Government control of money has turned money from being the reward for producing value to the reward for obedience to government officials.

Huebner found that while the total number of innovations rose in the twentieth century, the number of innovations per capita peaked in the nineteenth century.

From examining such human choices in market situations, Carl Menger, the father of the Austrian school of economics and founder of marginal analysis in economics, came up with an understanding of the key property that leads to a good being adopted freely as money on the market, and that is salability—the ease with which a good can be sold on the

Any firm that produces outputs valued at less than its inputs would go out of business, its resources freed up to be used by other, more productive firms, in what economist Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction.

While Bitcoin's scaling will likely require the use of third‐party intermediaries, this will be different from gold settlement in several very important respects. First, the dealings of the third parties will ultimately all be settled on a publicly accessible ledger, allowing for more transparency and auditing. Bitcoin offers the modern individual

Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties. In other words, Bitcoin automates the functions of a modern central bank and makes them predictable and virtually immutable by programming them into code

But in October 2009, an Internet exchange2 sold 5,050 bitcoins for $5.02, at a price of $1 for 1,006 bitcoins, to register the first purchase of a bitcoin with money.3 The price was calculated by measuring the value of the electricity needed to produce a bitcoin. In economic terms, this seminal moment was arguably the most significant in Bitcoin's

While the data is not complete for all countries and all years, the average growth of money supply is 32.16% per year per country.

Further, wide acceptance of a medium of exchange allows all prices to be expressed in its terms, which allows it to play the third function of money: unit of account.