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The Almighty Buck Games

'World of Warcraft' Game Currency Now Worth More Than Venezuelan Money (theblaze.com) 189

schwit1 quotes TheBlaze: Digital gold from Blizzard's massive multiplayer online game "World of Warcraft" is worth more than actual Venezuelan currency, the bolivar, according to new data. Venezuelan resident and Twitter user @KalebPrime first made the discovery July 14 and tweeted at the time that on the Venezuela's black market -- now the most-used method of currency exchange within Venezuela according to NPR -- you can get $1 for 8493.97 bolivars. Meanwhile, a "WoW" token, which can be bought for $20 from the in-game auction house, is worth 8385 gold per dollar. According to sites that track the value of both currencies, KalebPrime's math is outdated, and WoW gold is now worth even more than the bolivar.
That tweet has since gone viral, prompting @KalebPrime to joke that "At this rate when I publish my novel the quotes will read 'FROM THE GUY THAT MADE THE WOW GOLD > VENEZUELAN BOLIVAR TWEET.'"
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'World of Warcraft' Game Currency Now Worth More Than Venezuelan Money

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  • The Blaze? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Saturday August 05, 2017 @12:46PM (#54947131)

    Really? I know the old saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But you couldn't come up with a more legit source than glen beck's propaganda rag?

    Try:
    http://fortune.com/2017/08/01/... [fortune.com]

  • Widespread desperation and misery in the country with the richest oil reserves in Latin America. Everyone is poor (except the leaders) and it's all the fault of the CIA (or whoever it's convenient to blame this time). And yet, no matter how many times it brings disaster, some people keep believing stories about how spending others' money instead of earning their own will work out good for them.

    • Widespread desperation and misery in the country with the richest oil reserves in Latin America. Everyone is poor (except the leaders) and it's all the fault of the CIA (or whoever it's convenient to blame this time). And yet, no matter how many times it brings disaster, some people keep believing stories about how spending others' money instead of earning their own will work out good for them.

      Your incorrect conclusion about socialism is based on a false premise - that Venezuela operates under socialism. What you have there is a crook and his crook friends mismanaging everything they can't embezzle or otherwise misappropriate, not a socialist state, no matter what they call it.

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        Can we go with the version of socialism the USSR did against the Ukraine then? I'm sure the millions dead from starvation would like to speak up, well if they could.

        No, it's not a crook. What you have is socialism propping up another dictatorship under the guise of "we'll provide it all" and it fully collapsing under not only their theft of private property, but the lack of that stolen private property to produce anything. And on top of that, if you were a private enterprise why would you want to do busi

        • Can we go with the version of socialism the USSR did against the Ukraine then?

          Why would we want to do that? The USSR was a totalitarian country that eventually collapsed. If we're tossing around worst-case insults, how about the capitalism that Germany did against Poland?

          Note that Nazi Germany was right-wing and capitalist, and I am prepared to meet any factual arguments against that claim. Please do not claim that propaganda was necessarily characteristic of how the National Socialists operated, or

  • by fibonacci8 ( 260615 ) on Saturday August 05, 2017 @12:53PM (#54947159)
    Unless you can then resell the token for real world currency, good, or services (not limited to some video game which most of the world does not value at all) then the headline is only true for a very small subset of people.
    • by dabadab ( 126782 ) on Saturday August 05, 2017 @01:02PM (#54947203)

      Unless you can then resell the token for real world currency

      Fair point: I do not think there are many people who would exchange real money for Bolivars.

  • Insert socialist, communist, or dictatorial regime and you got yourself articles for YEARS!
  • by Anonymous Coward

    This 'news' means absolutely nothing.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 05, 2017 @01:09PM (#54947237)

    The individual UNITS are worth more. But the units are arbitrary and a comparison between units has nothing to do with the value of the currency itself. You can say a single WoW gold is worth more than a Peso, or a cent, or a Rupee, or a Yuan, or whatever you want. It means nothing.

  • 36 retweets is now considered "viral"?

    • heh heh retweets

      You may have heard of a thing, it's called a screenshot.

      For some reason, this seems to be the thing to share around social networks. Screenshots of tweets. Guess it's easier than copy and paste.

  • Incedible (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday August 05, 2017 @01:33PM (#54947355)

    How a basically rich country can be driven utterly into the ground by massive mismanagement. Leads me to believe that it all comes down to the people and who they put in charge. As long as people do not start to wise up, we will continue have catastrophes like that. Not that what is going on in the US, the UK or the eastern parts of the EU is any better: Stupid people that believe stupid promises by utterly evil politicians.

  • There was an article a while back about Ultima Online gold being worth more than the Viatnamese Dong. Of course, that was more about an increase in the value of fantasy currency, whereas this is about the bolivar becoming a fantasy currency. Also everyone says the Dong has been performing well. It has consistently grown as it matures.
    • As everyone who's travelled to Vietnam knows, the only thing about the Dong that's grown is the size of the wallet you need to store it. Everything is a banknote. Even 1000 Dong (about £0.02) is a note.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Yet another socialist economy down the tubes. Even worse because they are resource rich. This will put the kibosh on the socialist "revolutionaries" that infest capitalist economies for a generation or two. Venezuelans have taken one for the team (mankind). Sean Penn and Danny Glover are, I hope, over-medicated due to being in a severe depression.

  • If no, then it has no value.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      I have a wallet full of peso bills from the Republic of the Philippines. I can't take them to a store here in CA and buy anything, but I can convert them into USD and buy stuff in CA with the USD. This is how currency works.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Socialism sucks. No matter how it's tried, no matter when, no matter where. There is no perfect form of socialism, or communism, or any form of leftism. Ever. It all sucks and it all falls apart at the seams.

    You can hate free markets and capitalism all you want. But it's the least worst system of economics that we know. You haven't yet figured out a better system.

  • ... by now my toenails are probably more worth than Venezuelan money. No surprise here to be honest.

  • ...World of Warcraft is far more stable than Venezuela today.

    • ...World of Warcraft is far more stable than Venezuela today.

      I don't know about that, if a token is under 10k gold now, the WoW economy has crashed as last time I logged in as few months ago it was in the 20-30k range.

      • ...World of Warcraft is far more stable than Venezuela today.

        I don't know about that, if a token is under 10k gold now, the WoW economy has crashed as last time I logged in as few months ago it was in the 20-30k range.

        After checking, tokens have been going up and haven't been at 8k for years. For the last year it's been around 40k, jumping up to ~120k recently.

  • I'm normally good with understanding markets when they are free, but not so good with manipulated ones. Can someone explain how this relates to the official exchange rate:
    http://www.xe.com/currencychar... [xe.com]
    The official exchange rate appears to be pegged to the USD. How is it then that people are spending so many bolivars for $1. Do people not honour the exchange rate? Does the government refuse to cover the value of it?

    How can this "official" exchange rate not reflect what the currency is actually worth, with

    • The actual exchange rate is what you can get on a large scale. Official exchange rates are those that a government is committed to propping up, and they only have effect when the government is indeed providing sufficient support that people will trade dollars and bolivars at the official exchange rate.

      • So it really is just a case of the government quoting a figure they have no intend to support right? If it were a pure volume thing then now would be a good time to spend $10000US on bolivars in the black market and then go convert them back through the official channels.

        • The official exchange rate is a government-set figure, which they might or might not intend to support (and may or may not follow through with their intentions). If the real exchange rate differs significantly from the official exchange rate, you know the government isn't supporting its exchange rate. If the government were, arbitrage (what you describe in your second sentence) would bring the real exchange rate into line. Bear in mind that some institutions that practice arbitrage when they can are wel

  • All Raids in Venezuela are canceled because it's nothing but trash drops?

The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives. -- Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project

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