This is actually a very valid question - what is the difference between a company token, a casino chip, a "reward point", company scrip, gift cards, Steam account balances, Steam hats, unlicensed money transmitters, hawala banks, bearer bonds, Jaffa cakes, e-gold, Liberty reserve, Scottish banknotes, shadow banks, Libera, Canadian Tyre money, the Black Sheep Bank, a piece of paper with "IOU £10" written on it, a cheque written on a cow, an unpaid invoice, a Totnes pound, a Zimbabwe dollar, and Bitcoin?

Broadly they fall into these categories:

- debt-like: bonds, banknotes, credit balances, invoice/PO pairs, chips, and so on. Things where theoretically you could redeem it for the face value of real money. These should appear as liabilities on the balance sheet of the issuer. There may be problems if this gets very large.

- redeemable for services: Canadian Tyre, most gift cards. If you look closely at a lot of these things they will have an "equivalent cash value" of a tiny fraction of a penny printed on the back.

- "those that belong to the emperor": state-issued money

- security-like (Howey Test, and similar rules elsewhere): this is the big one for cryptocurrencies, since it depends very heavily on the marketing. If Libera is floating this may be a problem. If it's a normal token redeemable at a par value, it's not.

- non-redeemable consumable or durable items that are commonly used in barter: can usually be distinguished from money by not having a face value of any kind. Steam items don't look like money even if they can be traded.

I agree that a lot of this is combining people getting upset about cryptocurrency with people getting upset about Facebook, but in both cases there are underlying valid points; there is also potentially a TBTF issue - how much is Facebook going to issue, and what effects would its huge market dominance have?