What is the difference between Electronic Money, Virtual currency and Digital currency?

Electronic money
Every one of us has a bank savings card. When we deposit money to the card, we will have a number in our bank account, indicating how much we have saved. In the process, we gave the cash to Bank, the bank gave us a bank card plus a number, this figure is our electronic money. After we deposit it, we can take out the money on the ATM machine or on the counter, or use the online banking, UnionPay or various third-party payment tools to make purchases or transactions.

It can be seen that electronic money has the following characteristics:

1. Electronic money and cash can be easily converted directly to each other;

2. The number of electronic money corresponds to the same amount of physical currency;

We need to pay the physical currency to the issuer of electronic money (banks and other financial institutions) in exchange for the same amount of electronic money.

Except for bank savings card, there are lots of electronic e-wallet, such as Paypal, Perfect money, Payeer, Epay and so on. the money in those electronic e-wallets is called electronic money.

2. Virtual currency
We can find some commonalities:

1. Virtual currency can be regarded as a commodity;

2. Physical currency can be easily converted into virtual currency, but virtual currency can basically not be converted into physical currency (through official channels), that is, single flow.

So we can think of virtual currency as a commodity that can be purchased in physical currency or electronic money.

Virtual currency is the electronicization of illicit currency, and its original issuer is not the central bank. For example, game coins, Q coins, coupons, etc., such virtual currency is mainly limited to circulation in a specific virtual environment.

3. Digital currency
Digital currencies include digital coins and cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, altcoin).

A digital gold coin is a form of currency named after the weight of gold. The typical unit of measure for this currency is the troy ounce, which is financed by unsorted or decentralized gold reserves.

The cryptocurrency refers to the digital currency obtained by using the cryptographic algorithm without relying on any kind of object. One of the most famous and successful is Bitcoin. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, it is not issued by an independent issuer but is generated by a large number of calculations by the network according to a specific algorithm.

Epay is a wallet supports both electronic money and digital currency. One can exchange different electronic money such as PM, Perfect Money, Payeer and Fasapay through Epay. They could also buy and sell digital currency such as BTC, USDT, EOS and so on.

Written by Rita for Medium ~ January 30, 2019

This entry was posted in The Mine or the Shaft. Bookmark the permalink.