Throughout history various materials have been used as money, from shells to beans, to precious metals, and, more recently, paper and electronic impulses. Money is nothing more and nothing less than what everybody accepts as payment for good and services. What is being used as money emerges at the intersection of social, political, economic, cultural and technical dynamics.
Money is a powerful actor in, and a symbol of, the society which uses.
It is an important source of inspiration for us. In this research project we look at the policy issue of electronic cash from a public interest perspective. We ask what are the postive and negative potentials of various technologies of electronic cash and how are policy issues such as access, security, privacy and the rise of private currencies related to one another. We believe that in order to understand the issues, and develop policies accordingly, we have to look at the interrelations among those issues, some of which are technical, other social, economic, cultural. It's is in novel relationships among those issues, rather than in any single issue itself, that the social impact of this technology and the impact of social policy on this technology is located.