virtual currency

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^[1], →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^[2], 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^[3], →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^[4]:

     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^[5], →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.

Synonyms

• virtual money

Hyponyms

• in-game currency

Translations

type of digital currency

• Finnish: virtuaaliraha

Further reading

• virtual currency on Wikipedia.Wikipedia