The Virtual Is Real - Just Follow The Money or The Physics
The song Paradigm on George Clinton’s recent CD How Late Do U Have 2 B B 4 U R Absent? closes with the statement “The virtual is real”.
As hard as this may be to believe, there is real money changing hands among the players in these games, Bowen reports. An estimated $1 billion worldwide is spent by users buying and selling virtual goods, such as furniture for virtual houses and clothing for their avatars. But it’s paid for with real-world credit cards — at Second Life alone, $6 million a month.Is Virtual Life Better Than Reality?, Living Online — With Dream House, Job, Friends — May Be Preferable For Some - CBS News
It shouldn’t be so surprising that people are making money in virtual economies. People buy things that are outside the human sense of touch all the time. People pay for MRIs and satellite radio signals and Wall Street is a virtual world where people trade in “financial instruments“. All of these have the same real existence as goods in virtual worlds - bits on a disk. Physics agrees with this. A bit on a disk is as physical as your fingers, it’s made up of the same atoms bound together with the same laws of subatomic physics. As the song says - “let the shakin begin”. 
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[…] What she and so many others don’t realize is that the virtual is real(oh my, did I just say that again?!). In time the meshverse will be so deeply intertwined with the part of reality which is tangible, that you won’t always be able to make a distinction between the two. Eventually, nanotech will blur that difference even more. The social implications of that are enormous. Rather than attempt to deny the inevitable, perhaps embracing the change, helping to shape it will prove more satisfactory. […]