Las profecías de Hayek sobre las criptomonedas

Résumé

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) theorised in the 1970s and 1980s about how a competitive money market would be organised and what the consequences would be for the economic world. Many contemporary economists dismissed his ideas as utopian, but the advent of cryptocurrencies has led to a renewed interest in his writings in this field. This paper aims to compile all of Hayek's predictions about the behaviour of a competitive money market and to apply these predictions to the current situation in which state fiat money and private cryptocurrencies coexist. As will be seen, the Hayekian model sheds light on issues that are highly topical today, such as Bitcoin's capacity to become money, the medium and long-term stability of the price of Stablecoins, the implications that monetary competition has on the economic policy of states and the real capacity of the authorities to maintain the monopoly on issuing money in the long term.