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And now for more post-mortems on Silicon Alley's latest casualty, digital currency play Flooz, which helped users buy stuff on the Web with flooz certificates that people bought with their credit cards.

The e-commerce venture has shuttered operations and is expected to file for bankruptcy any minute now, another victim of the dot-com shakeout that began in earnest about 16 months ago.

And as is the drill when a dot-com venture flames out, now comes the Monday morning quarterbacking about how the concept had no chance, was too flaky to succeed. In plenty of dumb-money ventures, this is certainly called for.

But in the case of Flooz.com's demise, all this piling on about how alternative or digital currencies make no sense, makes no sense.

Take this comment from James Van Dyke, a research director at Jupiter Media Metrix, who told ABC News.com that "people had nutty projections about e-commerce growth and knew that cash was never designed for the Internet."

Well, knock me over with a feather. This from a research firm that helped blow plenty of hot air into the dot-com bubble with all its projections about e-commerce. Now this guy is saying that it didn't make sense to jump in and design an alternative payment method just for the Internet, that it never proved to be a very good alternative.

I doubt Flooz had any designs on replacing the Federal Reserve or the Treasury's role in affecting and influencing money supply or how we use cash.

Flooz did have designs on making e-commerce easier. And to a certain extent, it succeeded in introducing the concept of buying things online to people who otherwise wouldn't have tried it.

There are plenty of reasons why the company ended operations, but least among them is whether or not it would work. The concept worked as a novelty but needed more time to take off.

People probably thought S&H Green Stamps wouldn't work either. And I bet there were doubters over using frequent flier miles.

The problem for Flooz.com is that it didn't work on a big enough scale and fast enough for its backers, all of which are trying to patch their venture capital portfolios below the water line. But if Flooz were still operating, which would be the case if its venture funding spigot hadn't been shut down, we'd all still be talking about what about it works, and what about it sucks. The concept would still be alive.

Flooz was gaining traction with merchants, who had signed up to accept the certificates, and the concept was making headway with the corporate market in the gift-giving arena.

And the story of how well the company managed its finances or ran the business will eventually come out too, especially after it declares bankruptcy as it recently indicated. Maybe an exit of selling its technology to the credit card companies might have been a way to go for Flooz. But the main problem facing it was that it needed both time and money to continue making its business work. And both ran out.

We'll save the lofty arguments about whether moving to a cashless society would help software companies displace the Fed. For now, I say we at least recognize that Flooz helped popularize online shopping and showed us how easy and, yes, fun it could be.

Come to think of it, I bet folks who used goats and eggs to pay for stuff were once wary of using little pieces of gold too. But eventually, they found a place among many and evolving forms of currency. And for a few years during the early days of the Internet boom, Flooz helped that evolution continue.

* For another take on the shutdown of Flooz, see Beth Cox's Ghost in the Machine.