Stirred by the latest controversy over who might have gotten it all started, stirred too by some of the tweets in my feed in recent days, I've been wondering what Henry George might think about bitcoins. I'm not a Georgist, but I have long regarded his point of view with fascination, and I discussed his theory of credit in particular in one passage of my book on the economic crisis of 2007-08. The theory of interest can give us some basis for extrapolating to what HG might think and say about cryptocurrencies were he around today to learn of them. In his classic work, PROGRESS AND POVERTY (1879), George proposed a thought experiment thus, "[I]f wealth consisted but of the inert matter of the universe, and production of working up this inert matter into different shapes [then] interest would be but the robbery of industry, and could not long exist." So: did he in fact see interest as theft? No, because the premise of that thought experiment is invalid. Some w...