End of the challenge ?

Arbitrage Wise very recently announced that JT Financials will be reshaped in SL Wallet, and amongst decisions result from the banking ban, cash deposits will no longer produce interests.

Those of you who read this blog from its inception (thanks a lot...) know that interests are VITAL for me as sole camping or similar activities are not sufficient. It that the end of my challenge ?

Not sure... At first the JT Investment Certificates still exist. They are not paying interests but dividends. Their future is not clear yet, and I will wait for further news.

Moreover I have other investment ideas, but I don't want to tell too much about it now... suspense...

Nevertheless if I decided to end the quest now, I will stick to the rule I defined in the very beginning and award all my earnings (roughly 23'000L$) to a member of the "Free Money from JohnLight Raymaker" group in Second Life. It is not too late for you to join the group !

Eggs and Basket

As Mr. Oh very appropriately commented on my last post, I'm putting all my eggs in the same basket, and it is true that last time (Ginko...) this strategy gave catastrophic results.

However the think is a bit different this time, because all of the banking industry in SecondLife is at risk with the new ruling LL seems to put in place. As I already explained a bank is vital for me to achieve my goal.

So if all baskets fall down, my eggs will be broken anyway. As I have not a lot of time, diversifying outside banking is not possible, so the fate of my quest is strongly bound to the fate of SL banks...

2000 L$ by doing nothing !

Since I opened my account by JT Financials, the interests of my savings and the payments from the JT Investment Certificates totalize 2000 L$ !

This is only 0.2% of the million I aim for, but it is a good sign for two reasons:

• I got these 2000 L$ doing absolutely nothing
• The rate at which I earn interests is growing together with my savings

I also re-camped a few hours over last days, and even if I found hard to find good spots, I had the pleasure to re-talk with friends...

As this post is the last for 2007, let me wish you all a Happy New Year 2008 !

Personal news - Season's Greetings

The time I could spend in SecondLife for the last months has been reduced to an extreme minumum for various reasons on which I can now say more...

In spring 2008, I will change job, location, and country. Job hunting, decisions, and move preparation took a lot of time. This combined with the fall in camping possibilities took me away of SL, except for very brief visits.

After discussing with Wrag about producing tee-shirts and other goodies, I made it for another blog, with interesting results. Thus I also took an other way to become a millionaire (a bit obsessive...) with a tee-shirt blog and its associated shop.

The next two weeks should be a bit quieter, so I'll try to get in SL again, to meet all my friends there again (Jo, Angle, Genie, Alex, Rev, Stroh, Wrag, ... I did not forget about you).

My experience in SecondLife does certainly belong to the good things I made in 2007, and I want to thank you all, friends, reader, commenters, guest posters, because this blog is yours before all.

So I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and a very pleasant and successful Happy New Year 2008 !

Real Life is taking over Second Life

These days my real life is just going crazy. Many changes are in the air, and managing it uses all my spare time, so I have no time left for camping. As I don't want to miss decisions that will impact the rest of my life for the next 10 years, priority is clearly to Real Life. I keep an eye to my SL Capital Exchange investments, and will place orders if good opportunities show up.

The challenge is not stopped. You can still support me by opening accounts using the ATM in the shop, or buying items from the shop. All financial products will also continue to work automatically, increasing my fortune slowly but certainly.

I'll try to update the blog regularly, and keep you informed when I will become more active again.

Do you like Second Life goodies ?

T-shirt ? Cap ? Mug ? Mousepad ? Sticker ? Calendar ? Magnet ?

Would you like a JohnLight Raymaker customized goodie ?

Wrager Creeley (a very creative friend from SL) sent me today to the website of cafepress, a company producing t-shirts, caps, and goodies on demand, with customized look.

Before starting such a business, I wanted to see if you would be interested... so please let me know via a comment, or a mail.

(N - 1... suspense...)

10'000 and beyond !

The visits counter of this blog turned 10'000 yesterday ! Other important steps will come soon: 6 months (on the 1st of November) and 200 posts.

I wanted to say a warm thank you to all of you, readers who contribute to this success, and I will continue on the same way to help you even more with camping and other easy ways to earn linden dollars. If you have any wishes or suggestions to make the blog better, feel free to comment...

May be some kind of celebration will take place for the 6 months... May be a group photo with all my SL friends, or a new kind of contest... will see...

Speaking of contests, Kadena Whitfield sent me the 400L$ for the non-human avatar contest... you can still vote until monday !

Back for more - High Yield Deposit: Done !

I've been away, and then busy over the next days, so I don't have a lot of things to report. The most important thing is that I finally achieve to get 8'000 of the JT Financial High Yield bonds ! Thanks a lot to Reverend Chapman who mentionned in a comment that these bonds can be exchanged on the SL Capital Exchange !

This makes these bonds much better than the term deposit that Ginko issued before they collapsed, because they can be sold at (nearly) anytime. If I feel any risk with JTF, I will sold the bonds.

I also decided to put only two thirds of my JTF deposit in the bonds, to avoid losing too much in case of trouble. So my strategy is now to put my camping savings by JTF on my standard account, to let the bonds generate interests, while still having 10% of my balance safe by APEZ.

The non-human avatar contest with 400L$ to earn is still open, you have until tomorrow 12PM to send your best non-human avatar. I already got some really surprising ones !

High Yield Deposits Announced By JTFinancials

JT Financials promised for a while that high yield deposit will become possible soon. Now the soon seems sooner than ever. There is an entry in the SLCapex forum about what JTF will offer.

From mid of October, it should be possible to buy 1.00L$ bonds, and JTF will re-buy them mid of April, at 1.44L$ each. It is quite a long period of time, particularly as time in SL is much quicker than in real life, but it's also a very interesting deal. 44% increase over half a year ! This corresponds to 0.2% daily.

As I don't need the money I'm saving, this will be perfect for me. The only remaining question is "do I trust JTF enough to go for a long term investment ?". This is by far not an easy one to answer... hopefully, I've got until mid of october !

I plan to post a detailled post this week-end about my financial strategy, and compare how I'm doing with what was planned. And may be some fun post on Sunday...

Camping together again - Bye bye JTFinancials contest

Busy, busy, busy ! This has been the keyword for today. Busy at job, busy at home, so not a lot of time to camp. Hopefully I had a short slot of time to start camping, and to make it more profitable, I started camping with JaneLight and JohnLight simultanously again.

The new SL client seems much more stable on my old computer than before, so I got quite good result. May be I should look for free old computers, but strong enough to run more SL clients...

Anyway, twin camping has been good, and I will report more about it later on. By the way, I did not decided yet if Jane and John are twins or lovers...

Sadly, I must report that I did not won the JTFinancials affiliate contest. During the contest period, I had 6 more new affiliates, and the winner had not less than 35 new affiliates ! Congratulations to him... May be next time... Bye bye 10'000 L$ prize :-(

The t-shirt your Second Life avatar wants !

Look at that ! Stroh Bing made this t-shirt for me today, and I'm sure you are all jealous now... It's so good that I don't know what to say.

The "JohnLight Raymaker" marking in the back makes it unique, as well as the serial number on the front side !

If you want your own, IM Stroh Bing... but he will increase the number each time, so I'm the unique number one camper !

Stroh sell these t-shirts for 150L$ (500 L$ full perms)

A bad day in Second Life

After earning nearly 1'000 L$ over the last seven days, two bad news hit me today. Both the unlimited dancecage in Newt and the 8L$ / 10 minutes benches in Multiply disappeared ! On the plus side, the three lucky chairs in Terra Nexus are giving quite high ammounts, sometimes over 25L$ !

I also discovered a new kind of dancepad, combined with a jackpot. For each period of ten minutes:

• the camper get 2, 1, or 0 L$, depending the amount of the jackpot
• the jackpot is increased by 1 L$
• the camper has a chance to get the jackpot

One of the pads had a jackpot 0f 730L$ but a rate of 0L$ per 10 minutes. Camping there gives the camper a chance to get the jackpot each 10 minutes... but could also lead to a very long fruitless camping ! Personally, I don't like it...

How to Find Good Camping in Second Life Part I

As the proverb say "Give a fish to a man, he will eat one day, teach him fishing, he will eat for the rest of his days". Many readers and group members asked me how I proceed to find good campsites. I have no special procedure, and I think it's all about common sense, but here is how I do.

Let's start by defining what a good campsite is. First, the payrate must be acceptable. To make comparison easier, I check it on an hourly basis. I don't camp for less that 12 L$ per hour. This is equivalent to the frequent 2 / 10 or 3 / 15. This is what I consider standard. Anything above is good, but 12 per hour is ok.

As the campsites change very quickly, I do share my time between camping and searching for new spots. The objective is to always have at least a couple of 12 / hour sites available so I never wast potential camping time because of no campsite available.

When I teleport to a new campsite (I'll say how I find them in part II), I expect the camping device to be easy to spot. Given the number of campsites out there, I don't spend time flying or walking through all of an island to find them. Using the mini-map is helpful here as it makes easy to find where crowded areas are, and crowds most of time are due to campers.

Once the device have been easily located, I have a look for other camper earnings. If campers have earnings in the 20, 50 or even 100 range, it's a good sign of unlimited camping. If decide to give the new site a go, I camp for about half an hour, keeping an eye on the process.

This test run allows to check for any blue box popping-up asking if I want to continue. This is quite common now, and makes any unsupervised camping impossible. The test run is also good to make sure that the device is actually paying, before starting spending too much time. To be fair, most of the camping devices are paying, but it's worth checking.

To sumarize this first part, here are my rules:
1) No camping below 12L$ per hour
2) Camping device must be easy to find once teleported
3) Use the mini-map to locate camping crowds
4) Check how others are doing
5) Have a test run before camping too long

In part II, I will explain how I find new campsites to be checked... stay tuned !

Improving this blog ?- Express yourself !

To get a better idea of what you like, I opened a poll in the right hand column of this page. Please take 30 seconds to vote, so that I can improve the content of this blog.

If you have other wishes / tips / remarks, they're all welcome via comments on this post, or per e-mail if you want more privacy.

Now, the floor is yours !

Week-end post - Family camping - New type of pad

It's saturday, let's have some fun and personal information. I found today a new very quiet campsite, offering many 3L$ / 15 minutes, the limit is not known yet, but they allow at least 18 L$.

This picture has been taken there, after fellow campers and readers Genie Denima and Stroh Bing joined me.

Stroh is the insect. We had some good contact with the campsite owners, who were still putting things in place.

There is also a new kind of camping device there. They look like standard camping mats, but while camping, the avatar is kneeling, like praying. Will religion get into camping ?

Stategy update

Investment activities
As I started to invest on SLCapex, a strategy update is needed. For the time being, and as long as I will consider myself in the learning phase, I won't put any of the camping money at risk. I will only invest the 5000 L$ I got from Arbitrage Wise. To keep them separate, I'll use JaneLight's account for this.

Interests
Given the information published here about JTFinancials, I trust them a bit more than Midas, from which I had no info until them. As a consequence, I moved the 10'000 L$ from Midas to JohnLight0s account by JTFinancials.

I also topped this account with my camping income from last week. The previously defined strategy consisting of taking interests away and put them in APEZ is still valid, and I will use APEZ as kind of a strategic reserve, in case of major and undetected trouble by JTFinancials.

The mini shop
For the time being, Josephina is unfortunately experiencing troubles with the club building which is also hosting the mini shop. I must mention however that she does a great job as holding her famous parties in the garden. For more info on that, check her blog (http://secondlifeclubjosephina.blogspot.com/).

When the building will be fixed, probably today or tomorrow, I will restart vending watches there. I will also place an ATM, and a donation box.

Camping
Last but not least, I will for sure continue to camp and explore SL to find the best camping sites, being supported in this task by the members of "Free Money from JohnLight" group. And remember, I by the end, on of the group members will get the 1'000'000 L$ as a prize !

JohnLight's landmarks book XII - The submarine camping

One more thime, I got this camping spot via a member of "Free Money from JohnLight" group, so thank you for that ! Many group members already profited from this place, so after a few days it's time to publish it here for the non members... but remind you can still join for 15 L$, and have all the best camping tips as soon as they are known to one of us.

This one is located in Adobe (146, 155, 11). There is a green-ish object there you have to touch to start camping. Touch it again to get your money. It is paying 1 L$ / 5 minutes, and when reaching 24 L$, you'll have to restart. Don't sit on it, it's not needed, and while camping you can still more around.

GUEST POST from Arbitrage Wise about JT Financials

Most people already know who JT Financials is. And I think most people want to know how we can possibly provide the interest rate we do. Well, believe it or not, we do some sophisticated RL arbitrage trading that CAN provide us the interest. But, let's assume we didn't and just take a look at things from an in-world perspective.

SL is growing exponentially right now. It may not seem like it, but we are barely the seeds to the beginning of virtual worlds. I can't remember what article it was, or the exact numbers, but I believe some article said that by 2011, 80% of the population will be in virtual world. If you believe that, and you feel that SL may be the main platform (as I do), then you have to think that with JT Financial having a strong position in the financial sector of SL, that we will benefit the most as we grow with SL. We operate one of the biggest banks in SL and have one of the best managed stock exchanges in SL. That alone should have some merit for growth and a potential buyout by a RL company.

But let's take a look into some of the other things we are doing. First, based on our interest rate of 44% annually, and our total deposits of 70M, we are paying about 2.5M a month in interest. If you look on our ATM, you will see that we have turned our ATMs in to ads - the first grid wide advertising network. And we are going to cater to Real Life corporations who can afford to have ads on there. In short, our goal is for those ads to bring in about 2M a month, and as our ATM network grow, along with our customer base, so will the revenue from the ATM ads. Let's assume we only pull in 1M a month, that leaves us with about 1.5M of interest we have to cover. We'll leave out profits from the stock exchange (www.slcapex.com) for now since profits will have to go to paying off the purchase debt, which I think should be paid off in about 6 months. If we can achieve that, we've basically bought a stock exchange for 1M from the upfront cash we paid out, is that not a sweet deal?

Now, let's look at my profile and the businesses we're trying to start up or have. These businesses will end up helping one another grow because there is some synergy in them.

-SLReports.net: already generating revenue from ads. Let's assume we can make 200K from this business a month.

-Wisemetaverse.com: this is our advertising engine that is located on all of our ATM. The system is a very sophisticated system that allows you to control textures and what item the textures give, as well as keep track of clicks. We are still trying to make this system commercially ready. Let's assume we can get 500 users to pay us 2000L a month to use this system, that's 1M in revenue

-www.slmarketlive.com: This is our retail site. It is currently up and only sells virtual items, but we're going to rebuild it so that we can sell Virtual and Real Life versions, or Sell Virtual Versions while advertising RL versions. Let's low-ball it and say we only make 100K a month (by the end of the year), even though a site selling Real Life items should make more.

-www.helpture.com: If you are a small e-commerce business and sell RL items, but need virtual versions of it built, you need a solution to find builders. Helpture will be a site allowing you to post images of your items so that others can bid to build it. The site is up, but not ready. This one can be a goldmine if you have hundreds of thousands of people needing virtual versions of their personal items built, or thousands of home-based eBay businesses needed virtual items built. Shall we peg potential profits at 1M a month?

There you have it, all of our current businesses that are in operations, or should be by the end of the year. If we add up the guestimates we just made on revenue, that's about 2.3M. We only had to cover an additional 1.5M.

Now think about this. This idea is still just a thought, but the wheels have been set in motion. We have reserved the domain www.slwallet.com. As SL gets bigger, and more retail sites get into it, they will want to accept L$ as a form of payment. By then, we'll have a VERY large customer base from JT Financials. Think BIG, as in SLWallet can be for SL what Paypal was for eBay. Instead of "We Accept Paypal", it'll be "We Accept Lindens". Someone has to provide the payment gateway, why not us? We're heading towards that direction.

So, do you see all of the dots starting to connect now? And after reading this long essay about our in-world business, you probably forgot that I've mentioned in the beginning we do RL investments that can pay back the interest alone. So if EVERYTHING I've just written about completely flops, we'll still be OK. That's putting your money to work right there.

Finally, we're also going to be donating 5000L to Johnlight strictly for trading on www.slcapex.com, as a separate portfolio to help his cause and see how he does. We have set some term limitations with him, but he'll probably provide you more details in his own blog.

Group is good - Submarine camping

Yesterday, a member of "Free Money from JohnLight" shared one of its favorite camping places on the group. This is a new kind of camping location, as it is located under water ! The design is funny, as there are fishes, sharks and other sea animals moving around. We will see now for how long JohnLight can stay under water !

I will certainly publish the address of this 1L$ / 5 minutes here in a few days, to let the members of the group profit from it ! The last spot I published became saturated quickly after my post.

My normal computer is still not fixed, and the SL client crashed right now, as I'm composing this post... Camping is really hard with this old Mac, so I will probably take some time to explore new banks. I seriously envisage to move to another one on Saturday, so as to test many of them.

Tattoo and a watch sold - Thank you Wrager Creeley

Immediately after its opening, the shop had its first visitor: Wrager Creeley. He bought the tattoo, for which I had no copy perms, so no more tattoo for sale. I replaced the tattoo with a blondie female skin. Wrager also bought a watch. Thanks to him for being my first customer.

As you can see, Wrager is a fan of HUGE and non human avatars. The shop is in fact the mini box behind him, and you can see a corner if the pyramid watch vendor.

One big question then... how will he wear the tattoo and the watch ?