Protecting The Virtual World's Economy

I attended one of the most interesting customer meetings yesterday. It was interesting because the customer is asking to deploy SecureSphere in order to protect the entire universe. His universe. As you can guess, this company (let's keep the name to ourselves) is developing one of the coolest games. This is a multilayer online game that has its own economy. This economy is managed by the users and just like any other economy; some users are more corrupt than others. SecureSphere is protecting the treasury database, ensuring that (real life) gamers will not cheat and destroy the (virtual) economy. Just imagine that a virtual bank will start to offer cheap loans to other users that can not afford to pay mortgages... it can destroy the economy.... In short, I was very excited to learn about this opportunity and watch how imagination sometimes is well connected with reality.

So how is the car related to this post? On the way to the data center, we spotted one of those beauties. The Bugatti Veyron is the most powerful, most expensive, and fastest street-legal production car in the world, with a proven top speed of over 400 km/h (407 km/h or 253 mph). The title of the most expensive mass production car in the world comes with a price tag of $1,700,000. Watching this car and thinking about the economy, one can REALLY understand why treasury applications should be protected. Not just in the virtual world.