Product Currency

In early 2017, I took a course in college called Monetary Finance. One day, while discussing the properties of money, the teacher said that money can be divided into two categories: 'credit money' and 'commodity money'. According to the teacher's explanation, 'credit money' relies on the credit of the issuing institution, for example, a 100 yuan bill. That 'paper' is certainly not worth 100 yuan; rather, it is because it is issued by the People's Bank of China that it is worth 100 yuan. 'Commodity money' is money that has inherent value, such as gold and silver, which have intrinsic value, or money under the gold standard. Then, he assigned us a homework to see whether 'Bitcoin' is credit money or commodity money, and that was the first time I heard about Bitcoin. Since the teacher of this course was quite laid-back and rarely assigned homework, and our usual scores accounted for 60% of the total grade, which is quite significant, my roommate and I cherished this opportunity and prepared to do some research on it. We first searched for the keyword 'Bitcoin' on Baidu, and the first news we found was about the government cracking down on mining activities and virtual currency transactions. Scrolling down, it seemed that there was not much useful information, and we couldn't even find out how much 1 Bitcoin was worth in RMB. I had to fetch a ladder and climb over the wall to use Google Chrome to search for Bitcoin, and the first link provided a real-time Bitcoin price chart.