Regulations and differences of various digital currencies

Historically, we worked and traded goods and services then were paid cash. We used the coins and notes we had received to go about our day to day lives, buying and selling items and either putting the spare cash in a tin or depositing it with a bank (which hopefully paid us interest on our savings). However, as economies have become more global, our lives have become more digitised (i.e., buying goods and services online), thus the demand to pay for goods and services and not use cash has grown. Now we seem to have a range of ways to pay for transactions such as cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, CBDCs, e-money, virtual currencies and in-game currencies. Many of the non-cash methods of payment, including credit cards, rely on public-key cryptography and digital signatures so making it possible to pay for transactions remotely and or digitally. A digital currency can either be centralised, where a single entity controls the money supply, or it can be decentralised, where the money supply i…