Pocket: World of Warcraft's gold rush has upended Blizzard’s economy

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"The WoW Token is a simple market. All the tokens are identical, and have a static real-money cost. When there are more people wanting to buy gold than people wanting to sell gold, the price falls. When there are more people looking to sell gold than buy it, the price rises."

Pocket: World of Warcraft's gold rush has upended Blizzard’s economy

When Blizzard (the people who run World of Warcraft) first

"Prices fluctuated so much because nobody knows what a WoW Token is worth now. Since the WoW Token interface also doesn’t let you know how many tokens are actually for sale at any given time, it’s unclear whether buyers and sellers are rushing into and out of the market at different price points, or whether a single gold-rich buyer using a low point as an opportunity to liquidate can send the price skyrocketing."

Pocket: World of Warcraft's gold rush has upended Blizzard’s economy

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Comments

There is no excuse for not taking cards

So we went to the pub. For lunch. Seven of us. Say £20 per head. £100+ quid. Say £50 quid gross for the pub. Colleague goes to order food and drinks and pay at the bar. Apologetic barmaid comes over to explain that their “card machine” is down, so she can only accept cash. Under normal circumstances I would have simply walked out, feeling it wholly inappropriate to reward such a poorly managed establishment and, as a functioning actor in a capitalist economy, done my duty to depress their lunchtime takings. Here’s what we wanted to say: This is absurd. This is 2016 not 1916. Your card machine is down? Well, so what! Are you seriously telling me that mein host has no mobile phone number capable of registering for PingIt or PayM? That none of the staff or the pub itself have a PayPal account that I can send the money to? That neither the owners nor managers not contingency planners thought to tuck an iZettle behind the bar to use when the clunky and expensive GPRS terminal fails for o...

Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force

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We could fix mobile security, you know. We don't, but we could

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...

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