Nick Szabo  🔑

Fascinating indeed. IMO this is consistent with @adam3us's retelling of cypherpunk history. That inflation control was one of the last missing puzzles in creating digital cash. Reading Satoshi's words it seems like he struggled with this initially as well.https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1088006317543964672 …

... as did Szabo, Wei Dai & others. People have this idea that Satoshi is a god & perfectly calculated everything. But RE: inflation he might have gone with his guts & fixed supply happened to be the cleanest implementation. It prolly helped with bootstrapping incentive as well.

Bit gold had a supply that would have more flexibly responded to demand for the currency (more akin to how gold and silver respond), but at the cost of introducing more trust than Bitcoin has, so probably not a net win, though dexes can now improve the trust problem for bit gold.

Was there any convergence of ideas with the Austrian School and the early cypherpunks? Or did this come later as some Austrians clung to the stable/consistent supply of bitcoin?

Hayek's promotion of private currency was inspired myself and others. White and Selgin had been influenced by Austrians and in turn influenced me. Other than that specifics had much more to do with computer science,and some study of origins of money, than any econ theory school.

So fascinating! Do you think if the austrians had specific influence with Satoshi that may be 21 million hard-code would be different?

No. Bitcoin is fiat in Austrian theory. The quantity of money is arbitrary in Austrian theory. & coding inflation is fucking socialist central planning. There are no economic calculations in socialist commonwealth. YOU CAN'T DO IT. It is the pretense of knowledge

But isn't having a known, stable supply (even though coded) better than leaving it up to bureaucrats? Also, yes Bitcoin is programmed, but it is not mandatory. It's use and value are fully market based.