First, its creators (who are computer programmers) have apparently ensured that there can never be more than 21 million coins in existence. There are two things striking about this new currency. Its advocates are keen followers of Friedrich von Hayek, and cite as inspiration his book, Denationalisation of Money, in which he calls for the production, distribution and management of money to be left to the ‘invisible hand’, so as to end the oversight of regulatory democracy.25 Like other virtual currencies, bitcoin has theoretical roots in the Austrian school of economics. It is now used for international payments, but also for speculative purposes. It was created by an unknown computer scientist – the first bitcoin miner. Its life began in the murky world of Silk Road, an online black market on the deep web, and has generated a great deal of excitement. This new currency (which claims to be a commodity) is a form of peer-to-peer exchange. The bitcoins so mined have become the new gold and bitcoiners the new goldbugs. This power is capable of deploying a complicated algorithm that approximates the effort of ‘mining’ coins.24 Whereas private banks can create money by a stroke of the keyboard, the creation of bitcoins involves vast amounts of computer processing power. Bitcoins have introduced millions of people to a currency that appeared from nowhere and is, apparently, ‘cryptographic proof’.
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