I'm thinking of things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curren... which ended in FBI raids.
Full Tilt Poker created a small closed e-money system which was seemingly legally fine; it was the gambling that got them raided, because only mob bosses in politically connected US states are allowed to profit from gambling and the US will go after gambling providers in other countries.
Liberty reserve were facilitating money laundering. This is the difficult bit - if you provide an electronic facility for easy transference of ownership of debts or e-money, the authorities want access to the paper trail.
No, there's a big difference, in that you don't have the right to redeem ("put") the corporate bond any time at face value.[1] You do have that right for the IOU that is your bank account. This allows two people to carry on as if they both are full owners of the dollar in the bank account (both the depositor and the business it was lent to), and that mechanism is what allows the money supply to increase.
When you don't have that right, you, as the corporate bond holder, know that you can only get the money out early by selling the bond at its current market rate, whatever that is, which may force you to take a discount. This expectation -- and the necessity to redeem it for someone else's dollars on the market -- prevents it from being money creation.
[1] There are "puttable bonds" where you can do something like this, but it's over specific intervals and times, not immediate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puttable_bond
Even if everyone agreed to use your IOU from the article the tax office is going to have quite a bit to say on the subject and probably start launching audits. And if the IOU start getting traction they are likely to trigger police raids and maybe a legislative response (look at how Facebook dropped their Libra for example). That seems substantially different from the IOUs the banks can create.
I wouldn't use bank-issued IOUs if I thought I had a choice. I'm pretty sure I'm forced to by government policy.
IANAL, but the IOUs created by Full Tilt Poker were also legal to use. When the government eventually pressed charges in the debacle, no charges were pressed against regular players of the poker site, including those who used these IOUs for small economic activity. If using these IOUs would have been illegal, then surely the government would have pressed at least some charges after spending years investigating the case?
But anyway, even if _using_ the IOUs was not illegal, creating them like a fractional reserve bank surely was illegal. So you definitely have a point that the regulatory environment creates a special status for the legal tender of the country.
When I give a Amazon gift-card to someone, it is an IOU against Amazon, and most people will gladly accept it as money.