MS$

Rob Findlay over at the Bank channel points to a story on Microsoft's Zune points which have their own conversion rates to different currencies, effectively making it a currency of its own. So what? I'm very interested in what banking fundamentally is, what currencies are and are not and here is an example of how a firm can instigate a "value transfer system", which is really all a currency is, without fanfare. Now lets make a silly prediction: in five years time there will be three new virtual currencies: the Amazon Dollar, the Google Credit and the Microsoft Dollar. Each will be used across a number of service providers and linked into various banking and payment systems and will threaten the ability of central banks to control the supply of funds in their economy.