Quote:
Originally Posted by villagetinker
It is a place where you can spend real money on completely nonexistent items that apparently can only be seen on a computer screen, NOT for me.
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This is not new. Second Life has existed since 2003. You can buy bitcoin, which is not a actual physical thing but you pay real money for it. In fact, whenever you buy stock, you are not buying a physical actual thing. You can't just go into the Intel store and say "Yeah I want 20 intel processor chips, here's my stock certificate." You can't demand that the secretary at the Intel company give you her pen, just because you have stock in the company.
Meanwhile, there have existed online games that are "pay to play" for decades, where you own only your own creative content - but you don't own the code it's written in.
This forum, Talk of the Villages? You can only see it via the internet. It is a physically non-existent thing. And yet - the owners of it own it, and pay for the privilege.