Book review: Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data

Authors

Wenlong Li PhD Researcher, School of Law, University of Edinburgh, UK, wenlong.li@ed.ac.uk

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2966/scrip.150118.162

'Moneta imaginaria', by Israel Cedillo Lazcano, Gasparo Scaruffi presented the idea for a global monetary standard in his work L’alitinonfo (1582), with the aim of standardising the numerous coinages then circulating around medieval Europe. This idea was structured around a concept known as “moneta imaginaria”, which represented a stable value relation between gold, silver, and copper and which all the currencies were expected to follow. Since the 2008 publication of Satoshi Nakamoto’s “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” – the “modern” version of John Law’s Money and Trade Considered (1705) – we have witnessed the emergence of numerous arguments claiming that Bitcoin has the potential to become a universal means of payment. Here, I wanted to show, with one picture, how we have tried (and in most cases failed) both to define money and to make it uniform through various instruments, laws, and technologies.

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Published

05-Aug-2018

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2018)

Section

Book Reviews