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Bitcoin Businesses

Virtual Real Estate Plot Sells for Record $2.4 Million (reuters.com) 72

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
A patch of virtual real estate in the online world Decentraland sold for a record $2.4 million worth of cryptocurrency, the buyer crypto investor Tokens.com and Decentraland said on Tuesday. From a report: Decentraland is an online environment -- also called a "metaverse" -- where users can buy land, visit buildings, walk around and meet people as avatars. Such environments have grown in popularity this year, as the pandemic caused people to spend more time online. read more Interest surged last month when Facebook changed its name to Meta to reflect its focus on developing virtual reality products for the metaverse. Decentraland is a specific type of metaverse that uses blockchain. Land and other items in Decentraland are sold in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a kind of crypto asset. Crypto enthusiasts buy land there as a speculative investment, using Decentraland's cryptocurrency, MANA. A subsidiary of Tokens.com, called the Metaverse Group, bought a patch of real estate for 618,000 MANA on Monday, which was around $3.27 million at the time of this Slashdot post, a Decentraland spokesman and a statement by Tokens.com said.
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Virtual Real Estate Plot Sells for Record $2.4 Million More

Virtual Real Estate Plot Sells for Record $2.4 Million

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  • It's all a fantasy. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @12:28PM (#62017183) Journal

    Sounds about right. Pretend money paying for pretend land.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nevermindme ( 912672 )
      Fiat currency is only backed by the desire to get it via risk or work. Sounds nearly the same to me.

      Despite crypto currency as a modern tool, 99.9% of all currency is fiat, and the physical economic world still works in real life.

      • its a dang government monopoly (Score:5, Informative)

        by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @01:02PM (#62017345) Homepage Journal

        Yet when I try to establish my own country and make my own shit coin, someone always tries to stop me. And if I make wooden nickels that aren't backed by a national bank and standing army, people don't take it seriously and it quickly falls into disuse (if the local government doesn't immediately shut it down). It's almost like there is more to a fiat currency than the paper that it is printed on.

        One thing that crypto doesn't solve is a government's desire for control and exclusivity. If they aren't looped into every transaction between individuals, you can count on a government to take steps remedy that situation.

        • One thing that crypto doesn't solve is a government's desire for control and exclusivity. If they aren't looped into every transaction between individuals, you can count on a government to take steps remedy that situation.

          Because what a government wants is for anyone and everyone to create their currency and have all of it circulating in the economy. Didn't learn very well from the Articles of Confederation, did you?
        • The US dollar has as collateral 9 million km^2 of land and the labor of 340 million people. Bitcoin is secured with some servers in China and shady derivatives that your crazy uncle is sure will be worth billions next week. The moment there is some margin call event, Bitcoin will sink like a stone.

        • when I try to establish my own country and make my own shit coin, someone always tries to stop me.

          How many times have you tried?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Microsoft has XBOX Points or whatever they are called. Essentially a private currency, backed by a private company that doesn't have a standing army or national bank.

          It's entire purpose is to obfuscate the real price of things and let Microsoft hold your fiat currency, i.e. it's basically a scam designed to make you poorer.

          And yet somehow it's legal and nobody tries to stop them.

        • You just created a real deflationary coin, just burn 2 percent of each transaction. Bonus if they are made of hardwood. Mmm smoked ribs.
      • Fiat currency is mostly backed by the underlying economy, i.e. what gets bought and sold with it. That's why you can print more money if your economy grows (in fact, you'll want to do that). There's a little bit more to it than that of course, but a tangible economy is what's missing from crypto. It's 1% people paying for pizza as a novelty or for their VPN, 5% ransom payoffs, the rest is speculative.

        Fiat currency and crypto are both worth what any fool will pay for it, in both cases it come down to t

      • sounds nearly the same

        Real land is real, you can go sit on it and say "this is mine," and defend it or have a government defend your claim to it. Virtual land is imaginary, if the company who runs the servers shuts them down, changes the "ownership," or deletes the "land" you might still "own" the NFT but it doesn't point to anything. Real land is a finite resource, virtual "land" is essentially infinite.

        So other than being almost entirely different yes, they're exactly the same.

        • Can I invade this virtual land and conquer it, see my enemies driven before me, and hear the lamentation of the women?
        • Agreed, I sit and sleep on my real property. And work too. I wonder if the virtual land has property taxes? Even a 1% property tax on 2.4M is 24K/yr in virtual money!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Real land is real, you can go sit on it and say "this is mine," and defend it or have a government defend your claim to it. Virtual land is imaginary, if the company who runs the servers shuts them down, changes the "ownership," or deletes the "land" you might still "own" the NFT but it doesn't point to anything. Real land is a finite resource, virtual "land" is essentially infinite.

          So other than being almost entirely different yes, they're exactly the same.

          In other words, digital "land", like other digital

      • If only people 40 years ago could see this.

        If selling virtual items for real money in MMOs wasn't crazy enough, someone had to take this and dial it up to 100.

          Stop the loon wagon, I want to get off!

        • IDK, I use to sell wow accounts in the wotlk days. It was so easy to level up a character and get them to "raid ready" status before selling off the account. T7 paladin would go for $200.

          Basically was like having a free sub while enjoying the game. I never played with the intention of actually doing that but when it became a great way to leave the game for six months, I enjoyed the nice exit bonus.

          • "IDK, I use to sell wow accounts in the wotlk days. It was so easy to level up a character and get them to "raid ready" status before selling off the account. T7 paladin would go for $200"

            My sister used to sell Everquest items for upwards of a couple hundred $$$. She even funded the purchase of a new PC this way.

            The practice was against EQ's TOS (IIRC), but people did it anyway.

            The more unscrupulous sellers would change the account password once money exchanged hands, robbing the buy

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by khchung ( 462899 )

        Fiat currency is only backed by the desire to get it via risk or work. Sounds nearly the same to me.

        US dollars are backed by all the oil in Middle East. Ever heard of "petrodollar"? Most countries needed oil to function, hence most countries will accept USD. So with USD you can buy what you want in most places on Earth, hence USD has value to you.

        For other fiat currencies, generally, are backed by the economy of the respective country issuing the money. E.g. with some Euro notes in hand, one can buy stuff in Europe. Same with JPY buying stuff from Japan, RMB buying stuff from China. As long as the

    • The only thing standing between a person who blows major money on stuff like this and a mental institution is the amount of wealth they have.

        Why do so many creepy people have so much money? :-\

      • The only thing standing between a person who blows major money on stuff like this and a mental institution is the amount of wealth they have.

        Well, there's nothing new there. I seem to recall reading, decades ago, a statement along the lines of "the difference between eccentric and mentally ill is simply the amount of cash on hand".

      • This reminds me far too much of the mangled wreck of a brand new Jaguar that a gas station operator in fancy-pants Brentwood (Los Angeles, late '70s) had left in his parking area with a sign "Customized by Drugs".
      • I mean, apparently Facebook is all in on metaverse and Microsoft too. So we know it's going to be a real thing. A digital land grab is not the craziest thing in the world to invest in.

        • "metaverse" - buzzword alert.

          Sounds like something out of a Marvel comic.

            We are seeing the VR bubble being pumped up and hyped again, and it will burst just like before.

            This whole "Metaverse" business is just Second Life all over again, and if you mention that name to people, you get blank stares in return.

            Only a fool would blow millions on something that can and will be yanked away in an instant.

      • Why do so many creepy people have so much money?

        I love answering rhetoricals so here goes, because it's a lot easier to get rich by taking advantage of other people so sociopaths and even psychopaths are at an advantage in a capitalist society. It's literally like the goal was to create a nation of fuckfaces.

    • Not ready, player one?

  • Oh God (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Malays2 bowman ( 6656916 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @12:30PM (#62017199)

    Not only has the shark been jumped, but they made the Fonz jump the entire ocean.

      Gee I wish I had that kind of money to flush down the toilet while people lose their homes for want of a hundred dollars!

    • That's assuming it's even a real transaction and not another case of the owner of the paying themself to make headlines so they call sell their multimillion dollar property at a low price of a mere million.

  • Fake transaction with fake currency for fake land (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tphb ( 181551 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @12:31PM (#62017203)

    Can we please have a end to the "$1Zillion NFT purchase using StupidCoin" stories. There's no liquidity in whatever the heck is "MANA", so there's no real value.

    Here's an ICO for "IdiotCoin", 1 of 10 quadrillion. Key: #000001. I'll buy it from myself for $1. There, now I'm a multi-quadrillionaire. Now I'll use 1 IdiotCoin to purchase virtual land on a virtual server. Wow, this is making me rich!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

      Today's volume for MANA is over 150 million, about 3x that of bitcoin at the moment on the exchange I use most. Up 30% today, probably due to this.

      Say what you will about tulips, but at the end of the day you can plant them and get a pretty flower out of it.

    • Can we please have a end to the "$1Zillion NFT purchase using StupidCoin" stories. There's no liquidity in whatever the heck is "MANA", so there's no real value.

      Here's an ICO for "IdiotCoin", 1 of 10 quadrillion. Key: #000001. I'll buy it from myself for $1. There, now I'm a multi-quadrillionaire. Now I'll use 1 IdiotCoin to purchase virtual land on a virtual server. Wow, this is making me rich!

      HTF does this nonsense get modded "insightful"? More accurate would be "inciteful".

      MANA has traded almost $6B in value over the last 24 hours. That's more than over half of the S&P 500 has. That's 6x what Mastercard stock has traded, 28x times what ConocoPhillips has traded, 22x what Medtronic has traded. If that's "no liquidity", I'd like to understand what your definition of that term is.

    • I would like to subscribe to your newletter!

  • Selling Virtual Bridges! (Score:5, Funny)

    by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @12:34PM (#62017223)
    For those interested, I will be selling virtual bridges to connect these digital islands for the next three hours only. By owning a bridge in the metaverse you will be able to charge a toll to any avatars hopping from island to island. Don't miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to become metaverse rich overnight! Don't delay. BUY NOW!

  • ... well, you know the rest, and no, it doesn't have anything to do with partition tables.

    • Where do you see money? I see someone handing over pretend value for pretend property. It's pretty much kids playing in the sandbox, just with more technology around it all.

  • Any reason why they shouldn't have to pay them ie school taxes, business taxes so on and so on. They keep saying its real money and its a real investment then they should have to pay real life taxes on their property IMO.
    • Don't forget the recent trend demanding that rich people get taxed on unrealized increases in wealth. So when you buy 10 memecoin for $1 and two days later some darkweb syndicate drives the "value" up to $5mil each due to to Washing activity, you suddenly owe the IRS several million dollars.

  • This isn't really that new - these kinds of transactions and bigger were happening in 2012 in Entropia - a free to play game that you could buy stuff in to improve your virtual existence.

    https://www.eurogamer.net/arti... [eurogamer.net]

    That game has the clever idea of suckering in people to spend real money on weapons, equipment and ammo, with the in-game currency (PED) pegged to the USD and exchangeable both ways - at one point I think you could even have a real world debit card that would let you spend your in-game curr

  • I had such a nice property in Napa Valley, early homestead, numbers in the 800s. It had everything including the blinking text and the gif file of a pen scratching a letter and folding it into an envelop.

    Good neighborhood too. One neighbor kept talking about "Media Bypass" and the other one was into creating the canonical list of blond jokes. The one next to the canonical list of blond jokes was compiling a canonical list of bomb making recipes. I think it is the same guy with two homesteads.

    Never knew v

  • You know what they say - you can't lose money on land because they aren't making it anymore - oh wait!
  • 1st step toward pod living

  • First Cybersquatting of the Metaverse

  • Fiat currency

    What if I don't to buy a Fiat but a Honda?

  • All This Has Happened Before (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @04:10PM (#62018039)

    From the video on their web page, this MMO looks like a low-quality version of Second Life. Where you could do all the things they advertise for this one.

    Including of course, buy and selling virtual land.

    In what way is all this not just a bad re-run of Second Life?

    (Answer: Instead of $US it's BTC.)

    It's also fascinating to me that nobody ever mentions Second Life in the metaverse-hype press?

    It's not like Ready Player One. It's like Battlestar Galactica: All this has happened before, and it will happen again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Yep, and if this MMO takes off, in a few years people will be saying the same thing for whatever replaces it. All the attention comes from the speculative investment, once things have settled the 'get rich quick' allure wears off and people using it for things other than, well, playing the actual game, lose interest and wait for the next fad.

  • .. or not?

    Does anyone remember Second Life anyway?

    Yes the NFT of the early 2000s.

  • with way too much money waste money on stupid shit

  • Step 1: Tap into stupid.
    Step 2: Place bucket under tap.
    Step 3: Profit.

    There is no step that consists of "????".

    With this particular well you can see the excess stupid flaring off at night from the space station.

  • Let me know when I can cut down people with a katana and actually kill people in real life by having them read a virtual piece of paper....

  • Their pyramid nature is meta, they keep expanding the scope of scam its self to keep victims hooked.

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