Those well-versed in the writings of Menger, Mises, and Hayek had expected monetary competition to reemerge in a time of crisis. The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 seemed like a final vindication of Austrian Economics. Ron Paul became a household name in the US. Doubts about fiat dollars were at a peak. The time was ripe for change, but things quickly seemed to revert back to the status quo. E-gold, using a centralized ledger of gold claims, was shut down by the US government in 2009. Credit contraction was compensated by even more debt, in particular government debt, directly monetized through central banks. The societal conflict shifted from economics to politics again, and interest in the Austrian School was eclipsed by a new culture war.

Nowadays, the road goes the other way, from Bitcoin to the Austrian School of Economics, from the most exciting monetary experiment of our times to a niche tradition of thought. For some leftists peddling the kind of officially sanctioned conspiracy theories that do not get you canceled but nourish academic careers, the Austrian School is an immensely powerful force hidden in the shadows. They see Bitcoin as spawning from the same evil root as the Alt-right, Pinochet, Thatcher, Reagan, and everything else they dislike in the world. For most other academics, the Austrian School is relegated to a footnote in the history of ideas, an anachronistic tradition of which a few useful parts have been absorbed by mainstream economics, the remainder only being regurgitated by cranks.