual real estate is registered on the EOS blockchain, and is the first paying customer for Linden Lab's Tilia…
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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…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 