Hayek predicted Bitcoin’s promise decades ago

Jul

Hayek predicted Bitcoin’s promise decades ago

#Altcoins, #Bitcoin, #Blockchain, #Crypto, #Cryptocurrency

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TL;DR governments won’t give up control of money voluntarily, so we’re going to have to do it the sneaky way.

Anyone can make predictions about the future based on what they see around them, but it’s a rare mind that can take the temperature of the times and accurately understand the signs. Friedrich Hayek, the famous economist, was one such person.

Hayek was an Austrian economist who wrote The Denationalization of Money, which argued for different forms of private money instead of state-backed currencies. These different private currencies would compete on the market, just like any other stock or business, and the best and most reliable ones would rise to the top. It should be a free market for currencies.

He recognised that when the state took control of printing money, it opened the way to lots of abuses – exactly the ones we see now. More and more money is being created, and it’s being used to prop up markets and economies that are failing. Ultimately, this only defers and makes worse the inevitable crash.

Take a look at what Hayek said back in 1984, in this short video clip.

‘I don’t believe that we can ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. And since we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly, roundabout way introduce something they can’t stop.’

Hayek was talking before the advent of the internet, let alone blockchain. This was the 1980s, when barely anyone even owned a cellphone. But he grasped the essence of the problem: whatever form of good money was created would need to be structured in such a way as to be unstoppable.

Bitcoin launched a quarter of a century after Hayek spoke those words and over 15 years since he died. But it’s about the best shot we have at honest money, outside the control of the state.