According to recent California law, "a gift certificate with a cash value of less than ten dollars ($10) is redeemable in cash (not a new certificate or merchandise) for its cash value."
Disney dollars are generally available only in denominations of $10 or less, so they may actually be an incredibly-inconvenient cash equivalent in California.
"Disney Dollars DO NOT expire. The oldest bill from 1987 can still be used today. As they are worth real money. They also may be exchanged back for the U.S. Dollars or purchased using the same.
They may used to pay for anything that can be normally paid for with cash including the following locations: (only Disney locations)"
They are exactly like casino chips, which is to say that within the Disney properties they can be used equivalently to cash, and even converted back into cash.
Given the Las Vegas experience however, I suspect that people in and around Orlando or other Disney locations, who aren't associated with Disney, should not accept them in lieu of cash.
One of the parallels to remember, the Secret Service wasn't going after the casinos for their chips, they were going after people who accepted them as cash even though they had no business relationship with the casino.
[1] http://disneydollars.net/where_can_disney_dollars_be_used.ht...
As it turned out the Digi-cash folks had all the patents and were being real dicks about licensing so we never got to test the question.
I can absolutely predict that if you can buy several hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoins from person X, and then go to persons P, Q, R, ... Z and redeeem them back for cash, that the authorities will shut down that sort of thing quite quickly.
It's already been done:
That's 400k BTC (about $400k) being sent to a number of different accounts.
edit: Ah, I see your point. You said "redeem back to cash". Yes, that probably wouldn't work in an economy only worth a few million :)