An Analysis of Cryptocurrency as a Monetary Unit

Abstrakt

The purpose of this thesis is to give a comprehensive analysis of crypto currency from an economic perspective. In doing so, Bitcoin will be used as a basis for the analysis, and bitcoin will therefore be mainly used as the example of crypto currency.1 Thus, the central question that will be investigated is:
To what extent does crypto currency satisfy the requirements typically served by money?
In order to come up with a meaningful response to this question the thesis will start off with clarifying basic money theory. The intention behind this is to lay the basis for a framework in which will include different kinds of money and sort them by characteristics. Crypto currency will be categorized and allocated accordingly before moving on to the analysis. Considering the technical aspects of crypto currency the developed framework can be applied to identify it as digital commodity money. In this way potential uses of bitcoin are discussed, supporting its value. Moreover, it will be argued that commodity money and thus bitcoin can circulate without use value and state backing, and this is supported by examples from the real world. In addition, Bitcoin ́s potential for disruption are discussed and finds that it can be applied to several functions of the economy.