With all the talk about virtual worlds, virtual culture, virtual economies and their effects on the 'real' world I suppose we all saw this coming. Particularly when so many of the goings-on began to be externalized by the likes of Second Life and their realtime tally of USD$ spent in the last 24 hours, not to mention Reuters' exposure of a Second Life Linden Dollar / USD exchange rate graph.
With all of this being touted in the media these days Congress has finally taken notice. Recently it was announced that they would begin looking into such virtual economies and evaluating how they and their users should be considered from a taxation perspective.
As stated in the Washington Post:
The increasing size and public profile of virtual economies, the largest of which have millions of users and gross domestic products that rival those of small countries, have made them increasingly difficult for lawmakers and regulators to ignore.
Why do I have a feeling that this will get messy?
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