New research tries to define what makes money ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and thus shed light on the factors that may shape the dominance or failure of new forms of digital currency.

The working paper, published this week by the US National Bureau of Economic Research, disputes the assertion made by economists such as Milton Friedman that money’s medium-of-exchange and store-of-value roles are “intrinsically complementary and largely indistinguishable”. 

Instead, authors Itay Goldstein, Ming Yang and Yao