Digital currency is the inevitable result of the continuous evolution of the monetary system, belonging to the monetary 4.0 stage. Money is another important invention invented by human beings besides words. After barter and gold and silver standard, credit currency has become an important leap in the history of currency.
Among them, the initial barter is a decentralized institutional arrangement. However, due to the extremely low transaction efficiency, the difficulty in coupling supply and demand, and the lack of a unified value measurement standard, human economic activities and trade scope are greatly limited, so they are gradually replaced by precious metals such as gold and silver. This trading system has experienced a long time in the history of currency development. Due to natural wear and tear, insufficient currency price, insufficient weight, shoddy, bad money driving out good money and other phenomena, paper money with national credit background-pure credit money began to appear. Paper money not only saves the issuing cost, but also overcomes the inconvenience of carrying precious metal currency, which greatly promotes the development of trade in modern history and makes it possible for the central bank to operate monetary policy.
If paper money has achieved the first leap from concrete objects to abstract symbols, then digital currency based on blockchain, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data has achieved the second leap from paper form to paperless direction. Digital currency did not change the credit endorsement behind the currency, but only changed the existing form of the currency. Currency has completed the evolution of commodity currency-precious metal as universal equivalent-credit currency-digital currency. Therefore, the evolution of the existing monetary form means that the operating cost of the monetary system is lower, safer and more efficient. Digital currency is the inevitable result of the continuous evolution of monetary system from commodity currency to credit currency.
Digital currency is not a substitute for electronic money. According to different issuers, digital currency can be divided into statutory digital currency issued by the central bank and private digital currency. At present, there is no uniform standard and definition about digital currency. According to the definition of the digital currency Institute of the Central Bank, the narrow sense of digital currency mainly refers to the pure digital currency that does not need physical carriers; Digital currency in a broad sense is equivalent to electronic money, which refers to all currencies that exist in electronic form, including electronic money, virtual money and digital currency.
According to different issuers, digital currency can be divided into statutory digital currency issued by the central bank and private digital currency. Among them, the digital currency issued by the central bank refers to the legal tender issued by the central bank in the form of encrypted digital strings representing a specific amount. It is not a physical entity itself, nor a physical entity as a carrier, but digital information used for online investment, trading and storage, which represents a certain value; Privately issued digital currency, also known as virtual currency, is a kind of digital currency, such as Bitcoin, which is issued and controlled by developers and circulated among members of virtual communities without government supervision.
Digital currency in a broad sense can be roughly divided into three categories: one is completely closed currency that has nothing to do with the real economy and can only be used in a specific virtual community, such as game currency in the virtual world; Second, it can be bought with real money but can't be converted back into real money, and can be used to buy virtual goods and services, such as Libra; Initiated by Facebook; Third, it can be exchanged and redeemed with real money according to a certain proportion, which can buy both virtual goods and services and real goods and services, such as the legal digital currency issued by the central bank.
Digital currency is the monetary development form of digital economy. Since its outbreak in 2020, the digital economy characterized by "new investment, new consumption, new mode and new format" has become an important force to promote the stable economic and social development of China. According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics, although the GDP in the first quarter decreased by 6.8% year-on-year, the digital economy showed a good development momentum. Among them, the output of electronic components and integrated circuits increased by 16% and 13. 1%, the added value of information transmission, software and information technology services increased by 13.2%, and the investment in e-commerce services increased by 13.
After experiencing the test brought by the epidemic, China's digital economy has entered a period of rapid development. It is urgent to realize the coordinated development of data, technology, industry, commerce and system, build a new production relationship of digital economy, and further stimulate digital productivity through factor marketization reform. Digital currency is based on node network and digital encryption algorithm, which meets the needs of the development of digital economy and is its specific currency development form. Based on the complex network theory, digital currency takes the blockchain technology as the core, which fully embodies the characteristics of anti-tampering and encryption security, and realizes the bottom digital currency and intermediate digital financial account system, covering the central bank payment system, commercial banks, non-bank institutions and other vertical total account systems. At the same time, we will realize the interconnection between the payment and clearing systems of central banks and the top digital identity authentication systems, and realize the transformation from the traditional monetary system to the digital currency system through big data and cloud computing.