[extropy-chat] Prediction markets and Second Life virtual economy

[Neil H.]

Below is an email which I recently sent to the Foresight Exchange discussion
list, which I thought might be of interest to this group. I think it would
be very interesting to try some of these ideas out, but unfortunately I have
too many time pressures from grad school to coordinate such an effort
myself. Would anybody in this group be interested in pursuing this?

There were some pretty interesting follow-up responses to my email. You can
see the entire thread here:
http://forum.javien.com/conv.php?new=true&convdata=id::GjKLIYRD-eMmu-ZaAz-ztrl-89xB1SINPC_J

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Neil H. <neuronexmachina at gmail.com>
Date: Feb 15, 2006 11:05 PM
Subject: fx-discuss: Idea: Prediction markets and Second Life virtual
economy
To: fx-discuss at ideosphere.com

A quick idea I had which I wanted to toss into the open...

A little while back I read this Wired article about the Second Life virtual
world, and its active virtual economy:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70153-0.html?tw=wn_technology_1

Has anybody considered taking advantage of Second Life's economy and
scriptable world to create an in-game prediction market? Instead of using a
purely reputation-based currency such a market could use the game's Linden
Dollars. It seems that in-game scripts can communicate with external
servers<http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=communications>via
email or XML-RPC, so one could probably have such an in-game script
placing orders with a server running the open-source Foresight Exchange
software.

One might even imagine creating a Futarchy-like system, with bids made on
decisions about how to make the market prosper in the Second Life world.
That could be interesting.

I should add the caveat that I haven't actually tried Second Life myself
yet, as I currently lack a personal computer.

-- Neil
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