Gold Farming

I started playing WoW at roughly the age of 14. So I have seen the advertisements for gold in the game for real money. I remember asking my parents at one point if I could purchase the gold, but both looked at me and said no. My mom said no because my dad did. However, my dads reasoning were much more sound because he had known one of his friends who purchased gold that way for a game called Everquest. My dad told me about how the business worked to a certain extent and then told me how his friends account was later hacked and used for gold farming. This caused me to drop the topic and later I stopped playing WoW to make time for football. Though after entering college some friends started playing WoW again which caused me to join. Then the same topic of buying gold came up between us. I told then what my dad had told me. They laughed and explained how much gold farming has changed and after their explanation I decided to look into the topic myself. When the topic came up in class I felt that I was fairly knowledgeable since the research I did was only a few years old. The concept still intrigued me because I know some friends who have purchased gold with real life money. After the reading of InfoDev, I became even more interested and did some research again. I ended up finding out about bitcoins and how they are used over the internet. A interesting story that I found is that a man in Canada is selling his house which would not seem strange. The interesting part is that the man is accepting an equal value of bitcoins instead of money. This just blew my mind that a person is willing to accept digital money in exchange for a HOUSE! With the way digital money is evolving I wonder if we as people will eventually turn to a pure digital currency economy. Though I hope that we do not because at our current state I feel that hackers would be able to easily manipulate the economy by creating false numbers for how much they have.