On 4 December 1921, the New York Tribune published a story about Henry Ford’s innovative plan to replace the gold-based currency system of the time with a new “energy currency”.
Henry Ford’s vision of a new currency
Ford was referring to a new energy currency, which seems to have striking similarities with Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin. The article entitled “Ford Would Replace Gold With Energy Currency and Stop Wars”.
According to Ford, gold was at the root of the outbreak of the First World War, just as Satoshi claimed that fiat currencies were at the root of the severe financial crisis of 2008. Moreover, as Ford explained to the newspaper, his energy coin would also be produced in a limited number just like Bitcoin. What he then stated was remarkable:
“The essential evil of gold in its relation to war is the fact that it can be controlled. Break the control and you stop war”.
The incredible similarity between Ford’s energy currency and bitcoin does not stop there. As Ford argued, this new system could break what he called the banking cartel that existed at the time.
Ford asserted:
“It’s simply a case of thinking and calculating in terms different from those laid down to us by the international banking group to which we have grown so accustomed that we think there is no other desirable standard”
Henry Ford
Bitcoin breaks the hegemony of monetary authorities
Satoshi’s intuition was not so ingenious, considering that similar projects such as Henry Ford’s had existed almost a hundred years earlier. And even a Nobel Prize winner like Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s spoke of the United States’ excessive control of money as a negative component for the economy.
Hayek asserted:
“I don’t believe we shall ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of the government. That is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of the government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way to introduce something that they can’t stop”.
A statement that could very well have been contained in Satoshi’s famous whitepaper.
The famous economist Milton Friedman was also talking about the idea of a digital currency back in the late 1990s.
The economist stated:
“I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A”.
Bitcoin is an unstoppable revolution
Despite attempts to discredit it by governments and central banks, the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies has exceeded $2 billion. El Salvador on 7 September made Bitcoin legal throughout the country, and other states are reportedly planning to do the same. Its adoption is growing, both as a currency of exchange and as a store of value in place of gold for anti-inflationary purposes.
Eighty central banks are already considering the creation of a state digital currency that could compete with private cryptocurrencies. In short, the revolution started by Satoshi in 2008 seems to have reached a point of no return.
