Many newbies entering the Bitcoin community tend to think that Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in a vacuum, but Bitcoin is actually part of a wider Cypherpunk/crypto-anarchist movement using cryptography to establish protocols that compete and can replace legacy institutions.
To address a wider lack of scholarship about Bitcoin, its history, and its social implications, members of
the Mises Circle at the University of Texas, Pierre Rochard, Daniel Krawisz, and myself (Michael Goldstein), have teamed up to form the
Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. By addressing the history of monetary and legal systems and the history of attempts by cryptographers to address these issues, we can better understand why Bitcoin is important and the principles for which it stands. So far, you can find source material from Satoshi Nakamoto, Nick Szabo, Timothy C. May, Whitfield Diffie, and others, including economists such as Peter Šurda, Konrad S. Graf, and Friedrich Hayek. With your support we can help foster a more diverse, principled, and intellectual community celebrating the use of technology to make a freer world.
