I'm confused. "Real" bitcoins are just numbers stored on a computer hard drive, while "Make-believe" bitcoins are ones you can hold in your hands?
Do I have that correct?
You can transfer people the number or the codes in any way you wish, email, peer-to-peer through the various BitCoin wallet utilities, or the code on paper, or written as a QR code. The coins I've seen so far have the QR code, although once scanned, the coins were worthless. I guess you could just throw another sticker with a new QR code on there...
All the BTC physical media schemes I've seen to date were really more like a pre-loaded gift card or credit card, and the BTC still mainly moved in the "real" way. It was just a tangible method of relaying the codes.
I suppose like anything else, it begs the more philosophical question "
what is money?" etc. I guess if I have a $50 Applebee's gift card, or a pre-paid VISA/AMEX/MC with $50 on it, and give it to someone in exchange for $50 in bullets, gold, canned food or whatever it was "money" too...
I don't really care what people do with their BTC, as long as it does not allow for fractional reserve/speculation/futures or derivatives type activity, or for the larger Internet/BTC community to ignore such behavior for those who don't want to play. Plenty of other fiat .gov issued currencies for those types to mess with or screw up IMO. In theory, since BTC's only exist as their codes, and the block-chain and user base at large will quickly squash any "duplication" or attempts at double-issue of a BTC, this shouldn't be possible, although I could see people trying to use BTC as a commodity backing of a "sub currency", like using BTC as gold or something to issue paper or non-gold coinage etc. then playing finance games with that.
Then it just becomes an issue if the "games" with the sub-currency become more popular than the BTC, which then could artificially drive up the value of BTC than just the exchanges, or the built in mathematical deflation as the block chain gets ever longer, and the miners/processors create the "scarcity" because new BTC's become ever more infrequently added to the pool/block-chain.