Because I know I have both EVE players and economic fans in the audience:

[theweaselking]

Something Awful Forumites manipulate EVE's economy to generate infinite money. After pulling out more money than they figured they could ever possibly spend, they documented the exploit and notified the developers.

(Which is to say, they stopped pulling on their infinite money sink because they got bored, not that the sink was finite.)

Comments

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Like Snow Crash, Eve is an excellent commentary on libertarianism and the inevitability of shittiness when you let humanity's freak flag fly.

Also, when thinking of Eve money, drop three decimal places and imagine Bank of America doing something similar. A $5 billion banking scandal would be significant, but not exactly unheard of nor world-shattering.

Five trillion isk is certainly nothing to sneeze at and the money they pulled out of the exploit was all gravy, but "more money than they figured they could ever possibly spend" is a bit hyperbole-y given the amounts of money a corp as massive as Goonfleet throws out on a regular basis. A trillion apiece for each of the people involved can go really quick when you can easily drop a billion on a decently equipped version of the smallest class of ship.

[dreamshade.livejournal.com]

I was reading a thread on Kotaku or something in which the libertarians were countering by saying that true libertarianism, stemming from objectivism, disdains taking things from others by force, and the piracy that drives much of these massive EVE events is thus not a part of libertarianism, the parts where Goons blow up ships and steal their cargo in order to fuel their market advantage. Though that's sort of like saying that Stalin's concentration of power at the top wasn't a part of true communism.

[jerril]

The "No true scottsman" defense tends to fail in the face of demographics. Or another way of putting it is "Yes, but there's like, only three of you guys, and a few million of them. So good luck with your ideal society."

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Or, more directly, their supposed "prohibition" on force necessarily requires a monopoly on force. And Libertarianism is so logically incoherent that once you have the monopoly on force, it's impossible to not use it.

Which is why all True Libertarian Paradises look like EVE, or Somalia.