PFP337 | Yorick De Mombynes: Rothbard & Bitcoin—100 Years with Rothbard, Portugal

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Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 337.

This is the speech by Yorick De Mombynes at 100 Years with Rothbard (Porto, Portugal, June 27, 2026): Rothbard & Bitcoin.

Powerpoint (.pptx), transcript and summary below.

See also Kinsella, Rothbard Takes Portugal: 100 Years with Rothbard: A Personal Account, and the Cataláxia Editora Rothbard 100 Youtube playlist.

 

What would Rothbard think of Bitcoin?

imho, he would:

1) note that BTC is not (yet) money but a “secondary medium of exchange” in Mises’ sense

2) maintain his proposal to remonetize gold

3) acknowledge that, in the long term, BTC could supplant goldhttps://t.co/273lF6GlrM pic.twitter.com/vPXfE5Vsxs

— Yorick de Mombynes (@ydemombynes) July 20, 2026

Summary

Summary of Yorick de Mombynes’ Talk: “Rothbard & Bitcoin”

Yorick de Mombynes explores what Murray Rothbard would likely think of Bitcoin, framing it as “digital gold” in light of Rothbard’s strong advocacy for separating money from the state via a gold standard.

Rothbard’s Core Views on Money

Rothbard (drawing from Menger and Mises) argued that:

• Governments should have no role in money.
• Fiat money, fractional reserve banking, and central banks are disastrous, fraudulent, and the root of inflation, business cycles, and destruction of the market economy.
• Gold naturally emerged as money over centuries and was artificially demonetized by states.
• Solution: Remonetize gold by abolishing legal tender laws, defining the dollar (and other currencies) as a fixed weight of gold, ensuring 100% redeemability, transferring government gold to the private sector, allowing free private coinage and bank notes, and eventually eliminating the Fed and the “dollar” name itself.

He discusses two pragmatic scenarios for the gold definition (Fed liabilities only vs. full money supply/M1), favoring the latter for enabling full-reserve banking (~$1,696/oz historically; much higher today).

Would Rothbard See Bitcoin as Money?

• Politically: Rothbard would strongly approve of Bitcoin’s censorship resistance and individual sovereignty.
• Economically: More nuanced. Bitcoin meets many criteria of money (scarce commodity/general medium of exchange emerging via market process, with strong properties like divisibility, portability, auditability, and improving technology via layers like Lightning). It has non-monetary uses (timestamping, payment infrastructure) that satisfy the regression theorem.
• Currently, Bitcoin is not yet a full “general medium of exchange” but qualifies as a secondary medium of exchange (highly marketable non-monetary asset, like jewels or bonds historically) that reduces the opportunity cost of holding cash.
• Bitcoin could become sound/hard money due to its fixed supply, high production cost, lack of government control, and disinflationary nature (leading to beneficial price deflation and more equity-based funding).

Paradox: Still Remonetize Gold

Despite Bitcoin’s promise, de Mombynes argues Rothbard would still prioritize remonetizing gold to eliminate fiat entirely:

• Rejects legal tender for Bitcoin (e.g., El Salvador), government strategic reserves, or pure free-banking competition under Hayek’s proposal (fiat would persist and likely dominate due to familiarity).
• The only reliable way to denationalize fiat is linking it to a commodity (gold preferred, as it was market-chosen; defining fiat to Bitcoin would be arbitrary since it’s not yet fully money).
• Once fiat is tied to gold and taxes on Bitcoin are removed, free competition between gold and Bitcoin could occur — and Bitcoin might ultimately win.

Conclusion: Rothbard would love Bitcoin as a powerful tool for liberty and sound money but would insist on first destroying fiat via gold remonetization. He would likely own some Bitcoin himself and advise against betting everything on unproven new private currencies (including altcoins). The talk blends deep Rothbardian theory with pragmatic Bitcoin analysis.

The presentation is thoughtful, technical in places, and optimistic about Bitcoin’s long-term potential within a Rothbardian framework.

Transcript

Opening and Thanks to Organizers 0:07

Hola. Do I say it correctly?

Unfortunately, I will stop there in Portuguese. I’m very happy to attend this amazing event. It’s really a nice event. And I must tell you that it was not very easy to organize. It was organized by a very small team and they dedicated a lot of time and the result is really impressive. So I want to say a big thank you and congrats to the team, especially to Manuel Oando. [applause]

Topic: Rothbard and Bitcoin – Political and Economic Perspectives 0:49

So I’m very happy to talk about my favorite author, Rothbard, and my favorite technology, Bitcoin.

As you know, Rothbard was one of the main proponents to separate money and the state, but he wanted to do that with gold. So, since Bitcoin is often described as digital gold, what would Rothbard think of Bitcoin? Let’s try together to imagine that, knowing that it’s not easy to imagine because he was a genius. So very obviously he would come up with something much more intelligent than what I can guess, but let’s try anyway.

As regards the political aspect of Bitcoin, I think that he would love Bitcoin. He would love the censorship-resistant aspect, the individual sovereignty aspect. But as regards the economic aspect, probably it would be a bit more tricky, a bit more complex.

So I will focus on the economic aspect and I don’t know what you think, but my guess is that he would like Bitcoin as a potential sound money, but paradoxically he would still propose to remonetize gold. He would still propose to remonetize gold and despite that he would agree that Bitcoin may win in the competition against gold later on. So I will try to argue in favor of this thesis in three steps.

First, I will make a short synthesis of Rothbard’s view on money. Second, I will say why, according to Rothbard, Bitcoin may become sound money. And then I will explain why, according to Rothbard, governments should still remonetize gold.

Rothbard’s Theory of Money – Summary 2:58

So first, a short summary of Rothbard’s view on money.

As you know, his theory and history of money is based on Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises. According to them, governments should have no role in money. They have taken control gradually of money with very bad results. Fiat money is a disaster.

Fractional reserve banking is not a good idea. It’s not viable on a truly free market with real free banking and actually it’s fraudulent and it’s not economical. It was promoted by the state and if it survived it’s mainly thanks to the state, especially thanks to central banking, which is a capitalization device in favor of big banks and in favor of the governments.

So this has very bad consequences: price inflation, business cycles, the destruction of the price system and finally the destruction of money and the destruction of the market economy.

So the consequence is that gold became money over the centuries and it was artificially demonetized by the governments. So then we should remonetize gold. Of course, it was a very short summary and his analysis is much richer in his books. He proposed to remonetize gold.

What does it mean exactly? He had a very original theory of how to remonetize gold. Of course, the first step is to abolish legal tender and then we should define the dollar as a fixed weight of gold. The dollar should be a fixed weight of gold as it was before the 20th century.

So every existing dollar currently should be considered as a claim on some specific weight of gold. There should be genuine redeemability of dollars in gold and all the gold of the governments and the central banks should be transferred to the banks and to the people. And after that, no more Fed notes. They can be destroyed. We don’t need any Fed notes anymore. And each bank can issue their own notes with their own name on the notes. But each of them will represent some specific weight of gold. And then there will be free private coinage of gold coins as before, long time ago. And we can close the central bank. We don’t need it anymore. And we can even later on suppress the name “dollar.” We can replace it with a gram of gold or ounce of gold. So that people understand that the dollar doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not an autonomous independent entity anymore. Gold should be dollar, dollar should be gold. And then we can do that with the other currencies. He wrote about the dollar, but the analysis is the same for the other currencies.

Defining the Dollar in Gold – Technical Considerations 6:05

So now a few words about how to define the dollar in terms of weight of gold.

This is a tricky slide. It’s a bit technical. So if you are not crazy about economic theory, you can skip it. There’s no problem. But personally, I struggled to understand that. So I wanted to share it with you. It’s not really a price; it’s a weight of gold. It’s a definition. What definition should we adopt for the dollar?

The first element to take into consideration is that this definition should not be too low. For example, if we take the Bretton Woods system price of $35 per ounce of gold, this would be too low because there it will have a very big deflationary impact on the economy. Why? Because since that time a lot of dollars have been created. So there will be too many dollars. We will need to destroy a lot of dollars to be hard. The commercial banks should call in all existing loans and stop lending money. So it would not be a good idea.

Rothbard was very pragmatic. He didn’t want to impose a solution but he explored various scenarios. The two main scenarios:

The first option is that we should define the dollar so that the Fed’s gold stock covers all the Fed’s liabilities. What are the Fed’s liabilities? The Fed notes plus the deposits due to commercial banks (the reserves of the commercial banks at the central bank). So in that case he made the calculation. The definition of the dollar would bring a price of gold which would be $676 per ounce of gold.

But there’s a second option which is more interesting according to Rothbard. Instead of covering only Fed liabilities, the gold stock of the Fed should cover the whole money supply—all the liabilities issued by all the banks, not only the central bank but also the commercial banks. It’s more or less the monetary aggregate M1 as it was defined at the time of Rothbard: notes plus checkable deposits. He favors that because it would allow 100% reserve banking, full reserve banking, which he favors against fractional reserve banking. And in this calculation, it would bring a definition of $1,696 per ounce of gold. According to my own calculation, then it would be between $35,000 and $40,000 for one ounce of gold. So of course, the owners of gold would be very, very happy.

Why Bitcoin Could Become Sound Money According to Rothbard 9:17

So now, why can we think that Rothbard would think that Bitcoin can become money?

What money is not according to him: Money is not an abstract unit of account divorceable from a concrete good. This is not the case of Bitcoin. It’s not divorced from a concrete good. It’s based on energy, computers, infrastructure.

Money is not a useless token only good for exchanging. Money is not a claim of society (a very fashionable theory nowadays). It’s not a guarantee of a fixed price level. Money is simply a commodity—but not so simply a commodity. Actually, it’s a commodity that is a general medium of exchange. Money is a commodity that serves as a general medium of exchange. Very important definition. Every word is important.

And the concept of general medium of exchange is not so easy to grasp. And Rothbard is very honest on that. He adds that it’s impossible to define very precisely at what step something becomes a general medium of exchange.

So what about Bitcoin? We can argue that Bitcoin is a commodity. We know that Bitcoin is already a means of exchange. But we can guess that Rothbard would say that Bitcoin is still not a general medium of exchange. Whatever you define as a general medium of exchange, you can’t say that Bitcoin is a general medium of exchange now. So he would think that Bitcoin is not (yet) money.

Bitcoin is not yet money. But it can become money. So if it’s not money, what is it? I think that he would use a very important concept in Human Action by Mises: the concept of secondary medium of exchange.

What is it? It’s an asset that you keep with you. You know that you can’t use it to buy a coffee, but you know that you can sell it very easily the day you need some fiat money to buy a coffee. For centuries, those kinds of assets were jewels and now they are government bonds or very liquid assets. They are the most marketable non-monetary goods. You know that money is the most marketable good. But among non-monetary goods, there are goods that are more or less marketable. And the most marketable non-monetary goods are what Mises calls secondary medium of exchange.

And I don’t know what you think, but for me, Bitcoin is exactly that. It’s a secondary medium of exchange. You can own it, you can hold it and you know that you can sell it when you want to get some fiat if you want to buy a Lamborghini or a coffee. And the interest of those assets is to reduce the opportunity cost of holding cash. From an economic point of view, it’s exactly Bitcoin.

Another aspect: You can’t really own Bitcoin because it’s information and there’s no intellectual property as per Rothbard. You can control it. You can possess it because you can have practical control on this scarce resource if you have your private keys. So I think that Rothbard will agree on that, especially if he sees this fascinating talk by Stephan Kinsella who is here today and in 2019. So I advise you to watch it on YouTube.

But a very tricky question is: if you can’t own Bitcoin, if there’s no property title, can it become money? And libertarians don’t all agree on that. A possible answer by Stephan Kinsella is that money is not a legal phenomenon. It’s an economic phenomenon and it’s the economic phenomenon of a medium of exchange to avoid the problems of barter. So even if there’s no property title, even if you can’t own something, it can be money. So we can conclude that Bitcoin could be money despite that.

Another aspect is that Bitcoin has all the necessary physical properties to become money. Even if it’s not a physical thing, we can argue that it’s a digital commodity even if the fungibility is not completely perfect. It depends on if you talk about the fungibility on the protocol level or on the social and legal level. It’s a tricky question.

But it’s divisible, homogeneous, portable, tradable, auditable, etc., like gold actually. And of course, it’s scarce. And it’s emerging through a market process which is very important in the Rothbardian analysis for something to be money.

And I think that Rothbard will agree that there’s an increasing demand for a kind of asset that is very useful to protect savings against monetary inflation and political control and surveillance. So the context is good for Bitcoin to become money and it will not violate the regression theorem, which is a very important thing. I insist on that because here again there’s a lot of controversy among Austrians. Before May 2010 (the first purchase of goods with Bitcoin – pizza) there was a non-monetary use of Bitcoin which is the criteria for the regression theorem. Bitcoin was a collectible; it was an object of interest for geeks, computer scientists, cryptographers, activists, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and anybody.

And even today we can say that Bitcoin has a non-monetary use. What is it? First, it’s a decentralized timestamping system. Very efficient, more efficient than other timestamping systems. And it’s useful in the industry and in legal services. And more importantly, it’s a payment infrastructure. It’s an infrastructure of value transfer. And it’s not a monetary use. If I want to send you $1 billion, I can use this infrastructure by converting my fiat into Bitcoin, send you some Bitcoin and then you convert the Bitcoin into dollars. So I have used the Bitcoin infrastructure as a payment infrastructure. But even if Bitcoin is not money, it’s a non-monetary use of Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin becomes money later on, there would be no violation of the regression theorem.

So in that case Bitcoin will be part of money in the narrower sense according to Mises and Bitcoin on layers two like the Lightning Network would be considered as a money certificate and not as fiduciary media.

This is a very interesting typology of money by Ludwig von Mises. I don’t have time to explain it but it’s very interesting. You should read Mises and you should read also Saifedean Ammous because in his very good book Principles of Economics he made a very good synthesis of this typology by Mises.

So I think that according to Rothbard, Bitcoin could become sound money. Why? Because it’s hard money. It is very costly to produce and the government has no influence. He will consider that there is very impressive volatility today but it’s probably a very temporary phenomenon. It will decrease if adoption continues. He will like the disinflationary emission of Bitcoin. He will understand that this is going to bring price deflation and it’s perfectly okay. Natural deflation is okay for Austrian economists and he will agree that in the Bitcoin economy there would be less debt to fund investments and business but there would be more equity funding which is fine.

And he could even think that Bitcoin can be better than gold on certain aspects: first because there’s a supply cap; second because we don’t need an additional money for small transactions as we needed some silver for transactions that are too small to use gold. We can use Bitcoin for very small amounts especially on the Lightning Network or other layers two. And contrary to gold, Bitcoin is an improving technology. There’s some progress over time. It can be improved over time. So it’s a huge advantage.

So Bitcoin, according to Rothbard, can become money and would be sound money.

Why Rothbard Would Still Propose to Remonetize Gold 18:51

But paradoxically I think that he would still propose to remonetize gold. Why?

First, let’s disregard three wrong options. The first wrong option is to give legal tender to Bitcoin – the choice that was made in El Salvador. But the problem is that it’s imposed by the government. So Rothbard would not favor that. It’s just impossible.

Second, we should disregard the strategic reserve as proposed by Trump because it would be government-managed. Of course, Rothbard wouldn’t like that. [laughter]

And more interesting, we should avoid the Hayek proposal because of private currencies competing with each other. Why? Because as Rothbard explained very extensively in the Hayek system, fiat money still exists. We don’t suppress fiat money and there’s a competition between fiat money and private monies and it’s not so obvious that people would choose the new private monies because they would prefer to continue to use something they already know. They have known the dollar and other currencies for a long time. So Rothbard explained that the Hayek proposal is not a good idea. It will fail.

So in a Bitcoin situation, probably Bitcoin would be more attractive for the public than new monies issued by banks but we can’t be sure that Rothbard would think that it’s enough for Bitcoin to win in this kind of competition where fiat still exists. I’m not totally sure but I think Rothbard would be skeptical on that. So I think he would still propose to get rid of fiat. This is the priority: to get rid of fiat.

How do we do it? According to him, the only way to denationalize fiat is to link it to a commodity. It’s the only way. And what commodity? It could be a market-based market basket of commodities. He analyzes this scenario but he doesn’t like it because it will be government-imposed and managed even if there is some Bitcoin in this commodity basket.

So we should link fiat money to a single commodity. And could it be Bitcoin? Maybe Rothbard would think okay, let’s ask the government to define fiat money into Bitcoin. This is possible but I don’t believe that. I think that he would not propose that because he would think that Bitcoin is not (yet) money. It would be arbitrary to ask the government to define fiat money into something that is not yet money. I think that’s the analysis that Rothbard would have.

So he would propose to remonetize gold. It was chosen by the market. And there’s an interesting question: would it be unjust to ask the government to define the dollar in gold? And he has an interesting answer. He says take the example of price control. If government creates price control, of course we should abolish the price control but the only way to abolish the price control is a government law, a government decree, a government bill. The government has to undo what it has done. It’s the only way. And it’s the same with money. The government should undo the demonetization of gold by redefining the dollar in gold.

And of course, we should remove taxes on Bitcoin and then let the market decide. There will be competition between Bitcoin and gold. And maybe Bitcoin will win. According to Rothbard, I think he would accept this possibility.

Conclusion 22:56

So in conclusion, he would like Bitcoin, he would still remonetize gold, he will accept that Bitcoin may win. And at the conclusion of his book chapter “The Case for a Genuine Dollar” he wrote: “I would not advise anyone to bet their life savings on any of these proposed new currencies getting anywhere in this competitive race.” So he was talking about the potential new monies issued by banks and probably today if he was talking about new currencies getting anywhere he would talk about the altcoins that are pretending to compete against Bitcoin.

I think he would say: “I would not advise anyone not to own any Bitcoin.” He would not say Bitcoin is money, we should all use Bitcoin. He would say I would not advise anyone not to own Bitcoin. And I think maybe he would buy some Bitcoin.

Thank you. [applause]