The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony (Perspectives)

The way that money works now is a blip. It’s a temporary institutional arrangement agreed
in response to specific political, technological and economic circumstances. As these
circumstances change, so money must change. Many people think that it will undergo a
pretty significant change in the very near future and we need to start planning for the
coming era of digital currency. The historian Niall Ferguson wrote in 2019 that “if America is
smart, it will wake up and start competing for dominance in digital payments”. Competing
for this new currency dominance could mean a new cold war in cyberspace with, for
example, Facebook’s private currency facing off against China’s public currency facing off
against a digital euro. Or would a digital dollar win this new space race?