How about putting the digital money in a game/bbs environment?
I had a talk with a fellow named Joichi Ito at CFP about this subject. He's a total MUD addict and told me, "I would pay real money for MUD money." The legal issues involved in setting up a real world money system are enormous. Doing a game environment implementation would allow the technical issues to be worked out without having to hire lawyers. And if some people transact for real money, we can't help that. For MUD's in particular, there's a problem with conservation of mass, er, gold. It's really easy to create more MUD money. However, if there were a currency exchange system available between MUD's, you would have a classical free banking environment. Everyone issues currency, and as gamemaster your money deflates to the extent that you allow more gold to exist in your game. I can't think of a better way to get people to learn about monetary effects in macroeconomics. I also spoke with Pavel Curtis at CFP, but only enough to interest him in talking further. Pavel runs the largest MUD on the planet. Eric