Bitcoin Magazine The Avant-Garde and Bitcoin: Decentralized Money Didn’t Come From Nowhere

Bitcoin is a financial tool born of code and cryptography. But seen in a wider frame, it belongs to a cultural lineage more than a century old. Since the 1910s, avant-garde movements have probed questions that later became central to Bitcoin: Who decides value? Can rules replace rulers? How do systems record time, distribute trust or resist authority? Far from appearing out of nowhere in 2009, Bitcoin crystallized ideas that had long circulated in artistic experiments.

You don’t need to like art — or on-chain art — to follow this argument. This article is not a case for “Bitcoin art” but for understanding Bitcoin’s conceptual prehistory. If you are a Bitcoin maximalist, read what follows as the bac

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