Digital cash may be issued privately (so as to be called "virtual currency") or by a central bank. It may be a cryptocurrency, randomised or tethered. Its scheme may be centralized or decentralised and its value may be self-anchored or of a specified fiat currency. By facilitating electronic...

The U.S. has approximately 1,600 cryptocurrencies. No cryptocurrency is qualified to be called money because none has been designated by the U.S. government as being legal tender. Cryptocurrencies are called virtual currencies because they possess a few of the qualities of money. In this...

The buzz surrounding Bitcoin has reached a fever pitch. Yet in academic legal discussions, disproportionate emphasis is placed on bitcoins (that is, virtual currency), and little mention is made of blockchain technology—the true innovation behind the Bitcoin protocol. Simply, blockchain...

Digital currency is designed to compete with central bank fiat money and the banking system but may create new financial stability risk. Central banks are considering issuing their own fiat public digital currency in response. This paper shows that privately issued digital currency, such as...

A purely anti-node non-peer-to-peer version of electronic money would allow online payments to be sent directly from one person to another without going through a financial institution and node promoters such as digital and gold-miners. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the...

Recent innovations have made it feasible to transfer private digital currency without the intervention of an institution. A digital currency must prevent users from spending their balances more than once, which is easier said than done with purely digital currencies. Current digital currencies...

In this article, we review the recent developments in the digital currency landscape. We survey the economic drivers that led to the creation of digital currencies and show that they are a natural step in the evolution of means of payment. We overview two major classes of digital currencies,...

The considerable diffusion of bitcoins over the Internet that took place in the last two years has highlighted some important issue about the use of anonym tools of payment in e-commerce. Even though bitcoins are largely considered to be a digital currency, the legal and economic analysis draws...