It does not say "Libertarian" on the label, but in Bitcoin debates there's always the ideas of doing it without a government, without a central authority, of having competing currencies and exchanges, of "unprotected" economic activity, of "one dollar one vote" rather than "one person one vote", a gold-rush mentality built-in (rather than "let's make a new currency and everyone starts with 100 eBucks").

So it looks like a nice real life Libertarian experiment to me.

>>There isn't any inherent philosophy in the protocol. You can use bitcoins with a tinfoil hat firmly planted on your head, or you can use bitcoins to build centralised banking again if you want to. It's just a tool.

It's a deflationary currency that enables decentralized commerce. I think that in and of itself speaks volumes about the philosophy behind it.

It's trivially easy to create an altcoin that inflates to infinity instead. It's just changing a relatively small amount of code. The difference is instead of a political elite that only cares about themselves & their tribe like most human beings, the monetary policy is set at the start and is completely predictable.

Right now bitcoin is the star of the ball, but the other altcoins represent a significant amount of value. There is nothing guaranteeing that bitcoin will stay the star.

I don't understand enough about the economics to understand what kind of philosophy a deflationary currency entails. Can you please explain?

As to the decentralised nature, I'm not convinced that really appeals to any deep philosophy other than our greedy nature to want to be able to own what we think we should own.

Essentially, a deflationary and decentralized currency encourages "our greedy nature" rather than discouraging it. Inflation is often referred to as a subtle tax, because it devalues currency. Thus, you're incentivized to spend your money rather than save it. Deflation, as the inverse, increases value of currency and incentivizes you to save your money rather than spend it.

There's nothing particularly deep about libertarian philosophy. (Though there are different amount of nuance depending on which flavor of libertarian you manage to get into a conversation with. Some of them are competent thinkers; I have found them to be exceedingly rare.)

Many flavors extol the virtues of selfishness, though. You'll find this is particularly true with libertarians who agree with Ayn Rand. Even those who don't will generally say that people should look to their self-interest (it no longer appears popular to invoke the invisible hand at this point; maybe because of the intervening years of people noticing that Adam Smith had a lot to say that contradicts libertarian ideas) and use abstract forces like the price mechanism to determine policy. (This is a very rough sketch.)

...and anyways, I'm spending too much time trying to be fair. Libertarianism is fucking stupid, which is an opinion I have based more on its political bits, which is a teenager's idea of society, than on its economic bits, which I'm willing to concede more because I'd rather claim ignorance than because I think there's any merit there.

The point is that looking out for number one is a cornerstone of varying intensity in libertarianism and Bitcoin's deflationary and decentralized nature plays very directly into that.