The history of crypto-currencies does not date back to the 21st century. While the first crypto-currency issue dates back to 2009 and Satoshi Nakamoto's project, its ideology is much older.
As early as the 1970s, an economist who was already breaking away from mainstream economics and opposing the theory of the famous John Maynard Keynes, proposed a particular ideology of money. This economist, from the Austrian school, is Friedrich Hayek. A fervent opponent of the expansionist monetary policies of the central banks - which, in his view, were the cause of the 1929 crisis in that they fuelled borrowing, leading to a crisis of overproduction - he considered that the central banks should not have a monopoly on issuing money.
The title of his 1976 book, For a True Competition between Currencies (or The denationalization of money), is eloquent. Money must cease to be a public affair and must depend on the market, which is optimal in all situations. Hayek then calls for free banking: each second-tier bank should issue its own money. The market will then punish the laxest: an over-issued currency loses its value and credibility. Banks will then be forced by competition to issue money in reasonable quantities, preventing central banks from pursuing expansionary policies, which limits the risk of crisis for Hayek.
This theory of the 1929 crisis thus gave rise to an ideology: central banks should be stripped of their monopoly of issuance so that agents could choose their own money. So, in the continuity of several years of research around the Blockchain, by the CypherPunks community, Hayek's ideology found an echo in bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency to date, which opened the way to many others thanks to the resolution of the double-spending problem. Crypto-currencies are therefore deeply rooted in a libertarian ideology. Their development responds to a crisis of confidence in central authorities but also to a desire to escape this surveillance.