Tag Archives: virtual currencies

This Cory Doctorow column in the Guardian about gaming and currencies is a nice update to a trend I’ve been tracking since 1996 and the launch of Hollywood Stock Exchange.

At the time, when I was running HSX I insisted on allowing users to convert Hollywood Dollars into U.S. dollars at a fixed exchange rate of 1 million to 1. The profit to us was pretty good because by the time a user on HSX made 1 million Hollywood dollars clicking around our site, we had served more than 1 dollar in ads.  The NYT called the Hollywood Dollar the first virtual currency in existence in a story from around that time.

What’s interesting to me today, is not that virtual currencies are just now being understood as a viable piece of the overall economy but how supposedly smart people, like America’s favorite economist Paul Krugman, fail to understand, or have decided not to inform Americans that the Federal Reserve Bank and U.S. Treasury issuing U.S. dollars is no different than online game currencies.

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