I've been browsing through some old adventures (Ivy and Chrome to be exact) and its describing the online setup a prep school has. Now, in describing what data is available, it says that sitting there in a DS is 15k that takes up 15 Mp of storage. Should I take it to mean that this money is downloadable? What would you then do with that money? Anyone have any thoughts on how that would work?

You would then... spend it?

So you could download and transfer that money to your own accounts? Is this a normal thing? I was under the assumption that hosts like this didnt store their own funds, it would be safely tucked away behind some nasty black ice in a financial institution.

Certified cred is just encrypted data. It can be copied, downloaded, and spent. However, whenever the money is spent legitimately it becomes verified cred and that code is now garbage. If you download money from a host, spend it fast. But spending it will also let the system owners know they've been compromised.

my take: certified creds use one-time pads for encryption. the entity that 'creates' the certified cred basically writes a check addressed to "bearer" and encrypts the monetary data. when the certified cred is spent, the data is shuffled back to the originating bank, which then authorizes payment equal to the amount being spent. the originating entity then creates a new set of certified cred for the amount remaining on the credstick, encrypts it with a new OTP, and downloads it to the credstick.

So do any GMs out there leave lying around the matrix like that? The only place I've seen that are in two adventures (Ivy and Chrome and Dark Angel) both by Thomas Kane.

Only in syndicate money cleaners, and those have just a little bit of dark as the blackest corners of hell ice guarding them.

i don't normally leave it lying around the Matrix, but i do use virtual certified credsticks that amount to the same thing.

Many of the early published adventures have money that can be found in hosts. Yes, it can be downloaded, deleted on the host, and spent. Some players like it, some GMs ignore the money.