Dynamic Roles of Digital Currency: An Exploration from Interactive Processes: Difference, Time, and Perspective

Digital currency has emerged as a new phenomenon that brought about many technological innovations and social-economic implications. In the last decades, the growing popularity of digital currency, particularly cryptocurrency, has attracted attention from various parties. The multiple facets of cryptocurrency induce controversial debates. So far, there is no mutual agreement on how to perceive, use and govern digital currencies globally, and there are huge divergences in ways of treating them. This new emerging phenomenon is gradually mixing and eroding the existing mechanisms. Meanwhile, the existing system is experiencing incremental changes to adapt to the newness brought forward by digital currencies. In order to understand such dynamic and complex processes of digital currency growth, this dissertation investigates the different roles of digital currency, particularly cryptocurrency, during its development path through the interactions with existing systems. This thesis aims to follow the development of (crypto)currency from the past to the present and extend the present development into future projection to explore the relationships between the existing mechanism and (crypto)currency.
In this dissertation, I draw upon various theories of money to analyze digital currency and applied both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the dynamic roles of digital currency. First, this thesis uses rich archive data to give a thick description of the evolution path of cryptocurrency through horizontal comparisons between the Western world1 and China. Second, this thesis combines second-hand and first-hand data to conduct vertical analysis, which integrates the past, present, and future standing points to consider the relationships and interactions between the internal fundamentals and external environments of digital currency. Additionally, empirical data have also been employed to explore the patterns and market dynamics of cryptocurrency evolutions.