Legal Commentary

Virtal Worlds Will Not Solve This Banking Crisis

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Jesus Diaz, Determining the Money Supply of a Virtual World,

People have been studying virtual worlds for a while now, but there has been little discussion on the money supply. Currently, most virtual world developers do not publish data on the money supply and so I developed a method in estimating it. Using economic theory and the exchange rate, I was able to check the accuracy of my estimate. After applying my method to World of Warcraft, I believe there is over nine billion gold on North American servers. If that gold were converted to USD, it would be worth $192 million, and if the same held true for all World of Warcraft players, there would be $747 million.

Not close to enough to help with the current banking crisis, alas.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on April 03, 2009 (boomark / email).