Last night there was a meeting with a collection of bloggers,creators and Linden Lab employees to discuss the transition of Second Life payment processing from Tillia to Thunes.
The acquisition of Tillia was announced last year. Strawberry Linden put some of the most common questions back then to Brad Oberwager in an episode of Lab Gab, that you can watch HERE. It’s worth watching because it outlines most of what has now happened,as well as conveying Brad’s excitement and enthusiasm for the venture.
Last night’s Zoom call was to bring people up to date and share the latest, so we could pass that onto our audiences/readers.
What happened?
Tillia got sold and a company much more suited to operating it acquired it. Thunes is a global financial services provider, Tillia was simply created to allow Linden Lab to legally operate it’s own currency (Linden Dollars) and process credit cards.
What’s going to change?
Immediately for most residents, not a lot. On Wednesday (or the next time you visit after that) you will be asked to check a box on the website, acknowledging the change of the company name from Tillia to “Thunes Financial services LLC”. In the future it should lead to more options for buying Linden Dollars and cashing-out to your bank or other accounts.
An analogy Brad used was a local coffee shop, that I’m going to paraphrase.
If you pay with your card the receipt may have a reference to “Square” (a common card processing company in the US), if the coffee shop changes their card processing company to for example “SumUp” (a card handler common in the UK) your receipt may have a reference to that company, but the price of your coffee doesn’t change.
So the change to Thunes is like that. Tillia is being renamed but all your details and transactions are exactly where they always were, like the name on the coffee shop changing, it’s still in the same place. (If they’d tried moving any of it, that would have been the risky part for everyone, so they didn’t.)
It’s possible you may have to re-enter your credit card details, or check some boxes to reconfirm payment or payout methods and that’s it.
The LindeX exchange remains under the control of Linden Lab, Thunes cannot change the price you pay for Lindens.
Right now you may be thinking “what about fees?”, and rightly so. Linden Lab intends to make fees more transparent, by showing you the fee breakdown. Showing how much of that fee they have to pay to provide you that particular payout option. This then allows you to better choose what method you want to use.
What happened in the call?
I’ve now taken part in several of these calls, but this one was different. I’ve seen Brad excited, enthusiastic,angry and range in-between. This time,as someone pointed out in the call text chat, he looked a little scared. Don’t be mistaken though, this was not fear of things going wrong with the switch over to Thunes; they’ve been working hard for months to make sure it goes smoothly. What he’s worried about are the emails he receives. Every time he puts himself on the line to change something for the better in Second Life he usually receives at least 50 “You’ve ruined SL!” type emails, some of which get very personal.
Given the internal and regulatory scale of this change (think lawyers in 48 US States all having to agree to it), I can understand his emotions.
The example of the “Potato1” support case was mentioned, which Bloggers heard about last week during the call about account security.
So if your password is something like “potato1” please change it, for everyone’s sake. We don’t really want a forced grid-wide password reset on account of you folks.
A final point that came up around fees that charities have to pay (just like everyone else) when cashing out the donations residents have made. Those fees can’t be waived, someone has to pay them somewhere, and Brad said he may well do that, out of his own personal pocket, not Linden Labs. With a slight caveat of “maybe not if it was a Million Dollar donation”.
That’s a lot but made simple. Thank you.
A well summarised account of a zoom conference I didn’t attend. Much easier to read your summary. 😀