Some There/Therebucks history

So, the other day...I guess it's been a few weeks now, Kittenkat contacted me because she was very distressed over IMVU's proposed tiers system and she thought, since I live only six miles from IMVU and have been known to sneak attack them and just show up there, that maybe if she could win me over to her cause, she could get me to march into IMVU and get them to listen to reason.

Honestly, IMVU should probably hire Kittenkat to be their in-house economist or something, but my days of IMVU peeps telling me that they owed me a debt of gratitude so great that they are happy to buy me lunch once a month for basically forever are probably over. The best I can do right now is publish what Kittenkat shared with me after being frustrated by one of IMVU's newer employees "Joepez" telling her she didn't understand the There economy as well as There's original founder and some of his cronies and tried to explain to her a few things about the There economy.

Please enjoy this wonderful bit of There history compliments of KittenKat!

As There's founder and ex-employees should be able to tell you, I was there since the beginning, and my resale site (tbux.com) pretty much single-handedly shaped the resale market from the beginning. If anyone knows anything about the resale market at There.com, it's me.

For the record, here is the story of the There resale market:

I became involved in the There developer program pretty shortly after it was released. After time I and the other top developers had accumulated enough therebucks that there began to be talk about selling them for cash. The first person to offer us cash for our therebucks was Baloo, who happened to be There's economist (he operated his resale site on the side). He offered us terrible rates (2700T/$1 as I recall) but we sold to him, because he pressured us and because it was money.

It didn't take me long to decide that we had to be able to sell them for more he was offering. So I got together with There's other top developers, showed them my proposal for tbux.com, formed tbux.com, and began to sell directly to There members at 2000T/$1 (~200T/$ savings over There's official rate). Sure, Baloo could offer consumers a cheaper rate, but he had depended on having the major developers selling to him, so by banding together, we eliminated his supply, so we had no trouble selling for that rate. Shortly thereafter we began to resell other developers' tbux, offering them a rate of 2200T/$1 (our spread is and always has been very low).

We've had a small handful of competitors over the years, but none have ever succeeded at driving the rate of tbux down. Even during the period of economic turmoil and panic which followed There's "Black Friday" (in 2004, when There Inc. announced that it would no longer develop the consumer version of There), tbux.com kept buying and selling at the SAME rates.

And here we are, in 2007, buying and selling at the same rates we always have, and still selling out. 2000T/$1 is now the standard resale cost of Therebucks across all resellers, a whole 200T savings over There's rate of 1800T/$1.

So, to say that There's resale market is where it is because its "mature" is just completely inaccurate. There's resale market has not changed at all since it started with tbux.com back in August 2003."

For the record, *I* never sold to Baloo. My first sale was actually an exchange of ThereBucks for frequent flier miles which allowed me to attend the first There real life gathering in 2003.

Anyway, thanks to KittenKat for allowing me to share that nice writeup of There and ThereBucks history in my blog. Maybe it won't help us stop tiers, since Will Harvey has indicated that they only implement things we suggest that they were already implementing anyway, but it's still a great read. Cha right...like Will knows more about the There economy just because he founded There. According to any IMVU employee who worked on the blox project There is already dead, and yet as far as I can tell they are still growing strong. Wishful thinking, guys?