Thanks, Jeremy Liew for your post pointing this article out.
Over on WorldsInMotion there is a great interview with Gene Hoffman, CEO of billing and fraud management company Vindicia, on credit card fraud prevention in MMOs. It's well worth reading just for the fraud prevention angle, but it also contains bits of casually dropped wisdom on the economies of virtual worlds that are actually the real goods in the interview. For instance:
"These are real economies. In fact, they get much closer to the raw
creation of economic growth than many national economies as these
"virtual" economies prove quite convincingly that wealth isn't capital
or labor but instead knowledge and creativity. Building a working
infrastructure to support capital inflows and outflows in a trustworthy
manner is very much a core problem we want to address."