The cooperative, non-altruistic nature of Bitcoin is elusive even to those who understand its technicalities. Many of them are fans of Austrian economics, even though the very existence of Bitcoin is a blow to their theory that money is ‘the most liquid good’ which emerges from barter. Because bitcoins have not yet established themselves in the way a 20th Century mind would regard as ‘generally accepted’, bitcoins are not regarded as money. But Menger, Mises and Hayek were all pre-internet human beings with a strong national consciousness. Bitcoins are valuable precisely because they transcend such an old social context, because they encapsulate the desires of people to cooperate regardless of where they were born.