How a Fish Tank Led to a Leak of Sensitive Data - Tattoo

Some of you might have heard of the hyperinflation that happened in Diablo 3. However, the hyperinflation rates there pale in comparison to the hyperinflation rates in Gaia Online, a forum-based website intended for teens and young adults.
In Gaia Online, users are given avatars, houses, cars and aquariums for them to customize using items available in the site. Items are produced in:

• Gold shops, where regular items can be bought using gold, the site's primary tradeable virtual currency.
• Cash shops, where premium items can be bought using Gaia cash, the site's non-tradeable premium currency, available for $0.01 each.
• A casino, which sells tokens for use in the casino games (blackjack and slots) at the fixed price of 1 gold each. Winnings there could be cashed out into tickets that could be used to buy items from the casino's rewards shop.
• Several other games which reward users component items that could be processed into other, more valuable items
• Special events, which give items to users depending on their degree of participation.
• Giftboxes and chests that randomly appear on the site, which give items when opened.

Gold is generated by interacting with site features in various ways: posting in the forums, voting in polls and playing the site's games, among others. Trade is done either through a) the site's virtual auction house (the Marketplace) where users run their own stores, sell their items for a set price in gold (or auction it to the highest bidder) and are charged with a 2% sales tax for every completed transaction, or b) direct user-to-user trade, where users negotiate in a dedicated trading subforum within the site and avoid taxes (although the prices in the trading subforum are mostly tied to the prices in the marketplace).
Frequently, items in the cash shops are sold only for a limited time. The sale of items on most other shops, on the other hand, is almost never discontinued. This provides a price ceiling for present gold shop items and prevents the sale of those items for profit. Users seeking profit are limited to selling past gold shop items, cash shop items, event items, game items (including tokens and tickets) and giftbox/chest items. The best-selling items in the marketplace tend to be cash shop items that can be equipped by the user's avatar, followed by game items.
Before the massive hyperinflation, Gaia's virtual economy has been mostly stable and encouraged users to save up for items they want to equip for their avatar. For example, in this thread dating back to the peak of Gaia in January 2008, some user quested to have an Emo Bag, a past cash shop item. By the time she posted the thread, said item was worth 350,000, and, like most other Gaians, she thought that she could consider herself rich enough if she had 100,000. Like most other economies (virtual or real), the price of specific items are dependent on the amount of existing supplies and the demand for them. The following table shows the prices of selected items throughout the years whenever a thread that mentions the price of said item in one way or another is available:

Item	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	Early 2013
Emo Bag		300,000	350,000	270,000	700,000	590,000	310,000	440,000
Longcat Scarf				58,000	120,000	140,000	115,000	129,000
White Ink	1,250	1,000	3,165*	2,300	4,500	5,000	5,500	7,000
Old Crumpled Newspaper					20	100	700	840
Red Ink		80	190	100	200	325	400	500
Ticket	2	3	2.5	2	5	4	5	3.5

^{*No listing was found for the item itself, so price is estimated through calculating the price of 5 red inks, 5 blue inks and 5 green inks, which makes a white ink when combined together.}
The prices slowly increased through the years, owing to the gradual decline of site activity that began in 2009. Many members who announced their departure give away their gold and their items to others, keeping the amount of items and gold mostly constant (although item production was somewhat affected). The inflation rate is mostly tolerable, and anyone could earn enough gold to buy items for their avatar if they spent enough time in the site.
What destabilized the economy, however, is the sale of items that generated random amounts of gold in the cash shops that began in August 2013, a few months after Gary Schofield, Gaia Interactive's current CEO, took over. First were the gold generators called "Flynn's Booty" and "Flynn's Chest", which immediately triggered price hikes on several items. Several petitions to end the sale of such items have been ignored, saying in a now-deleted FAQ that "it is not predicted to have any long-term negative effect on the economy".
A picture of Jason Loia, Gaia Interactive's COO, presenting "Flynn's Booty" as an example of gamification and operant conditioning leaked to the forums and users began blaming the upper management for the hyperinflation. Relations between staff and users have deteriorated so much that the long-standing tradition of weekly talks between the staff and the users ended a week later, following countless calls for the discontinuation of gold generators and the resignation of the CEO (who received the nickname of "he-who-must-not-be-named" after bans over the use of his real name) and the COO. The succeeding table shows prices of the items in the earlier table, from August to October 2013:

Item	Aug 2013	Sep 2013	Oct 2013
Emo Bag	490,000	600,000	900,000
Longcat Scarf	75,000	150,000	210,000
White Ink	10,000	12,000	25,000
Old Crumpled Newspaper	1,000	1,375	4,090
Red Ink	560	1,000	1,400
Ticket	5	7	10

Despite the incident, they said in a statement they later released that "there are a large number of users who do like these items as they allow people to get Gaia gold to purchase items from the marketplace". Then, gold generators began receiving other names before being released and re-released into the cash shops. The gold they promised to give to users began increasing to keep up with the inflation, to a point that some people are complaining of not being able to handle more than 2,147,483,647 gold in transactions and in their accounts. The response was to increase the cap to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 gold, encouraging further hyperinflation. Below is the price data between November 2013 and March 2014:

Item	Nov 2013	Dec 2013	Jan 2014	Feb 2014	Mar 2014
Emo Bag	2,500,000	1,050,000	2,700,000	5,000,000	40,000,000
Longcat Scarf	300,000	405,000	595,000	1,000,000	5,500,000
White Ink	28,000	50,000	40,000	65,000	700,000
Old Crumpled Newspaper	2,000	950	950	800	2,700
Red Ink	1,500	2,000	3,700	4,500	30,000
Ticket	8	15	16	30	110

Weeks after increasing the gold cap, Gaia began releasing gold generators that are worth more than the previous gold limit. And when asked about the economy, they continue to insist that the economy is healthy despite the continuing exponential increase of prices of almost everything. However, it is becoming apparent to users that the economy is becoming unstable, and fewer users buy gold generators. Thus, the marketing team began relying on increasingly-intrusive methods to advertise gold generators and/or Gaia cash:

1. Once used sparingly for useful site updates, the site-wide announcements are now used several times a day to advertise constant sales of Gaia cash and the latest repackagings of Flynn's Booty. Most users ignore the announcements nowadays.
2. Pop up ads for Gaia cash have also begun appearing on the site.
3. When both were ignored, Gaia began sending advertisements through the private messaging system. When they did it in September 2013 to offer free gold generators for those who buy Gaia cash, users were simply annoyed but not enraged enough. When the Gaia tried it again in June 2014 to offer discounts on buying Gaia Cash, they did so repeatedly (like the last post of this particular thread shows). The users went ahead to report the admin for spamming their inboxes. When the reports were rejected, they took their grievances to the Site Feedback forum and began the biggest revolt the site has ever seen. The staff realized their mistake and ended the spamfest, but without even acknowledging the outrage that surrounded it.

Increasing desperation on selling the gold generators eventually became apparent when the prices of those items became discounted, some as high as 70%. And in July 2014, a gold generator worth a trillion was released. Below is the price data from April to August 2014:

Item	Apr 2014	May 2014	Jun 2014	Jul 2014	Aug 2014
Emo Bag	100,000,000	1,200,000,000	2,000,000,000	2,500,000,000	11,000,000,000
Longcat Scarf	10,000,000	45,000,000	279,000,000	3,000,000,000	6,000,000,000
White Ink	7,000,000	10,000,000	31,000,000	75,000,000	300,000,000
Old Crumpled Newspaper	15,000	45,000	500,000	1,000,000	1,500,000
Red Ink	300,000	1,000,000	7,000,000	15,000,000	25,000,000
Ticket	100	4,000	2,200	18,000	32,000

And, for comparison with the charts above,here's a (probably outdated) list of every single gold generator that was released in Gaia Online. Using the ratio between the price of tokens and the price of tickets as an indicator, 1 gold last year is worth as much as at least 10,000 gold right now, putting the annual inflation rate at around one million percent.)
Other parts of the site also suffered due to hyperinflation. Before the first release of "Flynn's Booty", voting on forum polls and in the various weekly official contests (for 12 gold per vote), posting anything in the forum (for 125 gold per post, and Gaia has a subforum dedicated to spam posts), and playing the site's games (for probably 1000 gold per hour in the old games and 10,000 gold per hour in zOMG!, the site's MMORPG) earned users enough. It also had a thriving art industry where talented users sell sketches to interested buyers.
After "Flynn's Booty" got released for a few times, activity on the gold-producing parts of the site declined. The worst victims are many of Gaia's games. Now considered unprofitable, almost nobody bothers to play them anymore. Posts made just to earn gold have also decreased significantly. Voting in polls for gold became unviable as well, so even the winners of the weekly contests can't even get an average rating of four whole stars out of five like they did before. Artists in the art industry had to resort with bartering items for artworks to avoid going out of business.
There were attempts to solve hyperinflation by increasing the marketplace tax (to 3% on June 6, then to 5% by August 7) and introducing gold sink events. However, while the sink events were ongoing, the gold generators were still being sold most of the time, and the amount of gold in the system (as reflected in the Marketplace revenue graph, which displays the total amount of gold removed through the sales tax) kept increasing until after the release of the trillion-gold generators. By August 6, they were briefly discontinued after they did a survey, only to return in a modified form days later and in their regular form near the end of the month.
As it stands today, the most-sought items in Gaia Online, once worth less than a million gold, are now worth billions and billions due to the continuous sale of gold generators within the span of one year. And even after all of that, hyperinflation still continues with gold generators still being sold. I don't know how many more zeroes would be added to the prices of every item in the marketplace before whoever is in charge of Gaia's virtual economy realizes that something is wrong.
My questions for you are:

1. Which other games experience(d) hyperinflation in their virtual markets? Did it survive afterwards?
2. How was hyperinflation dealt with in those cases?
3. At what point can a virtual be economy considered to be totally out of control and beyond repair?