Dan Hunter on Death and Taxes: "Taxation can be used to mediate server resources. In the goode olde days of lambda and others, resource allocation was performed by the VW equivalent of the central committee of the politburo, aka the Architecture Review Board... I see now that Second Life is using market economics directly to mediate server resources. In 2L if you use resources in building content then those resources get taxed".

Even with some capitalist-model economic structures, most of these games are still a centralist "big server farm" mindset. Servers give you a simple model for control, lock-in, ownership; but downsides: single-point security and single-point superuser compromise patterns; resource conflict and scarcity. The server farm is Fort Knox AND the Louisiana Purchase.

But taxation applies to decentralised systems too...