4 reasons why Bitcoin is a revolution

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The first real market-currency, determined by mathematics

Currencies are issued by states, as they have been forever. The consequence of this was described by Friedrich August von Hayek, the patron saint of libertarians: ‘With the end of the age of the gold standard every government in history has used its exclusive right to issue money to defraud and plunder its people.’ Hayek asserted that one of the purposes of the market was to end the state’s monopoly on money and to regulate money itself. Bitcoin, as you may have guessed, has realised this aspiration: the first genuinely market-regulated money has arrived. Nobody orders it into being, nobody controls it: it is determined purely by mathematics. There will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins.