Conclusions

This short monograph reviews the basic economic principles through which to look at the essence of recent blockchain-based monetary innovations and their implications, beginning with the different ways of trust that economists and computer scientists and meant to address. It is an educated guess that users of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins shall self-select their own ecologic niches, in connection with the expected forthcoming regulations. Arguing about the sense of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a more sophisticated endeavor that concerns in the first instance the foreseeable reverberations on the delicate equilibria along the hierarchy of account-based money. Beyond the efficiency and financial inclusion that motivate the CBDC construct, one notices that systemic central banks like the Fed or the ECB cannot afford to lag behind the technological frontier. The tension between the different methodologies employed by economists and computer scientists may prove useful in the ongoing inquiry about the potential of blockchain solutions.