Special issue “New Possibility of Cryptocurrencies and Digital-Community Currencies”

Abstract

This special issue features the theme “New Possibilities of Cryptocurrencies and Digital-Community Currencies” by collecting five articles presented at RAMICS2019 held in Hida-Takayama, Japan. Community currencies, which can be understood as integrative communication media combining the economic domain and the social-cultural domain, have been actively practiced since the 1980s in Europe and North America and the late 1990s in Japan. Due to the progress of Blockchain/DLT, and QR code payment technologies and the diffusion of smartphones, cryptocurrencies and digital-community currencies (DCCs), in which the vision of CCs and the technology of cryptocurrencies are fused, have rapidly increased their presence and coexisted with national currencies as legal tender. The striking example of this trend is Facebook’s new digital coin called “Libra.” It can be understood not just as a blockchain-based stable coin for global payment system backed by multinational currencies, but also as a vast glocal digital-community currency to empower its billions of members larger than any national currency. To fully understand the new possibilities of cryptocurrencies and DCCs, we must reconsider the nature of currently dominant national currencies, particularly central banknotes, in the world. Controversially, inconvertible central banknotes are IOU entered on the liability side of the balance sheet of the central bank, but are also cash on the asset side of the balance sheets of all other economic agents. Tracing back the evolution of money, we conceive them as ‘informational money’ that integrates the properties of both material money and credit money. Their asset value is not endured as compulsory power forced by the laws of the state, but as self-generating purchasing power created by non-material self-fulfilling ideas such as custom and expectations. For CCs and Libra to persist, it is necessary to tempt users to follow the rules of self-fulfilling enjoyment or share to the future projection different from those of custom and expectations. The defect of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) lies in overestimation of strength of self-generating value of central banknotes and neglecting the present trend of diffusing private money.