[DanielBMarkham]

Manufacturing of tangible goods will become a commodity as 3-D printing becomes mainstream. In addition, many services that were verbally or physically contracted will be handled completely in virtual reality. Think home robots cutting hair, or auto-drive cars.

And as you point out, that's not even touching bio-hacking, which is also converging to digital/created lifeforms.

Call me cynical, but this article struck me as nerd candy. It's a totally-awesome idea: we finally get to really measure and experiment with economies! But in my research several years ago I was already uncovering hundreds of millions of dollars in a virtual goods black-market. People will take a character of yours and spend all of their time leveling him up and getting lots of goodies. Then you log in and take over. You pay them through some back channel. Or you leave an item where somebody else can pick it up, etc. No matter how you design a virtual world, there are plenty of ways to make economic transactions outside the walls. The illusion that you somehow have a god-like view and can see and observe everything of important is just that, an illusion. But I'm willing to wait a few decades for the economists to figure that one out :)

The virtual economy will merge along multiple different lines. I don't think there's any one answer here. There's no reason your WoW character can't be traded for BitCoin and used as a downpayment on a VR piece of real-estate that you then later sell at a profit for options on a futures market in some rare item coming out in a game next year. Thinking in a linear fashion can really handicap the possible solution sets out there.