A few months ago I was invited to join Swift Demand, which touts itself as a UBI project that includes a Fiverr-like interface for selling small items. The items were limited to mini services, such as translating one's name into language xyz, but I saw a jar of coconut sauce being sold as well. I sell half hearted tarot readings there from time to time as a lark.
When you first get into it, it feels like a game made up of fake money. Someone is also selling a guide to steemit which is pretty funny. I feel that there's more to swift than people think. In the beginning, everyone thought bitcoin was fake. I mined a few bitcoin but have no idea where they went. This was around 2009.
Then a few years later I saw that there was a bitcoin center down the street from my job. I thought it was really funny but I was shocked that it had coalesced in meatspace. Imagine if you were playing pokemon go and you saw pokemon in meatspace. I feel that there's a material difference between today's phony moneys and yesterday's gaming gold because there are a lot more people in the digital economy today.
The size of an economy matters, and the "realness" of a currency is only as good as its ability to store value. That is because the definition of money is a storehouse of value. This used to be a mere theoretical statement that we bandied about in school. However this is becoming truer and truer as time goes by. People are able to buy more and more things with hitherto "phony" money every day.