From coin to crypto token: money, value and currency in the age of digitality

The European Central Bank is considering options for a “Digital Euro”. By this, the ECB is reacting to a development that has taken place beyond institutional financial policy in recent years: privately owned systems enable the transaction of values via the internet and thus open up our previous notion of money and currency to new, digital concepts. The question of what significance we should attach to this dynamic and what reactions are appropriate is becoming increasingly urgent. Many companies as well as individuals are already integrating digital payment systems into their financial strategies, others have been paying little attention to this possibility. International corporations are creating in-house alternatives to established money – which government institutions such as the ECB are countering by trying to find their own models for the introduction of “digital money”. To all this there is much more than the mere use of the internet for financial transactions, to which we have long become accustomed anyway. What is the new thing that is emerging here and what are the implications – for economies and for each individual citizen?