LindenLab to regulate banks in SecondLife !

LindenLab posted yesterday on their official blog a post saying they will start to remove ATMs from SecondLide as of 22 of January !

The only way a bank could continue to operate in SL is to register with LL:

"We will not apply this policy to companies who submit a registration statement, charter, or other applicable license from a governing regulatory authority, or who are merely conducting marketing or education, but not accepting payments."

As a reaction, many people started to withdraw their money from banks, including from JT Financials and the SL Capital Exchange. Consequently cash withdrawals from JTF has been limited (see this post from Arbitrage Wise in the forums).

For the time being I do trust the team at JTF to manage this situation, even if I'm not really surprised by LL decision. My money is still by JTF and partly invested in SLCapex, and remember that even if the withdrawal stop may look "Ginko-ish" the reasons are totally different: Ginko was short of cash - JTF is not !

So no panic, and let's see how things will go on ! The LL decision is new, and JTF will submit for a registration, so the best for the time being is wait and see. There could even be good business to do !

Post number 201 - Looking back

This blog was born on the 1st of June 2007, 4 months and 26 days ago, and this is post number 201... a good time to look at all what I've done in SecondLife since.

I started with the goal of making money easily, using camping and banks. Simple plan, just a matter of how long I could camp and how much I could get out of the bank. I quickly learnt how find good camping spots, and how to re-configure the Second Life client to avoid being disconnected after 30 minutes of idle time.

While camping, I met people who are now good friends and who teach me a lot. I particularly think of Josephina Bonetto, who is now running Club Josephina. Jo also suggested to create a group to share ideas and good camping spots with other campers. I made it, and we are now 82 members in "Free Money from JohnLight Raymaker". Campsite sharing continues to go on, I regularly post good adresses to the group, and some other active members do it as well. It even happend that I used the group to find new campsites for myself ! I also decided that when I will get the 1'000'000L$, I will give it to one of the members of the group.

Jo also suggested to create an alt, a second avatar so as to be able to camp more, using my spare computer. I knew later than some SL players are running up to 8 avatars simultaneously ! When I met Jo, she was envisaging to buy a small piece of land to be able to change clothing in a quiet place... Not only she made it, but she is now running a night club and renting appartments !

As my wealth was increasing, I lost nearly all of it (10'000L$ by that time) when Ginko bank collapsed. This has been hard period, and I one lesson I learnt was to keep a separate reserve in a safe place. Since then I keep 10% of my total earnings apart. At this point an other important people comes in the story: Stroh Bing. He was kind enough to put me back on track, with a gift to compensate for what I lost in Ginko collapse !

Another problem hit the camping community at the same period: LindenLab made gambling illegal in Second Life. As gambling was a main source of income for camping operators, the number of campsites was strongly reduced, as well as the payrates and maximal earnings.

Another important people in my story is Arbitrage Wise, CEO of JT Financials, and SL Capital exchange. Apart from giving me very interesting inside views of a SL bank, he gave me 5'000L$ to invest on SL Capital Exchange ! Until now my results as a day trader are not exactly good, these 5'000L$ are now worth... 3'800 L$. Ooops. I'm still looking for better investment strategy.

More recently, I organized two contests to animate the little commuinity that is forming arount me and this blog. This was a good opportunity to reward friends I met through the group. They are way too numerous now to be all mentionned here, and I don't want to make any jealous... I won't cite bad people either, I'm in a positive mood right now.

To close this mini restrospective, I can say that what started as a purely economical quest turned into a passionating human adventure. It had up and downs, I met all kind of people, we exchanged views and ideas. I want to warmly thank all of you, who made SecondLife part of my Real Life...

And now, turn towards future, and see how to get this million Linden Dollars !

PS: Genie, you're the sweetest person I met in SL, I could not finish this post without talking of you.

New strategy implemented

As you can see from the "My present balance" summary on the right hand side, I did start according to what I defined previously. The deposit by Midas was ok, except that for this week they pay 0.11% daily, instead of the 0.20% I mentionned. So this will bring only 11 L$ a day, but that's easy money.

I mention the APEZ deposit, even if it's empty for the time being. I will start to fill it up next saturday, with the first Midas interests. The plan is to do the transfers from Midas to APEZ on the week-ends, as kind of a standard procedure.

Some of you may question how I got 10'000 to invest in Midas so quickly. That's a good question, and its answer is simple. Someone from the group, which is also a freqent blog reader, kindly gave me this money after he saw the results of my loss by Ginko.

So I want to warmly thank this sponsor, because without him restarting with the new strategy would have been longer. In fact I would have had to gather the 10'000 L$ again by camping and other activities.

I'm also working on the shop where you will soon be able to get some items from JohnLight's advenutres for few Lindens. I'm also envisaging a donation box, as a very easy way to earn some additional Lindens. More on this later

Touring the banks

I spent some time today and yesterday looking around for banks in Second Life. Strangely, some of them are offering daily rates equivalent to the ex-Ginko ones. I resisted the temptation to put any money here for the moment.

The remaining question is still the same I already raised in previous post. How can they offer such a rate ? What kind of economical activity can offer more than 44% a year ? If the answer is that they pay interests with the new deposits, their fate will be identical to Ginko's, so I don't really want to renew the experience...

Regarding this blog, you will see that I now opened comments to anyone, not only blogger users. I hope it won't get spammed by commenting bots...

Everything clear now about Ginko

As announced by Ginko, I got an account by WSE (www.wselive.com), and I received one Ginko Perpetual Bond (GPB) for each Linden Dollar I had by Ginko.

I had to go to a WSE ATM to obtain a password, and then I could access my account. The next bad surprise was that these bonds are currently worth 0.16L$ each ! So I lost 84% if my total in the Ginko crash.

As I'm back, I was able to get back online as well, and I saw that many campsites did vanish, and the lands are now for sale. This is probably becasue they got all their money from gambling, so they have nothing left to redistribute via camping.

The group "Free Money from JohnLight" is still active, and I got some feed-back and support from various member, and I want to thank them for that, it is good to feel such interest in what I'm trying to do.

The next steps are to decide what to do with the bonds, sell them yet and loose 84%, or hope they will get more value, which is not so likely, and keep them for a while. I must also find new campsites, and I hope the group will be helpful for that.

The quest for the 1'000'000 L$ is not yet stopped, so stay tuned !

Unknown balance !

This is one more post about Ginko, as my camping activities are still suspended as I'm on vacation. As you can see on the right column, my balance is unknown, as Ginko decided to convert all deposits into Ginko Perpetual Bonds, as explained on their website. I copied their last announcement at the end of this post, as I'm not sure how long it will remain online.

I did not receive any direct information from Ginko yet about the account to be created, where is my money, and what I can do with the bonds. What is clear nontheless is that my goal of becoming millionaire in SecondLife by doing nothing can not be achieved withoud a savings bank (see my previous post on this topic).

I will now wait until I'm back from vacation, and give a thought to all of this to decide if and how to continue...

The request for posts is still open, so if you want to express yourself, it's the right time.

Dear accountholders,

Ginko Financial was established in December 2004 at a time when Second Life had less than 20,000 residents. As one of the strongest brands in Second Life we have seen the economy grow to many millions of residents and thousands choose Ginko Financial as their preferred financial services provider.

As you probably already know, Ginko Financial has experienced some challenges in these last couple of weeks. Following the ban on gambling in Second Life we began experiencing a wave of withdrawals from Ginko Financial. This led the funds we keep in reserve for day to day use to be exhausted, which evolved into a full blown panic depleting even our last line of cash reserves and resulting in the current situation, with about L$50,000,000 queued up for withdrawal. This situation is unsustainable, as we would be forced to sell off our assets at a significant discount in order to honor such withdrawals, thus severely harming Ginko Financial's long term prospects and it's ability to ultimately honor all of it's obligations to accountholders.

We had some hope that calm would return to the public and we could resume normal operation, but that does not seem to be likely or even possible anymore. Drastic steps have to be taken in order to protect YOUR wealth while giving an escape valve to anyone who is in panic or simply in need. We are not going to vanish and the investments we made still exist and will not be sold off.

After considerable thought, we have concluded that the only way forward from this is to convert, compulsorily, all customer deposits into a tradeable debt security called Ginko Perpetual Bonds. These bonds, listed on the World Stock Exchange (www.wselive.com), will allow Ginko Financial to recover from recent events by removing all pressure from our cash reserves while providing accountholders with a way to cash out on an open market.

All accountholders will have an account automatically created on the World Stock Exchange (www.wselive.com). Customers will receive one bond with a face value of L$1 for every L$1 they have deposited in Ginko Financial. Each Ginko Perpetual Bond will yield L$0.03 or 3% of face value per quarter (every three months). Ginko Financial will be actively purchasing these bonds in order to help keep prices at as high a level as possible.

Ginko Financial will bounce back from this and if you stick with us, you wll not lose anything. If you must sell the bonds, then you must sell, but I advise against accepting low prices.

Regards,
Nicholas Portocarrero / Andre Sanchez

Ginko news again (Still away from home)

Still no camping as I'm on my holliday spot and have tons of more interesting things to do, but I just wanted to give an update on what is going on by Ginko, as I was myself curious about it.

The Ginko website contains a recent and quite detailled update about what went on, and what is the situation. Basic appologies, and few information about how the things will go on with the withdrawal limit, and so on.

The statistics on the website show a volume over 55'000'000 L$ for the last seven days, and I bet it's mostly withdrawals.

The last totals are:
L$104,042,037 in deposits
L$42,059,403 in term deposits

The interesting thing in these figures is that the term deposits increased since I started tracking them ! This indicates (at least in my view) that people trusting Ginko tend to use more term deposits, because of the better interest, and the other try to get their money out.

I hope now that the trend on savings deposits will stop soon, because moving from 150 million L$ to 104 million L$ over 5 days does not sound good. Stay tuned on this blog for next updates on this hot topic.

Ginko YoYo going up again. (Post from the Cannes)

Today, Ginko changed its daily interest rate again, it is back to 0.1%. This is good news, and probably a good sign for the future as well.

What is a bit less encouraging is the total deposited in savings accounts, which is now down to L$139,536,198 ! An ammount close to 10'000'000 L$ has been withdrawn over less than 2 days ! Hey, at least they had money to pay it !

I'm now on my holliday spot, so no camping, just a short update of this blog while checking my mails.

Summary before leaving

I will be on vacation for the next week, and I will probably not have an internet connection there, so here is kind of a summary post before this.

From the beginning, I could earn about 13'000 L$, part of them being interests from Ginko interests. I used various camping places, have been banned from some because I was saying too much about their rates.

The media ball mechanism also helped me to earn some more money, being a reseller. In the misc category also comes the trick with the Debug Menu, making possible to stay connected permanently, without going idle or disconnected.

But the "creation" I'm more proud of the certainly the "Free Money from JohnLight" group. It was originally intended as a way for me to inform members about good campsites, but it is actually going much farther than that. It became kind of a community, in which active members also share their campsite locations, tips for easy money, views of the Second Life future.

We also had interesting discussions about the gambling ban, what SL economy will become, and so on. And as you know, Josephina, the very first group member, is now running a club, an she shares her feed-back on that with the group, making it really interesting.

I wish all readers a good next week, have fun, take care, earn as much free lindens as you can ! See you soon

Last Ginko News

No, this blog is not becoming specialized in Ginko, but as things continue to move there, and given the imporance to me of a savings bank, I care of this changes.

Ginko now implemented a withdrawal queue, in which each withdrawal request is put, and then processed on a first come first serve basis. Last time I checked, there was about 3'000'000 L$ of requests waiting.

The statistics from their website are now:
Savings deposits 150'791'283 L$ (was 154'962'323L$)
Term deposits 35'955'842 L$ (was 32'233'381 L$)

and this clearly shows money flowing out. Add to that the 3 millions waiting in the withdrawal queue...

Ginko on free fall ?

When I posted the bad news about Ginko, I did not expected to post again on this topic so soon... but Ginko again announced a reduction of the daily interest rates on the savings accounts, which do now pay 0.01% daily. This is 10 times less than three days ago, and 13 times less than one week ago !

Apparently the process is speeding up...

Bad news from Ginko again - Oops

The following text is an extract from the Ginko website.

"Please be aware, your withdrawal limit will show as L$0 if there isn't enough available to withdraw. Alternately, it will show you how much you can withdraw given the current reserve available, up to L$5,000 per day. This is a temporary implementation."

Not enough available to withdraw ?

How bad is that ? Ok, they give you tons of warnings when you open your account, and they state there are no guarantees, and so on. Anyway, that sounds bad, especially as this morning, the ATM said my limit is zero !

The website also mentions robots being used to withdraw, which is illegal. But if people was their money back so madly, that's not exactly good sign.

To be able to follow the story, here are present values from the Ginko statistics:

Total in savings deposits: L$154,962,383
Total in term deposits: L$35,223,381
Accounts created in the last 7 days: 322

We will see in the next days if there will be a Ginko collapse or if they will survive. So a few questions to you now. Do you think Ginko will go bankrupt ? Do you use them, and if yes, what is your plan ? Withdraw as much as you can, or do you maintain your trust ?

The importance of a savings bank... to me

I will not repeat here all what I said in my first post about the interests paid by a savings bank and their important in what I try to do. Basically, earning 1'000'000 L$ on a base of 30 L$ per day would last for 90 years without a bank paying daily interest, and 10 years with such a bank.

From this it is clear that I won't become a millionaire by doing nothing if I can't have a bank to help me growing my fortune.

For other activities in Second Life, the use of banks makes things easier when you have to pay salaries, or to share money accross accounts. But the savings part is then much less important. APEZ for example is doing a good job for the kind of tasks a business owner has to do.

So savings accounts are probably helpful only to people like me, wanting money out of nothing.

The total withdraws from Ginko within the last 13 hours are about half a million Linden Dollars, on a total on saving accounts of 154 million dollars. So yes the money is flowing out, but not so dramatically.

Is Ginko in trouble ? Interest rate lowered again !

Today, Ginko lowered the daily interest rate from 0.1% to 0.05%. This is the lower rate since I started earning in Second Life. Another bad sign is that my ATM told me that the maximum I could withdraw today was 0L$ ! But may be this is because of what follows...

Additionally to the savings account, Ginko is offering term deposits. Basicall a blocked account from which you can not withdraw the money until a fixed term. The benefit to the customer is an higher interest rate.

As I don't need my money now, I opened such a deposit for 5'000 L$ this morning, and I got a daily rate of 0.19% over 30 days. This evening, when I saw that they lowered the daily rate for saving accounts, I went back to the term deposit, and I saw that they offer no 0.25% ! So I opened a scond one, of 7'000 L$ for 30 days...

I cross fingers now, hoping that they won't collapse within the next 30 days !

Post number 100 - Back to business with some worries

For the 100th post of this blog, I have good news. Apparently, Linden Lab finally achieved to make Second LIfe usable again, and I could restart my camping activities. JaneLight even made 100 L$ in an overnight camping in the YAKA-CLUB on Camazotz !

As today was national holiday, I also had some good camping during the day, as can be seen on my balance indicator.

On the bad side, I must report that Ginko lowered its daily interest rate from 0.13% to 0.1%. There were rumors on them not having enough cash compared to the total of deposits... This lead to a limitation of withdrawals to 5'000 L$ a day, later increased to 10'000 L$ a day, making the rumor even stronger. About Ginko, my personal question is what do they to with the money to be able to offer such a rate (44% a year). I will develop that in a next post.

After the gambling ban, and the technical troubles last days, it is hard to analyze the economical statistics published by Linden Lab. Given the strong change this could have on the SL economy, I will keep an eye on these stats during the next days.

The gambling days are over - news about the 1'000'000 L$ lottery

It is now clearly confirmes that any gambling in Second Life is agains the Terms and Conditions of use. One indicator how serious it is is that even Ginko stopped their weekly lottery. I certainly did not visit all casinos, but I guess they all shut their slot machines down.

Another hint is that group notices for parties no longer mention any sploder. I'm even guessing if Platinum is impacted by that or not, as their camping rate is random. May be they escape the new rule because there is no need to pay to start earning.

Regarding the 1'000'000 L$ lottery I initially envisaged to do when I will have earnd my million Linden Dollars, I have to find something new. The only thing that won't change is that it will be given to one of the "Free Money from JohnLight" group.

10'000 L$ !

For the 90th post on this blog, I'm happy and proud to annouce that I just reach 10'000 L$ ! The camping night has been good, and I could cash 217 L$ by Ginko. Passing this new step makes me happy and motivated for the next steps, so stay tuned, and you will may be get 1'000'000 L$ soon, by joining the "Free Money from JohnLight" group !

"To 1'000'000 and beyond !"

A bit short... - 9826 L$ by Ginko

I missed my goal of 10'000 L$ by Ginko by the end of the week... As mentionned in the title, I have "only" 9826 L$. I hate admitting that I missed my objective, so let's say it is postponed ;-) !

Hopefully next week I will reach that objective, and be able to proceed with the 99% remaining ! I'm motivated again, and I hope JaneLight and JohnLight have good legs, because they will dance for hours next week !

Apfelland and crashes - 9222.15 by Ginko

This morning, I posted again JaneLight and JohnLight in Apfelland, but had poor results. JaneLight crashed nearly immediately, and JohnLight has been ejected from his bench after 12 L$ only.

Hopefully I had better camping this evening, so I could deposit 115 L$ by Ginko, reaching 9222.15. Depending on the week-end, I could reach the 10'000 L$ step sunday ! Sounds coooool... and good for my mood.

This week-end Josephina will inaugurate her club, more info in her "Club Josephina" group... This will certainly be a new cool place.

For the time, JaneLight and JohnLight are both camping on a 2L$ per 10 minutes bench in a very quiet place. I don't know yet if it is time limited or not. At least there are no animations, no trees, no avatars passing by, so I hope the client will not experience any difficulty.

Let's have a short break - 5722L$ by Ginko - 50 Group members

Lots of things happened since I've been banned from Platinum because of detailling their payrates.

Thanks to the group, I found a new good campsite called Xero Party, which is located on Willow Beach 245, 238, 21. They have three Dance Dance with rates of 3-3-2-2-1-1. So no pad paying zero, so no time wasted. However, they are limited to 100 L$ per dancer.

Nevertheless, other good new is that the 50th member joined the group, so the campsite sharing amongst members of "Free Money from JohnLight" will continue to increase.

I will be out of this business for two days, but I will also profit from this time to assess what went on until now, and see if any new strategy could help me get the million even quicker.