What if...

[Brian Livingston]

Folks, I am going to have to disagree on the idea of promoting gambling as a means of revitalizing the CDS community, or for any other reason for that matter. My thoughts on why this is a bad idea have been explained in detail by several other posts, so I will summarize them as follows:

- LL rules strictly stipulate that gambling is prohibited, and no amount of tokens or other placeholder currency will make this kosher as long as, in the end, they can be converted in the RL currency. Even if it is that 25 of these gambling chips can be converted into 10 CDS Dollars which can be converted into 1 Linden Dollar, of which a thousand can be converted into $4 and change, it is still prohibited, at least under my read of the rule.

- Do we really want to rely on a loophole as the key to our revitalization efforts?

Either way, I am not comfortable with taking our community down this route. Unless the LL rules change, my position is that I will not vote in favor of any CDS-sponsored gambling or gaming activities such as those having been proposed here. I do thoroughly appreciate the time, effort, and creativity that has been displayed in this thread and would love to work with anyone interested in driving more traffic to our sims, while complying with applicable laws and regulations.

--BL

[Pelanor Eldrich]

Unless Linden can give us a definitive "it's ok" answer for a given scheme I think the whole thing is a no.

[michelmanen]

I fully agree with Pelanor's position because of the arguments put forward by Brian.

[Jamie Palisades]

I think Bromo's right that tokens which have no cash value -- but still might allow people bragging rights -- might be a viable and law-abiding (and non-Linden-wrath-attracting) approach. In theory.

But does CDS want to do this now? I agree with Brian: no. From a look-and-feel perspective, I think it'd need to be isolated to its own sim, and even then would challenge our "tone" severely anyway. And! Doing it well would require more planning and administration overhead than the CDS community appears to wish to undertake.

Still, on some level, that's frustrating. Will any outsiders' business work here, on sheer economic grounds? How badly do we want to make it so?

Politically speaking, I assume that slow CDS development mostly is due to the fact that, as a community represented by elected officials, most of us must like it slow. That's an OK outcome in a democracy.

Agile, opportunistic business moves, on the other hand, generally require a risk-friendly and permeable atmosphere. Think of the 'country risk' ratings that banks give to various nations ... does ABN AmRo Bank want to invest in Pakistan? Well, it depends on the risk of nationalization; the currency issues; the traffic; the likelihood that the government will act fairly; the zoning, etc. etc.

What would the 'country risk' rating of CDS be? What do we want it to be?