If you are under the impression that the quest for a decentralised currency started in October 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto posted a whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com - you’d be off by about 40 years.
In the mid-70’s the Nobel prize winning economist Friedrich August von Hayek published a now nearly forgotten book called The Denationalization of Money in which he made an argument for competitively issued private moneys