Well, gambling in Second Life is kaput. I’m not sure if to covers sploders, but I suspect it will. I suppose I’ve played my last sploder already. I hardly ever gaming in real life anyway and I never trusted any gambling in Second Life anyway, so no great direct loss to me.

I’m sure Linden Labs is being pushed to at least make an enforcement statement about this from the US Government. Oddly enough, gambling in the US is not illegal, as long as the local government is getting their cut of the action. It doesn’t really matter arguing or pissing or moaning about it. Gambling inside of SL was always an edgy proposition, because it is/was so easy to cheat the customer.

The pessimist in me believes this is the beginning of the end of this incarnation of Second Life from a number of stand points. This probably has the potential to crash the SL economy. All gambling assets are now essentially worthless. Anyone who has a gambling business is now effectively out of business. Expect a flight of L$ out of the world ahead of any banning of accounts by the gambling operators.

Land prices, along with the new continent coming will probably cause a property price crash. This is a good deal if you don’t own land, not so good if you already own land.

The next obvious attack of course will be on the sex side, and as people have alluded to the Furries seem to be the first target.

Private sims are not going to save any of us. Linden Labs still “owns” the server. They released the client, a good first step. The next step is the Open Simulator. I think Linden Labs anticipated this by open sourcing the client and trying to open source the server. I believe LL wants to just manage the asset server and the “directory” server, much like Network Solutions manages (and greatly profits) from managing and controlling the Internet domain system. In this model, anyone can setup their own physical server running the SL server software, perhaps pay some fee to connect up to LL’s asset database and directory server, and then join the grid.

LL avoids all of the issues over what is going on in that server, as they have no control or management of that server, just like Network Solutions.

The big deal now is to get the Open Simulator running….

-Veyron