Patrick Byrne: How Tech Can Thwart the State

Tags: The Entrepreneur, Free Markets, Strategy

02/10/2017 Patrick M. Byrne Jeff Deist

Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, the keynote speaker at our upcoming event in San Diego, is a brilliant innovator and freedom advocate. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Stanford, but understands e-commerce and blockchain technology like an engineer. He also understands Austrian economics, and courageously uses his public profile to make the Hayekian case for a decentralized political, economic, and social order. This presentation is excerpted from his talk given on our Auburn campus discussing the relationship between Austrian theory and the blockchain, and what it means for the eventual demise of government gatekeepers and middlemen.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.