How radically will digital currencies change our methods of exchange and the way that we think about money? With innovation in digital payments barrelling ahead, these questions are now commanding the attention of the World Economic Forum and other international institutions.

Regardless of how Facebook’s own digital-currency moonshot, Libra, fares, it has already provided a wake-up call for firms and policymakers around the world. “If revolution there is to be, let us rather undertake it than undergo it,” Otto von Bismarck once said. The question for policymakers is not whether to try to shape the digital-money revolution, but how.