After many emails and struggle sessions to get VIrwox’s OMC currency working at Pirate’s Atoll, I have given up on it. Even if I had been able to get it working properly (which I was not), the system did not inspire the confidence desired in a virtual world currency. Fernando Oliveira, our hosting guru, left no stone unturned in trying to get this to work, but at the end of the day, Virwox could not really help, and we think the problem lived somewhere in the closed black box of Virwox. Virwox is still an OK place to exchange virtual currencies, but I don’t see OMC as viable going forward. Come to think of it, at any of the grids where OMC is installed, I have never seen a successful sale of anything in OMC.
Contrast the month I spent trying to sell myself one of my own prims with OMC, with the 15-20 minutes I spent setting up a store on Kitely Market, leading to a sale about an hour later. If I put a URL loader in an in-world prim for sale, then clicking the prim goes right to the sale page. Easier to set-up, use and buy with, and it is hypergrid friendly. The only problem is that Kitely currency cannot be cashed out, and forcing people to use Paypal, also subjects them to a fee. It isn’t bad, and I will keep a Kitely store, but it isn’t a total solution.
I always envisioned Pirate’s Atoll as a place to be free from the man and his controls and money. The only logical solution is a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. There is not a full-fledged currency system for bitcoin yet, although it is being worked on by Edmund in Tokyo of Sloodle fame. He also wrote this brilliant article: 5 reasons grids should use Bitcoin (if I ever get around to finishing the money server).
Bitcoin is still useful for manual person to person transfers, as all you need is the address in chat or a QR code on a prim. I have replaced all of the Virwox ATMs in-world, with ATMs that connect to Blockchain Wallet. This allows everyone to be their own banker with their own bank, with currency that can be sent anywhere to anyone with no limits. The next phase will be to set up a webstore that takes both Paypal and Bitcoin. Virtual objects will be delivered as IARs at first, but eventually, we will have an LSL<—->PHP (webstore API) bridge to allow the webstore to deliver prims. The final phase should be something like the money server that Edmund is working on.
UPDATE: These scripts by Alan Tupper make me think that implementing cryptocurrency might be made easy by using a solid wallet API: