Digital Currency Schemes : More or Less Sustainable? Limits to Growth and Electronification of Money in Europe

This paper aims at providing a response to the interrelated issues of electronification and digitization of payments combining a law, economics and humanities approach with a critical eye on the most recent evolution of European Union law on the matter of payment systems and complementary and digital currencies. To this objective, Part I investigates the concept of value in money exchanges through the conceptual relation in Mangan’s artwork between the ancient Yapese currency, rai, in the form of stone money, and the contemporary crypto-currency of bitcoins. Their juxtaposed story of production, consumption and circulation, as well as of re-evaluation, will then be extended to the relation between localised/complementary, on the one side, and globalised/digital currencies, on the other side, to highlight how monetary value, originally “carved” via (closed) criteria of community belonging, changes when “sold” to an (open) market dominated by technology. Accordingly, Part II will later shed light over the regulatory approach to money and payments at the European level, focusing on the main features of the “regular” payment system and the bitcoin-like money systems, drawing the conclusions that the currency tokens based on permissionless blockchain can hardly change (and solve) issues of payment systems’ governance and credit crunch, as if their sustainability, and the new growth that they promise, would be, in fact, subject to persistent and inescapable limits for human actors