[cap-talk] Interesting article on virtual currency

[James A. Donald]

James Graves wrote:
 > There's an interesting article in today's Wall Street
 > Journal about the virtual currency, called QQ,
 > initially created by Tencent Holding Ltd.
 >
 > It started out as a play currency for in-game bonuses.
 > But since then it has started being used for
 > real-world transactions too.  China's government isn't
 > happy about that.
 >
 > There are also many issues surrounding a currency
 > being used far outside its intended use.  Stuff like
 > conversions between yuans and QQ are often done in a
 > woefully insecure manner.  All of which could have
 > been avoided from the start by studying the literature
 > on the subject, but no one was thinking that far
 > ahead.
 >
 > Another case of worse is better, I suppose.

The moral of the QQ story is that internet messaging
should not only support text, audio, and video, it
should also support a means of exchanging and
transferring promises, for when one person talks to
another, the topic is often what one of them can do for
the other.