# From Bitcoin to Central Bank Digital Currencies: Making Sense of the Digital Money Revolution
## 6 Conclusions  
At the moment, Central Bank Digital Currencies are one of the hottest issues under debate, involving not only academics from different fields of knowledge, such as economics, finance, computer science, data analysts, and law but also regulators, monetary authorities and practitioners from all over the world. The recognized merits of Blockchain as a disruptive technology and the success of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies paved the way for central banks to rethink new venues for the issuance and management of fiat money. For many, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do not, by themselves, threaten the pivotal role of central banks in existing payment systems, as they are conceptualized as more a market-based speculative asset than a new kind of money, or due to the narrowness of its influence. However, other structural changes are taking place, such as the significant reduction in the demand for cash happening in some countries and, most notably, the increasing importance of new players. FinTech startups and mobile network operators that compete with commercial banks as payment service providers have raised the \"red flag\" on the urgency of bringing into the system the technological innovations increasingly tagged as disruptive or revolutionary. At first glance, the advent of CBDCs means the complete digitalization of money and, as such, the ultimate step in the secular dematerialization of money. As in most economic innovations, the movement towards a cashless economy is the response of authorities to the demands of society. Unquestionably, the demand for digitalization has been increasing at a steady pace, \"not only in the many aspects of the daily life of families but also in the way firms conduct their businesses and states govern national affairs\" and gained a more profound dimension in recent years due to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis [15]. Hence the launch of CBDC will directly fulfil the need for digitalization, while tightening the relationship between citizens and central banks. However, one should note that a CBDC is not a Bitcoin-like or a stablecoin-like cryptocurrency governed by a central bank, nor the simple digitalization of cash. On the one hand, CBDCs may implement completely different currency concepts that share little more than their immateriality and the acronym; on the other hand, the implementation of CBDCs will have economic implications that surpass, by far, the changes in individual behavior produced by the digitalization of payment instruments. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [51] proposed the most used and up-to-date systematization of the contemporaneous coexisting types of money, which became known as the \"money flower\". Besides the restricted-access digital token for wholesale settlements, CBDC refers to general-purpose money, in the form of an account held by the public directly at the central bank, akin to the accounts commonly held at commercial banks (account-based) and digital cash, the equivalent of physical banknotes, sharing many of the same properties, including the privacy of transactions (token/value-based). Although central bank experiments with CBDCs before 2016 were almost non-existent, with the remarkable exception of the Bank of China, and early experiments focused mainly on wholesale CBDCs, according to the latest survey by the BIS, dated January 2021, over 85% of banks admitted to exploring the advantages and drawbacks of CDBC [65]. Besides being at different development stages, these experiments are far from being homogeneous and present significant differences in terms of application area, architecture (operating and access models), access technology, central bank infrastructure, interlinkages, authority (which maps partially with infrastructure and access technology), availability and access limitations and restrictions. Independent of the model used, the economic literature has highlighted several benefits and risks associated with the adoption of CBDCs.