And once again, people on the Internet think that they're the first ones to discover something. And, having only just thought of it, they don't know a solution. And, once again, having only just thought of it themselves, and being sure that nobody else in any other situation has ever had this problem, they think that there must not be a solution. Dooom!

News flash: in the non-Internet economy, there are whole sub-industries of fraud control and prevention. Nobody likes having them; if we thought we could get away with not having them, we would, because they cost money to run and somebody has to pay for it. This is, in fact, exactly what the 30 year experiment with "financial deregulation" in the real world was ALL ABOUT.

RMT and botting and other scams in MMOs don't "prove" that online economies are impossible, any more than the dot-com bubble and the fraudulent mortgage CDO bubble "prove" that real economies are impossible. What they both prove is what happens when it's nobody's full-time job to keep the economy honest through monitoring, transparency, and enough enforcement that the vast majority of the people who might otherwise be tempted to scam are afraid of getting caught.

Honestly, this stuff is not difficult. People just think it is, because it went out of style after Reagan and Thatcher.