The ever-popular World of Warcraft published by Blizzard is one of the most-played massively-multiplayer video games of all time (it’s certainly the most-subscribed) and there’s been a thriving economy in the game for some time. We’ve described this economy on SiliconANGLE before when we looked at statistics about where the gold in the game was in the whimsically named article “Occupy World of Warcraft: The Allure of Virtual Gold”.

As a virtual currency, Bitcoins make an interesting replacement (or transfer currency) for virtual worlds and MMO games. We’ve covered Bitcoin auction sites like Bitmit.net before, so it was no surprise when WoW gold started to appear in the Bitcoin economy.

It looks like the going price for 10,000 gold is 1 BTC.

It’s important to note that people who sell WoW gold should not be supported, even by the Bitcoin community, as the people who obtain this gold for sale “farm” it from servers using exploits and by diminishing the play experience for others. Also, the sale of gold from Blizzard’s games is currently against their Terms of Service and can get those who purchase it banned.

I’ve written before in other venues about how Bitcoin makes a good currency for an online game and an excellent mechanism for microtransactions. The free-to-play gaming ecology includes a great deal of games who rake in cash by selling virtual items for very small amounts of money (sometimes as low as 10¢ an item) at these rates the cost of the transfer can greatly exceed the cost of the item. As a result, they have the microtransaction currency bought in bulk.

However, with Bitcoin there’s no need to have people buy into any microtransaction currency, they can just use a portion of their Bitcoin (and an escrow service could even instantly transfer them for the current exchange rate.)

While for most free-to-play games this might change their model—many prefer to preserve having people purchase in bulk because it means that people must spend $5, $10, or $20 on their game and cannot get it back out, it still might open up more avenues for them to receive more money if people can pay in smaller increments.

At the current exchange rate, 1 BTC ($5.6 USD) for 10,000 gold means this individual values 1 gold at 0.06¢.