The problem they met with was an inability to get paid, either because there was no nearby institution where they could open a checking account or they required a man's permission to open one.

Bitcoin allows all the women in her clinic to open a bank account without permission from anyone. If they owned a smartphone, they only needed a free wallet app. Then they could receive and spend money without permission from any authority….

What had to come together to make something like bit coin possible? You need distributed networks, open-source programming, entrepreneurial drive, cryptography, and a world networked through the Internet.

The economy of distributed technology, Tucker writes, is what used to be called the "free market" — the free market that has been systematically destroyed or undermined by governments. The difference is, this time it's being built in the information realm; and unlike the old markets in naturally scarce material goods, the new one is organized around abundance. He quotes F.A. Hayek from The Constitution of Liberty: