Journal #8: Virtual Wealth

I found this novel quite interesting since I did not know that virtual worlds actually have virtual banks that can also be converted to real money. Upon reading Charles Stross’ novel, I thought that the book was dealing with real people. But as I read further I realized that the reader had to deal with both virtual users and the real world as well. Which made the read all the more captivating. However, I did not like how the book kept jumping from character to character. I wanted the book to keep with one person and finish with them before reading about another character.

It was quite clever how Jack came up with a solution to find the items that were stolen from Hackmans economic consultancy firm which houses valuable items. Jack said, “The insurance claim request got fifty-one responses before I kicked back last night. I fed them in and set the spider running on the two largest auction sites that handle cross-game Zone trades. Twelve of the items turned up immediately, in a single stash that KingHorror9 is trying to shift. KingHorror9 is currently logged as active in Forgotten Futures, and a quick ping test suggests they’re local latency is under ten milliseconds.” Wayne took the active account name KingHorror9 given to him by Elaine. Once Wayne ran this in the database, he called back Elaine and Jack and told them the suspect’s name was Wu Chen. The way that jack came up with the idea is similar to what they use for search engines and member look ups. Except Jack was smart enough to house both of these search engines into one application.

I felt that Charles Stross’ book was very realistic at times and at other times I thought it was a fantasy. One example was when Elaine said, “Finally, you pop back out into a stonily pompous Victorian satellite town centre: except that back home, buildings don’t usually have battlements with cannons carved into them.” The reason I use this example is because the book starts out as if it depicts a fantasy world but the more you read, the more you realize that it’s hard to tell reality from virtual reality.

The real bank robbery is actually a virtual bank robbery. Now this made me ask the question, “Why would someone want to rob a virtual bank?” But the next thought that came to mind was that the robber could take all the things that he stole and put them on eBay and sell it for four times the amount it was worth.

The direction that I see technology going for virtual users would be a global virtual banking system. This system would have all users globally logged into one central global bank that deals with all banking transactions for all virtual worlds. I believe that search applications and virtual world economic banks will one day merge. And if there were a crime like the one in the book, law officials would not have to go through the same expanded procedures that the characters in the book had to go through. Whereas if there were a global banking system, there would be a global search engine that would provide the assailants’ names, addresses, and credit card information all with a few keystrokes of the keyboard.