As someone who hasn't played Animal Crossing - this is kind of surreal. Sounds like a glitch in the way game mechanics allowed users to hyper-inflate the primary currency (by manually changing the time on their system) - and saw the economy migrate to a currency which more readily fits with a model of "unforgeable costliness".<p>Great writeup on that by Nick Szabo
<a href="http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/10/antiques-time-gold-and-bit-gold.html" rel="nofollow">http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/10/antiques-time-gold-...</a>