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Someone asked me recently how much time I spend online sending real-time messages to my friends. I figured that my $400-a-month BlackBerry/Rogers e-mail habit didn't count, so I said, "not much." Then someone else asked if I play in any virtual worlds.

Huh?

I proudly replied that I live in a real "real" world. I hug my family when I get home, I eat food by putting it in my mouth and swallowing it, and I turn left in a car by rotating the steering wheel counter-clockwise in my daughter's 1975 AMC Hornet. But then I asked myself: What do I do at work? I build and deploy electronic trading systems for investors whom I've never met, to move money they don't touch into stocks they only view as an accounting entry. I'm building virtual worlds in which investors can interact.

In a very real sense, for many of us, money is becoming a largely abstract concept. It's no longer gold and silver, or even paper notes that represent precious metals. A vast amount of the money in the world today consists of electronic bookkeeping entries that people flip back and forth. And they'll accept these digits as payment for goods and services.

The scary and intriguing thing is, the financial markets I work in are amateur hour compared to the expanding virtual worlds many mere 15-year-olds now "live in" online. I'm at the leading edge of online investing, yet it's already looking ragged and obsolete.

One of the most popular virtual worlds is Second Life, a three-dimensional online planet launched by San Francisco-based Linden Lab in 2003. More than eight million people have signed up, although there are only about 35,000 users online at any given time. You can join for free, or pay $9.95 (U.S.) a month and receive a stipend of Linden dollars. These can be exchanged for real dollars on the official LindeX exchange, or on third-party websites. Recently, the exchange rate was 270 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar. You can also earn money in Second Life by performing virtual "work."

To start, you go to the home page and create an online version of yourself called an avatar. You can look pretty much like anyone or anything you want—a furry creature, a dinosaur, whatever. You can walk around, fly or simply teleport yourself to almost anywhere.

This world has just about everything you have in the real world: houses, hotels, shopping malls, scenic landscapes and—like so many real-world beings seem to prefer—strip joints. There used to be casinos as well, but Second Life shut them down in late July for fear of violating real-world U.S. laws against online gambling. You interact with others by using private instant messaging or public chatting. You can even eat and drink, although your online body doesn't require it.

Eager to connect with hip consumers, dozens of real-world companies have also set up shop in Second Life, including Circuit City, Reuters and Nissan. You can browse through merchandise, check out news or test-drive a new car. There are people serving beers for Linden dollars, table dancing for Linden dollars, renting homes for Linden dollars and exchanging Linden dollars back into real dollars.

There is also real estate speculation. Second Life is made up of more than 3,500 simulated "regions" of land, and you can buy properties ranging in size from 512 square metres to 65,536 square kilometres. There are also more than 7,500 private islands.

When I found out that you could make real money in Second Life, it kind of frightened me. This is a fake place! It sits in a computer server! But, wait a minute. So does the stock market.

Actually, it looks like securities markets are still underdeveloped in Second Life. So I'm thinking that, in the evening when I get home from my "real" job, I should set up an investment bank. I'll charge 5% to take virtual businesses, with virtual customers, public. I'll also create a stock exchange and charge five cents per share to trade. That's way better for investment dealers and stock exchanges than in the real world, where online alternative trading systems allow some investors to trade pretty much for free.

Another reason Second Life would be better for my exchange: no insider trading laws and no provincial or territorial regulators looking over my shoulder. On the other hand, I'd have to watch out for an avatar-investor backlash if anything went wrong. American Apparel closed up shop in Second Life after having customers shot outside its store, and Reebok was nuked. Now I just need to find some 15-year-old who will spare some time to help me figure out all of this.

E-mail Doug Steiner about his column