Bigger than Bitcoin: A Theoretical Typology and Research Agenda for Digital Currencies
Open Access
- 18 August 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Business and Politics
- Vol. 23 (4), 439-455
- https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2021.12
Abstract
Currency is the fundamental economic technology that makes promises credible among actors within and across societies. From shells, to metals, to paper, the technology of money has continually evolved to meet the changing needs of human society. The twenty-first century is witnessing yet another evolution in the technology of money: digital currencies. Although political economy scholarship has begun to focus on digital currencies, this research has largely focused on single early examples like Bitcoin. I argue that this generally narrow focus has obscured important degrees of variation among digital currencies and, by extension, has omitted important lines of research on digital currencies as a familiar evolution in the technology of money. In this article, I revisit the history of digital currencies with explicit attention to not only economic inefficiencies but also political power structures and offer a new typology for theoretically organizing digital currencies along dimensions relevant to practitioners of political economy. I illustrate that variation along these typological dimensions produces important differences among different digital currencies and, relatedly, I explore the implications this has for digital currencies’ externalities and governance demands. Drawing on this typology, I conclude with a proposed research agenda for the political economy of digital currencies.Keywords
Funding Information
- Center for Global Partnership (UCB-20001N)
This publication has 61 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells: The Asian StoryJournal of World History, 2011
- The myth of too big to failJournal of Banking Regulation, 2010
- The State of Corporate Governance ResearchThe Review of Financial Studies, 2010
- The Political Economy of Corporate GovernanceAmerican Economic Review, 2005
- Strategic Responses to Regulatory Threat in the Credit Card MarketThe Journal of Law and Economics, 2003
- Goods, Games, and InstitutionsInternational Political Science Review, 1999
- The state of the art in electronic payment systemsComputer, 1997
- PROTO-INDUSTRIALIZATION AND PRE-COLONIAL SOUTH ASIAPast & Present, 1983
- Hyperinflation and the Supply of MoneyJournal of Money, Credit and Banking, 1977
- The History of Paper Money in ChinaJournal of the American Oriental Society, 1844