Blockchain futurists envision a world of endless possibility, where money as we know it is a thing of the past. It’s a world where people are free to earn cryptocurrency by simply doing what they love.
It could be years before that future becomes reality, but a sneak peek of that world may have already arrived – in the World of Warcraft.
The virtual gold in the World of Warcraft is now worth about seven times as much as Venezuela’s national currency.
Players can earn and spend the gold in-game or purchase it with cash. That allowed Fortune to crunch the numbers and come up with some remarkable statistics.
“Here’s how the math works out.
Per Google, one U.S. dollar is worth 68,915 bolívar.
Compare that to the price of WoW tokens, official in-game credits that can be used to extend player’s play time or buy in-game items. Tokens can be bought with either $20 real world cash or sold for a fluctuating amount of in-game gold. One tracking service lists the current gold price of a token as 203,035 pieces. That works out to about 10,152 gold gaming pieces per USD.
By those calculations, World of Warcraft virtual gold would be worth 6.8 times as much as the bolívar.”
The report goes on to say that if you make the same comparison using the black market cost of the bolívar, the value of WoW’s virtual gold rises to an incredible 62 times that of the bolívar.
To try and mitigate the country’s out-of-control inflation, Venezuela’s president created a cryptocurrency called the Petro. The country is trying to use its national crypto to let citizens pay for everything from imports to baked goods.
The national digital currency has been declared legal tender and is supposedly backed by a barrel of oil at a ratio of 1:1.
Related: What is nTitle?
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