Blinks.

Tateru, you truly live in some other life, not the Second Life of many people, but...some other life...beyond...beyond comprehension.

Oh, I'm not saying that there is any large percentage of people who use banks. There aren't. My polls show that. Arthur is right. The majority of the 350,000 people who spent more than a $1 last month in SL didn't spend it on a bank. But, a goodly chunk did, and that does have a pull on the economy.

If nothing else, surely you can see that there is a huge volume of cashouts. I don't know *what* to ascribe the huge volume of LindEx -- historical highs -- activity on January 3 and January 4th except New Year's resolution not to spend money on a game...or conversely, some people with school holidays still and time to play...or people with an early tip-off about the banking announcement Jan. 8.

The fact is, the Lindens were forced to print and sell far less Lindens this month -- this is what I blogged about today:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/01/bank-holiday.html

You cannot deny that as real revenue lost for Linden, and a sign of people needing to cash out in large numbers -- and not making the round trip back again. Of course we must wait til the end of the month, but it's not a good sign.

Next, there are a number of people looking very hard at the numbers of 60-day log-ons:

I did, anecdotally. Also Rezzable did:
http://rezzable.com/blog/2008/uncategorized/2006-vs-2007-second-life-data/

and Dusan Writer has a thoughtful piece on the same subject:
http://dusanwriter.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/rezzable-parses-second-life-stats-its-the-economy-stupid/

And these figures show not just churn, or poor retention, but poor retention even of those retained for the 60 days...and more people spending less.

Banking may only be part of this, but it's a factor, as was the casino ban, because it involved the entry-level economy for newbies.

Ginko gave every single avatar who logged on, regardless of whether they were the 10th alt, a free $100 just for registering with the bank -- and not even requiring a deposit. That kind of newbie grants program, unsustaintable as it proved to be, picked up the slack when the Lindens stopped paying out dwell and higher stipends.

In short, the casino ban, and then the banking ban which made sense too, did have an effect on some very big players' economies, and some significant thought not majority number of residents, and that did affect the economy, as can be seen in the numbers: Lindens lost revenue, and people were forced to cash out at lower levels of value.

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