Epic flying mount, just 8000 gold

The beta for Burning Crusade has started. I assume there is a NDA, but there is a lot of information leaking. Among them I found this forum entry with the cost of the riding skill needed for normal and epic flying mounts. The expert riding skill (225) costs 2,000 gold, and the artisan riding skill (300) costs 5,000 gold. And of course you will have to have paid 100 gold for the apprentice riding skill (75) and 1000 gold for the journeyman riding skill (150) before you can learn the higher skills. Learning riding to 300 to be able to ride an epic flying mount thus costs 8,100 gold base cost. And that only buys you the skill, you still will need to either buy or quest for the flying mount that goes with it. Note that all these are *base* prices, you usually get a 10% rebate for being honored with your faction. Currently there is also a 10% rebate for being at least rank 3 in PvP, but it isn't sure whether we will lose that one after the expansion totally remodels the PvP honor system.

If a normal flying mount is sufficient for you, you only pay 3,100 gold base cost, or 2,790 gold after the 10% rebate. If you already have a riding skill of 150, from having bought an epic mount before the patch 1.12.1, or from buying the riding skill now, you will "only" need to spend 1,800 gold after rebate for the skill necessary to fly the normal flying mount. But even that is far more than the average WoW player is likely to have. And as at least the normal flying mount is needed to access certain zones and dungeons in the Burning Crusade, lots of people will have a lot of farming to do for cash. While you can probably earn more gold per hour at level 70 than currently at level 60, farming 1,800 gold will still take many hours. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people will "outsource" that farming, and buy the gold from professional gold farmers. I don't know if there are any publicly traded gold farming companies, but now would be the time to buy shares in them.