Sidelines is a column by CGTN's Social Media Desk

A few years ago, this columnist visited an excavation site in east Beijing. Among the immediately recognizable findings was a pottery jar. A large part of its body remained firmly underground when it was discovered. A handful of bronze coins scattered around the rim, free from the grasp of land and history, betrayed its likely purpose: a piggy bank from the Han Dynasty (202 BC–220 AD).

As the stash of metal pieces slowly resurfaced from the dust of the past into the present-day bitcoin frenzy, a surreal feeling emerged within me.

The materials that had come to assume the role of mediating exchange guarantee first and foremost a sensual reality. The weight of metals or the roughness of paper, to name a few, is the privilege that capital bestows on our skin. At the dawn of the bitcoin, the necessary thingness of money has been completely stripped. Value no longer needs a poster child in the objective reality.

Lionel Messi's dramatic breakup with FC Barcelona jogs back my old memory. The plot had largely concluded with the Argentinian football genius and Paris Saint Germain (PSG) drying the ink on their signatures. A small Easter egg followed: an undisclosed proportion of Messi's salary will be paid with PSG fan tokens. Put differently, the club-issued cryptocurrency has Messi's endorsement now.

If the cryptocurrency bitcoin embodies is basically series of digits flying in a secured network, a fan token is little more. But in terms of function, a fan token has something different to offer. It allows the holders to vote on the peripheral affairs of their clubs, such as the design of the team bus (think a company's voting share). But decisions like signing up a star player are probably retained by the real money.

In the meantime, fans can trade the tokens in the same way as speculating bitcoin, making it an investment for both the fans and the club that issues it. Among clubs to launch tokens this year are English Premier League champions Manchester City and Italy's AC Milan. Messi's former employer Barcelona rolled out its token last year.

But unlike stocks, the relation between a fan token's price and its issuer's financial performance isn't very straightforward. The perks a club awards its token holders are often along the lines of meeting with big stars instead of a bonus in money terms. And quite like the trading of bitcoin and other digital currencies, fan token speculation can be subjected to wild price swings, because the inherent value it can pin its price on is ambiguous at best, compared to a bond or stock.

The trend of money being continuously digitalized is unstoppable. Paperless cash suits how economy evolves in term of currency's three essential purposes: to measure, transfer and store value.

With bronze coins, gold or silver bars serving as cash, the costs of transaction and storage are almost imaginable by bankroll-era standards. In a scenario where inflation runs wild, even paper money can't foot the bill for being convenient. More importantly, economic growth is likely to outpace the measuring power of all valuable metals that humans can ever rake out of this planet. And if the price tags of heterogenous categories of goods can be abstracted all the way down to the leanest possible forms, i.e., digits on our mobile phones, consumers and governments will be more than happy to not chop down all the trees in the world to manufacture paper money.

We certainly can't go back to using bronze coins to pay for a footballer's salary. But we probably shouldn't let any cryptocurrency with a bigger supply take over the world's exchange network either. Its turbulent buying power/valuation fluctuation could be deal killer. A decentralized token could hardly match bronze coins in offering the stability that ordinary consumers require of a currency to properly measure, transfer and store the values they create with their labor and spend on commodities. Any attempt to integrate cryptocurrency with national or global economy without due diligence puts public savings at risk.

Spearheaded by bitcoin, cryptocurrency's march into ordinary people's lives is equally hard to resist. Fan token's growing popularity epitomizes the trend. And it doesn't stop with football. The National Basketball Association in the U.S. has seen several of its members begin tapping into the fanfare. Some Formula One teams have also followed suit.

Technically, any community with a stable number of members has the potential to distribute cryptocurrency for a certain purpose and sometimes reduce the transition cost. In the music industry, for example, a superstar can sell albums directly to token-holding fans without relying upon a distribution company. Therefore, it's not a leap of imagination that cryptocurrency can play certain roles on some level.

But it would be too soon to liken it to some sort of "new gold" just because the supply is for now artificially controlled. Alchemy never pays off and financial alchemy within the modern financial system has cost humans unfathomably dearly as proved by the 2007 financial crisis. Just giving an old trick a digital twist doesn't guarantee success, more likely the contrary.    

We should be grateful for the scientific and economic development that antiquate burying coins underground. Yet toward cryptocurrency, we should be extra cautious so that it won't bury us.