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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the good old days when World of Warcraft got so big that there was a substantial grey market for the in-game gold. At first, it was simple enough, forums where you could pay someone $10 with PayPal or whatever, and then they would meet you in-game and give you 1,000 game gold coins.

Within just a few years there were large-scale "gold mining" operations set up in China, wholesalers, retailers, "forex" markets, etc... Nearly the entire modern economic ecosystem was set up around a game.

At some point, if WoW was treated as a country, its "currency" would have ranked above quite a few real countries in terms of forex trading. If I remember correctly, it was bigger than 70 real nations.

Crypto is the same, except times a thousand.

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This is still happening, in WoW and other games, and has morphed into some pretty wild things - such as people in impoverished countries playing the games as a source of income.

https://www.polygon.com/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescap...

One of my all-time favorite examples of an alternate communication channel is when, their URL banned from in-game chat, gold sellers spelled it out in corpses on a hillside: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/2y2vb3/back_in_wrath_g...

That was true for runescape too, but it seemed like its ended entirely when you were able to sell membership bonds for in game gp on the grand exchange. Now its like, why go with a scammer website where they will scrape your info when you can give jagex $8 and have 60 mill in game in a few moments? Brilliant way to get around the issue imo and it practically acts like a stimulus package for the players so they don't have to run flax like I did for hours 15 years ago.

The thrust of your comment is accurate, though

> it seemed like its ended entirely

not quite: relative volume actually increased as a function of growing game popularity around the time of the introduction of bonds (http://crystalmathlabs.com/tracker/players.php - amusingly enough, this is currently serving me a first-party ad for goldbuying) but that obviously represented a slice of a previously-undivided pie.

It's like legal weed: black markets still exist for those willing to forgo security and convenience for a deal. IIRC, black-market gold was 40-60% of the face price of a bond for the period I was active as a reasonably high volume swapper/seller. That kind of discount isn't worth it if you're buying 10m or a single prerolled joint or whatever, but generally makes sense in any kind of volume / if you've got the connections to mitigate the risk.

But the analogy continues: if the black market is relegated to a fairly small proportion of the total pool of individuals who buy (weed|gp), even if a lot of the volume transactions aren't captured, many of its harms are mitigated as you don't have unsophisticated consumers smoking rat poison / getting their mom's credit card stolen / etc.

But even that is more real than Crypto. That’s a currency used to buy something people wanted.

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