virtual currency

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English

Noun

virtual currency (countable and uncountable, plural virtual currencies)

  1. (originally) A type of unregulated digital currency that is restricted to a specific community or purpose, such as in-game purchases.
    • 2009, Lynne Grewe, OpenSocial Network Programming, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 320:
      Virtual currency is the offering of virtual monies that can be spent to buy services (or virtual goods) inside of an application. This is a new trend that has been used primarily in game-like social network applications.
    • 2013 July 31, Kate Murphy, “Virtual Currency Gains Ground in Actual World”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
      Unlike fiat currencies like the United States dollar and virtual currencies like Facebook credits and the one invented by Liberty Reserve, bitcoins are not created or controlled by a central authority.
    • 2018, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood, Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps‎, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN:
      Gas is not ether–it's a separate virtual currency with its own exchange rate against ether.
  2. (loosely) Synonym of digital currency.
    • 2013 April 8, Noam Cohen, “Bubble or No, This Virtual Currency Is a Lot of Coin in Any Realm”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
      When he was a Yale Law School student, Reuben Grinberg wrote one of the first academic papers about Bitcoin, a novel virtual currency that uses sophisticated cryptography to validate and secure transactions that exist only online.
    • 2013 April 11, Nathaniel Popper, Peter Lattman, quoting Cameron Winklevoss, “Never Mind Facebook; Winklevoss Twins Rule in Digital Money”, in New York Times‎:
      People say it’s a Ponzi scheme, it’s a bubble,” said Cameron Winklevoss. “People really don’t want to take it seriously. At some point that narrative will shift to ‘virtual currencies are here to stay.’ We’re in the early days.”
    • 2021 December 6, Andrew E. Kramer, “Companies Linked to Russian Ransomware Hide in Plain Sight”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
      Those payments are typically made in cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies like Bitcoin, which the gangs then need to convert to standard currencies, like dollars, euros and rubles.

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