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3:35Bitcoin — A History in Blocks
Seventeen years of bitcoin, from the white paper to today, in three and a half minutes — with an original score.
The Money Tree — Who Gets to Change the Rules?
A natural history of Western monetary thought, from Locke to Satoshi.
16:17A sixteen-minute documentary on the modern history of Western monetary thought, from Locke’s clipped coins in 1695 to bitcoin, stablecoins and central-bank money, told as a natural history of ideas: a living tree whose limbs fork, go dormant, go extinct and re-sprout.
Script by Alex Thorn · Narration by ElevenLabs · Graphics by Opus 5.5 · Produced by Alex Thorn
Credits and sources
Not financial advice. This film is for education and entertainment only. Nothing in it is an offer, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any asset, bitcoin, stablecoins and currencies included. No person, institution, company or publication shown or quoted is affiliated with this film or endorses it.
Made by
- Script by Alex Thorn. Produced by Alex Thorn. Graphics by Opus 5.5. @intangiblecoins · alexthorn.com, 2026.
- Narration by ElevenLabs: a synthetic voice (“George”). It is not a recording or a clone of any real person.
- Music: an original score made for this film with the Logic Pro sound library.
- Type: Libre Caslon Display and Text (Impallari Type) and JetBrains Mono, both under the SIL Open Font License.
- Coastlines and lakes: Natural Earth (public domain), naturalearthdata.com
Archival film
- President Nixon’s address to the nation, 15 August 1971. White House Communications Agency Videotape Collection, WHCA-4582, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum (National Archives): youtube.com
- F. A. Hayek interviewed by James U. Blanchard III, Freiburg, 1984. Libertarianism.org / Cato Institute, the Turney Collection. CC BY 3.0: youtube.com
Data
- FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: CPIAUCSL, fred.stlouisfed.org
- FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: UNRATE, fred.stlouisfed.org
- FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: FEDFUNDS, fred.stlouisfed.org
- FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: BOGMBASE, fred.stlouisfed.org
- FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: USREC, fred.stlouisfed.org
- NBER Macrohistory Database, series 11025 (Cowles Commission and Standard & Poor’s index of common stocks) and 14144 (the money stock, after Friedman and Schwartz): nber.org
- Block 0’s header and coinbase: the Bitcoin blockchain.
Prints
- James Gillray, Political-Ravishment, or The Old Lady of Threadneedle-Street in Danger!, 1797. Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- A. Humblot, Rue Quinquempoix en l’année 1720, from Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid. Rijksmuseum, CC0. commons.wikimedia.org
- Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, 1755, title page. Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Outside the London bank of Overend, Gurney & Co., 11 May 1866. Die Gartenlaube, Leipzig, 1866. Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
Coins
- Clipped shilling of James I. The Portable Antiquities Scheme / The Trustees of the British Museum; photograph by Adrian Marsden, Norfolk County Council. CC BY-SA 4.0. commons.wikimedia.org
- Shilling of William III, Chester, 1697. The Portable Antiquities Scheme / The Trustees of the British Museum; photograph by Robert Webley, Somerset County Council. CC BY-SA 2.0. commons.wikimedia.org
- The coin faces at the opening are drawn for this film.
Portraits
Period images, redrawn as engravings for this film. No face was generated by AI. The engravings made from CC BY-SA images (Mises, Hayek, Schwartz, Minsky) are adaptations shared under the same licence.
- John Locke: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- William Lowndes: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Isaac Newton: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- John Law: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- David Hume: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Adam Smith: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- David Ricardo: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Walter Bagehot: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Karl Marx: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Carl Menger: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Knut Wicksell: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Georg Simmel: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Georg Friedrich Knapp: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Irving Fisher: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- John Maynard Keynes: Public domain (Acme Newspictures, 1929). commons.wikimedia.org
- Milton Friedman: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Paul Volcker: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Ben Bernanke: Public domain. commons.wikimedia.org
- Ludwig von Mises: GFDL / CC BY-SA 3.0. commons.wikimedia.org
- Friedrich Hayek: CC BY-SA 3.0. commons.wikimedia.org
- Anna Schwartz: GFDL / CC BY-SA 3.0. commons.wikimedia.org
- Hyman Minsky: CC BY-SA 4.0. commons.wikimedia.org
No verified likeness of Henry Thornton survives, and no freely licensed one of Robert Triffin exists.
Quotations
- David Hume, Of Money, 1752.
- Irving Fisher, 15 October 1929, reported in the New York Times, 16 October 1929.
- J. M. Keynes, Essays in Biography, 1933.
- Milton Friedman, Inflation: Causes and Consequences, 1963.
- Richard Nixon, address to the nation, 15 August 1971.
- Ben Bernanke, remarks at the University of Chicago, 8 November 2002: federalreserve.gov
- The Times, 3 January 2009, as written into Bitcoin’s genesis block.
- Satoshi Nakamoto, P2P Foundation, 11 and 15 February 2009.
Paraphrases are marked PARAPHRASED on screen and never appear in quotation marks.
More to watch
3:35