Monetary technology solutions have existed for thousands of years. They are subject to a Darwinian evolutionary process which is NOT exactly what it seems.
For centuries in this historical process there was always some sort of unique natural winner or a dominant curency. We had gold, USD and Euro and maybe sooner or later, the Chinese RMB would become the world’s favorite reserve currency.
Now that we have crypto currencies everything has changed!
New currencies are likely to attract substantial business activity once many of current (very serious) problems are fixed. Entry barriers have become incredibly low. The ability of states to control money has been seriously eroded and it is simply impossible to ban anything in the cyberspace. The idea that there would be just one dominating currency is no longer taken for granted. Technologists point out that modern technology makes it possible for a single person to use many di erent currencies. Overall the competitive Darwinian process does not change, but incentives for endless creation of new private currencies (important seignorage bene ts) are likely to remain strong. Convertibility and co-operability can be easily achieved with purely virtual money systems. This is likely to maintain a certain diversity in major currencies and in payment technology business. Competition will now take place in distinct niches. If some powerful programmable or super anonymous currencies are likely to be banned in many jurisdictions, they will be used elsewhere. This will just increase the diversity.
>The idea that there would be just one dominating >currency is no longer taken for granted.
Cryptocurrencies are not very different from an enduser viewpoint. There is probably some kind of Stackelberg “competition” between them and therefore there always be a market leader.