It turns out that the way humans are made, the software-based approach seems to have much more success.

We can and should view synthetic worlds as essentially unregulated playgrounds for economic organization.

There's no economic puzzle here. Where there's money to be made, there will be people out to make it. Where some gamers are playing for fun, others are pursuing a new kind of day-trading game and those two factions are trying to co-exist.

As synthetic worlds grow in importance, we'll see scholars, legal analysts, and game industry experts under increasing pressure to generate sensible guidelines for different aspects of the practice.

One thing that's surprising is how serious this is. It's now my career.

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.