MMORPG General News - Virtual Economies and Real-World Tax

Reuters has an article titled Virtual economies attract real-world tax atention:

LONDON (Reuters) - Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day, and these virtual economies are beginning to draw the attention of real-world authorities.

"Right now we're at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise — taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth," said Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.

"You could argue that to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there's no mechanism by which you're taxed on this stuff," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

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They should instead ban all real life money involvement in the economy of virutal worlds, i.e. MMOs, effectively and keep them virtual, in my opinion. If they are really thinking about taxing virtual estate with real life cash, they'd only fall as low as the so called "China Farmers" (nothing against Chinese people, on the contrary, but it's unforunately a common term nowadays) and justify what they are doing.

And that would worry me, not to mention that the whole idea is just rediculous.

Dear Dan Miller,
The key word is VIRTUAL!
Please get your head out of your ass and do something useful!
Thank you!
rofl

The profit made on those virtual worlds is not virtual, it's real. If other capital gain is taxable, why shouldn't this be taxable too ?

Isn't the monthly subscription fee already taxed? Either way, profit made by players in the game is virtual. Only if people sell that virtual profit for real life money it becomes real in my opinion, which shouldn't happen in the first place.

My mistake, then. I read about people making real money with whatever transactions they do in those games, and that's what I thought revenue agencies are interested in.

Well, I know no more than you do, sorry if it sounded that way.
There are MMOs I believe, that are built around the very fact that you can buy virtual stuff for real money, none of which I'd care to play. Other problems include players selling their accounts on eBay or special MMO transaction sites. I utterly despise such actions.

There is no need to apologise, Arhu.
Yes, those are the MMOs I was thinking about too.
I'm a tax-collector, by the way.