When you talk about new digital money, the majority of people assume you’re talking about the traditional virtual money (which has for decades made up the bulk of the money in circulation), or identify it with a very strange currency that they aren’t familiar with, called Bitcoin...
However, it should be explained that, sooner or later, the use of a new type of money (a programmable one) that’s not based on traditional trust in institutions (e.g. Banks) , but rather reliant on protocols and CONSENSUS generated in network, should be generalized. There are already many examples, more or less decentralized, where consensuses will define the ways to measure and be able to rely on the value of what people want to transact. One of this earliest cases are the new tokens to be created by Kodack to the photographers community. For this community the future will run like this: The photographer buys the token and the community will do the rest (or the Kodak company itself may perhaps continue to do so with some success but only if it does not become too greedy...).
So, there will be plenty of "value-of-exchange" units programmed to serve specific communities and this will have tremendous implications for society. In fact, I fully believe DECENTRALIZED COMMUNITIES WILL BE MORE COMPETITIVE THAN CENTRALIZED ORGANIZATIONS, because, thanks to Blockchain technology, such networked communities won’t require the existence of intermediaries and will be more useful to each of the respective participants (see the “Metcalfe law”).
Most likely, these communities will replace governments and businesses as ways of generating the necessary political-economic consensuses to enable life in modern societies. In my opinion, if we continue to live in freedom in a market economy (not in a dictatorship in a planned economy), this transformation will take place over the next 10 or 20 years and will developed in a process that should not be peaceful... I even imagine that enormous suffering can be caused to mankind, if one does not perceive (or does not want to perceive) that such a change is inevitable and it will only do any good to create laws that can actually be applied (which is not the case of any laws aimed at halting flows of peer-to-peer information in the 21th century ).
In fact, it will not be worth politically trying to stop the economic supremacy of networks, because it is the most competitive model to create value, a model that always will win in a free market society. Unfortunately, however, there is reason to believe that the current instituted powers may wish to postpone this new civilizational stage, in particular by using they’re platforms to criticize this new kind of money (the “infamous Bitcoin”) and influence public opinion on the matter. Unfortunately, there are already clear signs pointing to this and it would not be surprising if we witnessed, in many countries, a legislative frenzy aimed to prolong the political and financial status quo. As is always the case, education is our best hope…