Something dawned on me today. It being a regular Sunday, I was sitting down at my desk and planning financial plans to pay for my inevitable visit to Japan. While figuring out how much to put aside each month for the trip, I was also on World of Warcraft. My forte in World of Warcraft, or any MMO that I've played, is dissecting and conquering the Action House or equivalent. An Auction House is like an e-Bay for MMO games. You can put items up for auction and/or for a flat price. Items vary in price and can be bought/sold to make a solid in-game profit. This is my realm.
As I worked the auction house today, I had to log onto a separate character to transfer game currency, in this case, gold. As I moved the gold around between characters, I realized that I was moving digital data throughout my account. This was exactly like the process I needed to follow to transfer funds from one bank account to another. From one digital data relocation to another.
This digital data, these numbers that only existed on computer screens, this currency that I spent so much time cultivating and accumulating, was only information in a computer system. In other words, the 'money' that gets direct-deposited into my account bi-weekly, spent through a debit-card, decreasing or increasing in value based on other data transfers, was simply computer data. It was just Ones and Zeroes being processed.
This epiphany led me to realize the true nature of money in today's society. It was just numbers. It was just data. The 'gold' that I had to transfer between World of Warcraft accounts was the same as the 'dollars' that I had to move between bank accounts. Data.
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