[nhaehnle]

Wikipedia defines money as:

"Money is any object or record, that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context."

This is in line with most actual usage of the word. Bottom line, you're just playing silly semantic games. It is useful to understand the differences between different types of money, but claiming that something is "not really money" based on your own private definition of money does not add to the discussion.

[fleitz]

Actually I juxtaposed the definition of money and currency. The distinction is important. Money is a superset of currency and I got that wrong.

Most people think that playing the lottery is an investment strategy for retirement, I would not trust what most people think when it comes to economics. Little semantic games are hugely important to people. Look how pissed everyone gets when MS describe the MSPL as 'open source'.

Actually, my own private definition does add to the discussion, when enough people connote a word to have a different meaning it changes the definition of a word, all based on their own little private definitions of words.

Your views on semantic contexts are 'fantastic'. I'd suggest you look that one up on the OED if you want to understand the definition I'm using, most people would get it wrong.