Milton Friedman Predicted Bitcoin in 1999 Interview

Bitcoin and its crypto-cash counterparts are essentially trustless monetary systems that upend the banking establishment's ideals of how a financial system should operate. Intriguingly, the concept of digital money was predicted as far back as the late '90s. Milton Friedman was one of the most renowned economists of the 20th century and his ideas radically changed the way that policymakers made their decisions. Friedman foresaw that bitcoin, or something like it, could have great advantages and would inevitably be developed - much to the animosity of incumbent institutions in the financial....

A Satirical Look at the Eerily Accurate Bitcoin Prediction Video Surfaces to Haunt Paul Krugman. In contrast to the article Paul Krugman wrote, an opinion piece titled Bitcoin is Evil, a video has surfaced on YouTube from Krugman's one time nemesis: the legendary economist Milton Friedman. The 94-year-old Friedman supposedly died in 2006. I explain why I say "supposedly" later. In the video which was filmed for a TV interview in 1999, the then 87-year-old Friedman clearly predicts the rise of bitcoin. You can view the short relevant clip of that video here. For those who don't know much....

It has been described as a "techno tour de force" by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and as a "remarkable cryptographic achievement…that has enormous value" by Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. It was even predicted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in 1999 when he said, "The one thing that’s missing, but will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash." Friedman was a visionary, and in this instance he was a decade ahead of the rest, foreseeing the advent of digital currency, and more specifically, bitcoin. Bitcoin’s rise to prominence is causing a global rethink of the concept of....

Richard Buckminster Fuller was a well known American architect, systems theorist, author, and inventor. Similar to the visions expressed by the industrialist Henry Ford, the Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, and Austrian economist Milton Friedman, Buckminster Fuller also predicted a concept that resembled Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin invention 54 years ago in 1967. Buckminster Fuller: ‘Build a New Model That Makes the Existing Model Obsolete’ In a recent editorial, Bitcoin.com News discussed how the famed industrialist Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor....

In 1999, the Chicago economist Milton Friedman predicted the rise of bitcoin as a currency. He told an interviewer, “The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that is missing, but will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash: a method by which on the Internet you can transfer funds from an A to....