[ChuckMcM]

Nika, none of the issuers you mention will convert back into dollars. Its a one way street. Presumably they have set up agreements with people who will accept them an they have pre-negotiated a discount rate. Its like chucky cheese tokens, you can't turn them back into quarters so that you can play more video games.

[zach]

Actually, now that you mention it...

According to recent California law, "a gift certificate with a cash value of less than ten dollars ($10) is redeemable in cash (not a new certificate or merchandise) for its cash value."

Disney dollars are generally available only in denominations of $10 or less, so they may actually be an incredibly-inconvenient cash equivalent in California.

[ChuckMcM]

According to the 'reference site' [1]

"Disney Dollars DO NOT expire. The oldest bill from 1987 can still be used today. As they are worth real money. They also may be exchanged back for the U.S. Dollars or purchased using the same.

They may used to pay for anything that can be normally paid for with cash including the following locations: (only Disney locations)"

They are exactly like casino chips, which is to say that within the Disney properties they can be used equivalently to cash, and even converted back into cash.

Given the Las Vegas experience however, I suspect that people in and around Orlando or other Disney locations, who aren't associated with Disney, should not accept them in lieu of cash.

One of the parallels to remember, the Secret Service wasn't going after the casinos for their chips, they were going after people who accepted them as cash even though they had no business relationship with the casino.

[1] http://disneydollars.net/where_can_disney_dollars_be_used.ht...

[makmanalp]

What about bitcoins? I thought you could convert those back to dollars.

[ChuckMcM]

Good question. Early on when I was trying to create a milli-cent currency for subscription buying of content from a website we wondered if we offered a refund for our digital cash tokens if we'd get in trouble for it.

As it turned out the Digi-cash folks had all the patents and were being real dicks about licensing so we never got to test the question.

I can absolutely predict that if you can buy several hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoins from person X, and then go to persons P, Q, R, ... Z and redeeem them back for cash, that the authorities will shut down that sort of thing quite quickly.

[weavejester]

"I can absolutely predict that if you can buy several hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoins from person X, and then go to persons P, Q, R, ... Z and redeeem them back for cash, that the authorities will shut down that sort of thing quite quickly."

It's already been done:

http://i.imgur.com/PUMtG.jpg

That's 400k BTC (about $400k) being sent to a number of different accounts.

[kwis]

Good luck cashing that out without crashing the market. Somebody pointed out, just a few days ago, that a $10k sell-off recently scrubbed 25% off BCN/USD. A 400,000BCN sell-off would almost certainly drop it to pennies.

[weavejester]

I suspect that anyone confident enough in the Bitcoin economy to invest that amount of money is not looking to cash out quickly. They may be gambling that Bitcoin becomes a commonly-used internet currency, in which case they stand to gain a lot of money in the long term.

edit: Ah, I see your point. You said "redeem back to cash". Yes, that probably wouldn't work in an economy only worth a few million :)

[colanderman]

Actually yes, you can convert BerkShares back to USD. http://www.berkshares.org/whatareberkshares.htm