> "As a fan of Hayek and Von Mises, I was fascinated by the idea of a currency free from the government's manipulation." Monetary systems are so crucial to mod

> "As a fan of Hayek and Von Mises, I was fascinated by the idea of a currency free from the government's manipulation." Monetary systems are so crucial to modern civilization that if you do set up a 'government-independent currency' then whoever has the most control over that monetary system themselves becomes a kind of de facto government. This is seen in historical studies of black-market currency systems, where things like a bottle of rum or a kilo of cocaine became effective measures of exchange (leading to the rise of organized crime in the USA in the 1920s, or the rise of drug cartels in Latin America from the 1970s onwards, which acted in reality as alternative government systems). So, who controls bitcoin? This article points to whales and mining pools: https://cryptobriefing.com/who-controls-bitcoin-guide-btc-stakeholders/ https://cryptobriefing.com/who-controls-bitcoin-guide-btc-st... Money after all is a social phenomenon, and only has value because people agree it has value - although that is as true for $USD and gold as it is for bitcoin. This then raises the question of who controls those monetary systems (hint: the control system in all cases is not at all democratic in nature). Probably the optimal global currency system (if you value stability) is the basket-of-currencies approach, in which the $USD loses its supremacy and monetary values are tied to the average values of the basket. This requires some understanding of how global central banking operates, and for that there's no better source than Nomi Prin's Collusion: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204933-collusion https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204933-collusion