| The development of the Internet and other communication system has accelerated the process of currency’s electronization and virtualization, which caused the revolution of the mode of entry, market transaction and payment.Bitcoin is a new produc, which makes a revolution in the monetary history and also attracts us to do some thinking in digital currency. This paper from the view of Hayek who is the leading representative of the Austrian School of economics, has done an in-depth study on the bitcoin’s classification from the perspective of economics.The open-source program of bitcoin will make a lot of kinds of qusi-bitcoin currencies emerge, causing digital currencies competition. This pending free competition and the characteristics of the bitcoin’s completely decentralization accord with the ideas of Hayek’s monetary model. But the bitcoin can not adjust its supply to a stable currency value, thus the manifestation of the price also is not stable. It does not accord with Hayek on the currency stability requirements, so the bitcoin is not completely in accordance with the theory of private monetary free competition which Hayek proposed. In addition, bitcoin although has the potential to be widely accepted as a medium of exchange, but its currency instability makes it can’t be a qualified unit of value. So bitcoin is not included in the category of currency.This paper analyzes several important factors affecting bitcoin price theoretically. By constructing the model we get the equilibrium of supply and demand equation of bitcoin price. Because the bitcoin’s supply is elastic constant, so It is generally believed that the main ways affecting the price of bitcoin is through influencing the demand of bitcoin. Based on the theory of currency, bitcoin’s demand can be divided into transaction demand and speculative demand. On the other hand, this paper argues that government policy is an important factor influencing bitcoin price.Under the backgroud that governments carry out different policy in response to bitcoin, we constructs the endogenous transaction model, obtaining the fiat money type equalization, bitcoin equalization, bitcoin and fiat money coexistence equilibrium and no monetary equilibrium type and equilibrium conditions required, thus we can get the effectiveness of government policy in response to bitcoin. Conclusion:it suppressed the demand of bitcoin at a certain extent that government adopted a policy banning bitcoins, but does not make bitcoin demand reduced to0. Bitcoin price will decline after policy implementationbecause of decline in demand of bitcoin, but the price will not breakthrough to a lower value because of bitcoins policy factors. In addition, this paper also proposes some other factors that may affect bitcoin prices, such as the macro economic and financial environment, investment environment, market credit degree and securities price index which may has two sided functions in bitcoin price.In order to further clarify the price of properties of bitcoin, this paper made an empirical research, analysising the influence mechanism of comparison of various factors during the two period of short-term and long-term. Our empirical results show the prices of bitcoin mainly affected by the currency supply and demand, to a certain extent, bitcoin prices can be explained by the economic standard model of currency price. The currency supply has a reverse effect on price significantly, and the transaction demand and speculative demand of bitcoin also has remarkable effect. Through the variance decomposition of the model, we get conclusion that effect of investment and speculative demand on bitcoin price is greater than the effect on the price of the transaction demand.Bitcoin is more a matter of investment and speculative commodities.Our empirical results are different wirh previous results in two points. First, our empirical results show that bitcoins velocity of bitcoin price has a negative significant effect, which contrary to the conclusion of Matonis (2012)and Pavel (2013) but be consistent with the theoretical hypothesis.Second, We emphasize the effect of policy factors on the price of bitcoin.Our empirical results show that the appearing of the Chinese policy in response to bitcoin can effectively inhibit the bitcoin demand,thus makes bitcoin prices down, but will not fall to a price in a very low level compared with past.Finally, we put forward the bitcoin development way and future research direction.We think that the development of bitcoin have far-reaching impact on the change of financial payment and internet. |
