Digitization and the evolution of money as a social technology of account

Objective: to research the evolution of money as a social technology of account under digitization.Methods: dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena using the general scientific and specific scientific methods of cognition.Results: Throughout the history of monetary thought, economists have predominantly emphasized the function of money as a medium of exchange along with the intrinsic properties that enhance its salability and credibility as the most liquid store of value. But the social institution of money co-evolves with technology. It is significant that the advent of digital crypto-currencies was initiated by computer scientists and has taken economists completely by surprise. As a consequence, it also forces us to rethink the basic phenomenology of money. In accordance with the views of Wieser and Schumpeter, digitization brings to the fore the immaterial function of money as a standard of value and social technology of account, which increasingly absorbs its function as a medium of exchange. The potential impact of this on economic policy is huge. The variety of different crypto coins has proven the technical feasibility of competing private currencies as proposed by Hayek. In the long term, however, there is reason to doubt the persistence of intense competition. One must fear that major digital platforms will extend their current dominance in multisided virtual market places to include digital payments and money. Central banks are increasingly anxious to preserve public sovereignty over the common unit of account and are considering issuing their own digital fiat money. After the current era of intense creative experimentation, the potentially new spontaneous order of private crypto-currencies is likely to be supplanted by central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), the design of which will depend on deliberate public choices and policies. Scientific novelty: the work discloses the provisions of the Austrian theoretical discourse on the proper phenomenology of money, contrasting Menger’s canonical explanation with the ‘heretical’ and largely forgotten views of Wieser and Schumpeter. Also, the work offers a brief look back at the early origins of money and shows that credit and related accounts became important drivers of financial development long before coins were minted. The author examines two major innovations of the current digitization of money: a) the emergence of crypto coins, and b) the probable emergence of central bank digital currencies.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering the issues related to regulation of monetary-credit policy of the states

Nanoparticle tracking analysis

Due to their extremely small size, nanoparticles cannot be analyses by conventional approaches such as light microscopy. To visualise particles in the nanoscale range, a combination of an ultra-microscope and a laser illumination unit has to be applied. This combinatory technique is called Nanoparticle Tracking Anlysis (NTA) and can be used of thr nalysis of particles in a size range of approximately 10 nm up to 1 μm in liquid suspension

Global Networks of Trade and Bits

Considerable efforts have been made in recent years to produce detailed topologies of the Internet. Although Internet topology data have been brought to the attention of a wide and somewhat diverse audience of scholars, so far they have been overlooked by economists. In this paper, we suggest that such data could be effectively treated as a proxy to characterize the size of the "digital economy" at country level and outsourcing: thus, we analyse the topological structure of the network of trade in digital services (trade in bits) and compare it with that of the more traditional flow of manufactured goods across countries. To perform meaningful comparisons across networks with different characteristics, we define a stochastic benchmark for the number of connections among each country-pair, based on hypergeometric distribution. Original data are thus filtered by means of different thresholds, so that we only focus on the strongest links, i.e., statistically significant links. We find that trade in bits displays a sparser and less hierarchical network structure, which is more similar to trade in high-skill manufactured goods than total trade. Lastly, distance plays a more prominent role in shaping the network of international trade in physical goods than trade in digital services.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure