This Business Week article suggests that Google might be developing their own currency, making an end-run around PayPal (and just about everyone else). This is fascinating when taken together with the economies of MMOGs, especially Second Life, whose Lindens are easily converted to and from real-world currencies. If Google starts “printing” virtual money (I’m 99% sure it would never exist in a physical form, other than plastic), it would jumpstart the concept of virtual economies and help ingrain the globalizing nature of the internet. Nations are becoming less of an organizing idea for anything other than geography; why should currency be tried to geography? I wonder if it would be a step in the direction of a Google-owned virtual world - an MMO marketplace of sorts. If that’s what they’re after, though, they might do better to just buy Second Life. But I digress -

Two questions:
1) This is fun to think about, but where the hell did BW get this idea? I’ve heard nothing of this until now. It seems too radical for the Google of recent years, if you ask me.
2) Why? What advantage would Google have to force consumers to convert dollars/yen/pounds/etc. into a Google currency? I don’t know enough about economics or currency exchange to say why this would be advantageous to them, other than (possibly) distancing the value of the company from any nation or group of nations. That seems like a plus, in the long term, but, once again, I’m hazy on the concrete benefits.