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

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?

David G.W. Birch is a director of Consult Hyperion, an IT management consultancy that specializes in electronic transactions. Described by The Telegraph as ‘one of the world’s leading experts on digital money’, by The Independent as a ‘grade-A geek’, by the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation as ‘one of the most user-friendly of the UK’s uber-techies’ and by Financial World as ‘mad’, Dave is a member of the editorial board of the E-Finance & Payments Law and Policy Journal, a columnist for SPEED and well known for his blogs on digital money and digital identity. He is a media commentator on electronic business issues (having appeared on BBC television and radio, Sky and other channels around the world) and has been named by WIRED magazine as one of their global top 15 favourite sources of business and finance information.