Money Laundering in Second Life

For years I festered over the problem of how money was being made in Second Life. I asked students to study businesses there and ran several business models on my own in an attempt to find out how money was being made. First, I have to say that very often either money is not being made or people are duplicitous about their presence in Second Life.

In the first case, I have always been skeptical of the real estate barons. Real estate prices have been in steady decline for the entire time I have been in Second Life (after the first six months or so) and I just can't work out a model where anyone could be doing anything but hemorrhaging money. I recently abandoned my academy in Second Life because I couldn't even give the land away. This is land I paid over $100 for four years ago and paid $15 per month tier and $6.95 per month for the right to own land as a premium member. That is roughly a $1,200 investment that returned $0. If somebody can make money with numbers like that, I like to hear about it.

Second, I think a lot of people in Second Life are just shills. They are Lindens pretending not to be in order to promote SL hype. Or they are one of the many satellite SL groups developing something such as a new client as Linden Labs continues to pursue its failed collaborative vision.

I feel vindicated in a perverse way as Linden Labs takes the one of the most impressive computer applications ever developed and lets opportunity after opportunity slip through their finger. It is almost like a Greek tragedy where the core of who you are prevents you from fulfilling your destiny.

But, the thing that really caught my attention in recent weeks was an article about Money Laundering in Second Life. When I read that, so many things made sense that did not make sense before. Has it really come to that? Has LL blown so many opportunities that it has to rely on transaction fees from laundered money to stay afloat. I suspect we will never know the answers to that or many other plaguing questions. But, it would sure be great to know them.