“Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold…”

—  Neal Stephenson, book Reamde

Economics of gold farming, Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

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Neal Stephenson167
American science fiction writer 1959

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