Edward Castronova lives in a fantasy world, populated by Shadow Knights, Beastlords, Berserkers and, one might be forgiven for supposing, socially challenged teenage boys.
And yet Castronova is a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington – and from out of the depths of this virtual world and its millions of global devotees he has mined a manifesto for a real-world revolution that threatens to expose as illusory one of the fundamental cornerstones of the “real” world in which we live.
A self-professed online gaming enthusiast, Castronova has made a reputation and a career out of studying the socioeconomic workings of multiplayer virtual worlds, such as Sony’s subscription-based EverQuest, and it was a slew of real-world headlines about his work in 2002 that got him thinking.
What exactly was the difference between “real”-world currencies and their funny-money alter egos in the virtual world?
The answer, as outlined in his new book, Wildcat Currency, is both fascinating and, somehow, a little disturbing, as upon it hinges the realisation that money, the ultimate prize after which almost all of us quest, has no greater claim to reality than Station Cash, EverQuest's in-game currency.
In March 2002, the BBC and many other media outlets reported that the virtual kingdom of Norrath, the imaginary country in which EverQuest’s millions of online citizens roam, was richer than Bulgaria.
The claim was based on work by Castronova, who estimated the value of the hundreds of hours individuals invested in the game by looking at the real-world prices fetched by the game “skills” they had amassed when they put them up for sale on sites such as eBay.
His conclusion was that, in terms of gross national product per capita, Norrath was the 77th wealthiest nation in the world, sandwiched just between Russia and Bulgaria.
Now Castronova has set out to demonstrate that we are teetering on the edge of a brave new world, in which all our presumptions about reality will come under siege, beginning with a credible challenge to the orthodoxy of the “real” money systems upon which all of us, from individuals to entire nations, depend.
The emergence of what Castronova calls “wildcat currencies” – Bitcoin, Amazon Coin, World of Warcraft Gold and so on – “is a sign that real and virtual continue to blend”.
Most people, he says, “think of virtual worlds as ‘not real’ and significantly different from ‘the real world’.” And yet, “a phone call is a real conversation, even though it’s happening via computers over the internet”; and “when five boys” (or grown professors of telecommunications) “team up in an online game to attack a dragon, their teamwork is no less real than [that] of five boys on a basketball team”.
Irritating though it is, it is hard to argue with this kind of logic.
For Castronova, the very concept of money is a kind of mass delusion. Even gold, “whose worth is so culturally ingrained that many people are convinced of its inherent value, is useful as money only because people think it is”.
Currency began as a response to the increasingly complex world of trading. How do you exchange a camel for a cow if a camel is worth twice as much? Do you cut it in half? And, of course, you first need to find someone who has a cow and would rather have a camel (or half of one).
In ancient Mesopotamia, barley was just one of many traded goods, but gradually a bushel of barley emerged as a way of expressing the relative value of any two or more types of product. Thus the shekel began life as a unit of weight, but lives on today as the currency of Israel. Likewise the British pound sterling, which referred originally to a pound of silver.
Carrying around a dozen bushels of barley or a couple of pounds of silver in small change was hardly convenient, of course, and tokens, or coins, emerged to represent their value – chief among them gold which, unlike camels or barley, has little practical use but has the advantage of neither dying nor rotting. But it was with the introduction of paper money, centuries before our modern digital era, that money really started to become virtual.
Paper money began as an IOU substitute for gold or silver. To make paper notes credible, issuing governments had to promise to exchange them on demand for gold or silver, and had to maintain a stock of the commodity equal to the supply of paper promises.
But today, however, there is no pot of gold.
Take the banknotes minted by the UK. Britain, like most other countries, abandoned its gold standard many years ago, but somehow the Bank of England never got around to removing from its notes the pledge signed by its chief cashier: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of …”.
The promise, in other words, is a gold-faced lie, and you can’t get much more virtual than that. Today, the UK pound, like the US dollar and most of the world’s other currencies, is a “fiat” currency, given value not by gold but “by the mere executive decree of the state”.
With the widespread use of digital money we are slipping even farther down the rabbit hole and it won’t be long before even our worthless coins and bits of paper have become utterly redundant. Today, most money already exists only in a notional sense, as “nothing more than entries on a digital database”.
Think about your salary. Does your employer cart a bag of gold, or even paper money, along to your bank every month? No. So where – and what – is “it”, then?
Into the vacuum of this uncertainty, says Castronova, is flooding a new wave of digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, “only a small part of the total virtual economy” but which is nevertheless said to be worth in excess of $1.5 billion (Dh5.5bn).
During the past decade, “a time of massive currency innovation and expansion”, coins and paper have been increasingly edged out by electronic transactions and virtual currencies are “part of the next step, which is too new even to have a name”. So he invents one: “Let’s call it digital value transfer, or DVT.” Castronova has, perhaps, been immersed in the virtual world for too long to recognise that DVT already stands for something else – deep-vein thrombosis. But perhaps that’s not such a bad accidental abbreviation for something that promises to derail the world’s traditional currency system at a stroke.
We have, of course, had “closed system” virtual currencies for many years – frequent-flyer miles, casino chips, Green Shield Stamps – but Castronova predicts that soon the barriers between all types of currency, virtual or otherwise, will collapse.
Currently the databases that hold the digital records of our wealth are each locked into a single currency but a DVT system will recognise no such distinctions and freely transfer value between entities. So “My account may be in dollars and yours may be in Delta Frequent Flyer Miles, and it doesn’t matter … You can pay for the chocolate candy bar I am selling using Delta Miles, Warcraft Gold, or yen.”
Do governments care? You bet, because already, there is “more monetary value in customer-loyalty currencies … than is held in the physical form of notes and coins”, and none of it is taxable. In 2007 the Central Bank of China banned the exchange of renminbi against a game currency called QQ Coins “because too many people were using redeemable QQ Coin cards to buy things in the real economy”. Where will it all end? Like most revolutions – with someone, somewhere, making a lot of money. The next “obvious step”, says Castronova, is to connect all these disparate currencies, and “how these connections are made, and who sees them, will clearly influence economic growth and the power of the state in the 21st century”.
It makes sense: the world is decentralising, nations are fragmenting and reforming into their constituent micro-parts, so why shouldn’t currencies defederalise? Perhaps in future your salary will be in MeCoins, paid into the Bank of You, and after a year of hard graft in some virtual game world you might face the choice of spending your hard-won dragon points on advancing to another virtual level – or on a two-week holiday on a real beach in the real world.
And you’d better get stuck in to slaying all those orcs, or whatever’s standing between you and that pot of imaginary gold, because in our rapidly evolving digital world the final blurring of the fine line between real and virtual could come sooner than anyone imagines.
“We may not know exactly what changes are coming to the institution of money,” says Castronova, “but we can say this: sometimes change comes slowly, like snowfall, and sometime it erupts, like a volcano.”
You can, in other words, put funny money on it.
Jonathan Gornall is a regular contributor to The Review.