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Comment by readerrrr | Hacker News Reader

Items mentioned in the article exist, even though you cannot touch them.

Did you mean to use the term intangible or incorporeal? In that case you can sell insurance. :)

Yes, but these items are basically only flags in a DB under the power of Blizzard. It's not real in the sense that Blizzard could just enter whatever values they want in this DB and it would be perfectly legal.

Conspiracy theory: Maybe the didn't ban bots that much so they could hide their own "bots" (a simple function in their servers that sells goods they just have created out of thin air by a simple insert statement).

> Yes, but these items are basically only flags in a DB under the power of Blizzard.

So is insurance.

Especially in the common case where it doesn't pay out (because no accident happened).

And so is most money.

There it's two records in two banks (in the general case) for each transaction. The sum must check out to be zero. And beside that there are laws that are enforced because it is not legal to create money out of thin air. Ok, it is done anyway (when the government prints more money and thus increases inflation) and to a degree banks are allowed to do that in some sense as well (they loan can a certain percentage more money than they actually have). The whole system isn't perfect (hence the economic crisis), but there are enforced laws that aren't written by companies (well, mostly).

The point of insurance is not placing a value in a database, that is just the way it is recorded.

But then that money would show up as an accounting error unless they're cooking their books.

> Maybe the didn't ban bots that much so they could hide their own "bots"

They don't need to; they own the market, they get 15% + a flat fee for every sale. The items listed for 250 in the article? Blizzard earned 38.50 from sales like those, which is probably more than they earn per game sold via their own webshop. And the bans were wholly ineffective too, and they knew it - the botters would simply buy more game licenses from their profits and continue printing money, recuperating their loss with just one item found/sold.

Agreed. I always find it odd when digital items are referred to as "non-existent", as though their intangibility makes them any less real or valuable.

Although I can only perceive them through specialised devices, pack of electrons trapped in a cell or magnetic wave patterns on a platter sound perfectly physical to me.

I'd imagine just about anything that exists in any capacity can be tied to the physical in some way. I think that in this context, "tangible" means more than that.

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