A fascinating article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal titled “QQ: China’s New Coin of the Realm?” describes the explosive growth of an alternative currency, making me wonder anew about the implications for global Web or mobile ecommerce or epayments. The article* describes how the Hong Kong stock exchange listed company TenCent created its own Web currency for users of its gaming service, and found the currency expanding into the general Chinese Web market in which credit cards are prohibited. QQ is now being traded for currency issued by actual nation states, which means that QQ is essentially pegged to a virtual basket of other real-world currencies backed by variouscentral governments. China is working to crack down on the latter practice, but what we’re witnessing is the growth of a virtual currency due to a governments prohibition of traditional ones (score one for Adam Smith).

With QQ currency originally intended to only have purchase in finite Web markets, this makes me dust off something I used to model back in the dot.com days: could a major online player such as EBay/PayPal, Google, or MySpace create a similar currency for its own users, and then find it to have acceptance in general marketplaces? Unlike the old attempted universal cash attempts such as Beenz, Flooz, or DigiCash (which set out to replace traditional currencies across the Web), this finite-to-universal phenomenon could happen. And as we saw in the original days of PayPal, few of today’s regulations, marketplace rules or even patent laws would apply, making this a wild free-for-all.

• Registration required: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117519670114653518-FR_svDHxRtxkvNmGwwpouq_hl2g_20080329.html?mod=rss_free