The Emergence of Bitcoin: An Austrian Renaissance

27 Apr, 2024

Brian Cubellis

Author

Read the whole report here.

The advent of bitcoin - humans' most successful attempt at a decentralized, digital form of money - has ignited a global monetary revolution, growing from a small spark to a robust flame over the past fifteen years.

This spark, however, was not an accident or random occurrence, but the culmination of several decades of work by cryptographers and computer scientists throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s (as Jesse Myers explains in a recent report). It's worth considering, however, that bitcoin's philosophical origins date back even further - all the way to the late 19th century in Vienna and the birth of Austrian economics. Satoshi created the initial spark, and the cypherpunks laid the technological groundwork for how a spark could be created, but it was the Austrian economists who conceptualized what fire was and why it needed to exist.