Bitcoin: The New Digital Gold?

In England at the University of Cambridge, students of computer science were able to take a course in the Michaelmas term that just ended, the topic of which was digital money, i.e. cryptocurrencies stored decentrally in the blockchain. In the first two weeks of the eight-week course, the teaching professors – not economists, mind you, but computer scientists – deal with the basic properties of money. You start with the “Gold Standard” monetary system, which existed for a good hundred years in Great Britain and around sixty years in the German Empire, with interruptions until the 1930s. Until the global economic crisis at the end of the 1920s, it ensured that pounds, (Reich) marks and other currencies such as the dollar could be exchanged for gold at a fixed rate at any time.