The Digital Era 3

4From the Eurodollar to Cybercurrencies: Nature and Scope of Monetary Disruption

In this book, the term money will be used to denote anything which is widely accepted in payment for goods, or in discharge of other kinds of obligation.

D.H. Robertson (1922)¹

The column that Telos magazine devoted to Libra, a few days after the announcement of the project that its founders established in Geneva, in the first half of 2019, opened with the strong words: “The payments industry has just suffered a historic shock!” This judgment was as much about the Facebook company, which presented the project’s “white paper”, as it was about the project itself: “Facebook’s recklessness and even arrogance [...] are disrupting a public infrastructure that is as important as payments”². It refers to the accusations concerning Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies unveiled since 2008 – stated by eminent economists such as Jean Tirole, Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz³, disclosures that were confirmed by the French Minister of Economy during the G7 ministerial meeting held in Chantilly on July 18, 2019: “Facebook is taking on the characteristics of sovereign states [...] The central banks have expressed their concern. Monetary sovereignty must remain in the hands of the states!”⁴ These charges overlook the nuanced opinion of traditional authors who have emphasized and condemned the errors that have marked monetary history since antiquity: Knut Wicksell of Sweden, one of the founders of modern economics, summed ...