We need more topical discussion threads like this. But this is not particularly timely. The news post is close to a month old.
On the other hands this directly impacts everyone in the cryptocoin and virtual currency space. To my mind money is anything you can trade directly for goods and services without resorting to a middleman to handle the conversion.
In this regard, money is more of a local thing than a global thing. With the exception of bitcoin and a handful of altcoins there is no "global" money, only commodities.
For example, if you're from Europe and visiting the USA then your Euros are not money because you need to exchange them to dollars before you can spend them.
But your Visa and Mastercard are.