The Economy Has Always Been Data
Why “knowledge economy,” “noonomy,” and the rest are not new dispensations but a rediscovery of what Rand, Hayek, and North already knew — and why Bitcoin is the next tool in a very long sequence
Keywords: data economy, knowledge economy, noonomy, Ayn Rand, Hayek, Douglass North, transaction costs, Bitcoin, scalable ledger, institutional change, tools, automation
I. The complaint that nothing is new
A recent exchange on X put the question plainly. Is the so-called noonomy — an economy “driven primarily by knowledge, information, and automated systems rather than traditional labor dynamics” — something new, and is it, by its novelty, somehow incompatible with the architectural commitments of a system like Bitcoin?
The framing is wrong on both ends. It is wrong that the economy is becoming knowledge-driven, because the economy was never anything else. It is wrong that automation displaces labour dynamics, because every tool ever made has displaced some labour dynamic and substituted another. And it is wrong that any of this is in tension with Bitcoin, because Bitcoin — properly understood as an instrument for cheap, atomic, verifiable settlement of facts about who owes what to whom — is itself a tool in the lineage of bills of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, marine insurance, the law merchant, and the printed price current. The data economy is not arriving. It has been arriving for at least eight centuries, and the only thing that changes from one century to the next is the cost of measuring, recording, and enforcing the data on which exchange depends.
That is the claim of this essay. The economy has always been data-driven, in the sense that what it costs to transact — to measure, attest, verify, and enforce — has always set the limit of what can be exchanged, by whom, and at what scale. Tools that lower these costs do not create a new kind of economy; they expand the economy that was always there. Rand’s insistence that wealth is the product of mind, Hayek’s insistence that prices are knowledge, and North’s insistence that institutions exist because measurement and enforcement are costly all converge on the same observation: the productive substrate of every society that has ever traded is information, and the institutions and instruments of that society are nothing more than the historically available technology for handling information at acceptable cost. Bitcoin, on the architecture defended in the long-form work attached to this argument (Wright, 2025; Wright, 2026a), is one further step along that line.
I will defend the claim in five movements. First, Rand’s argument that wealth is a product of mind, restated without polemic. Second, Hayek’s argument that the price system is a knowledge-coordination mechanism. Third, North’s argument that economic history is the history of falling transaction costs. Fourth, the claim that “tools” — from tally sticks to Teranode — are the physical embodiments of those falling costs. Fifth, the resolution: the noonomy thesis, where it has substance, is a redescription of what Rand, Hayek, North, Schumpeter, and Coase had already established; where it goes beyond redescription, it asks for collectivist conclusions that the antecedent literature does not support.
A note on what this essay is and is not. It is a Substack post written in an academic register, with citations attached. It is not a pre-submission journal review, and the standards I impose on myself here are those of the essay form, not those of identification econometrics. I have read the works I cite from the project library in substantive part; where I cite a work I have not read in full — there is one such case below — I say so plainly.
II. Rand: wealth as the output of mind
Ayn Rand’s contribution to the question of what an economy is lies not in her economics, which she did not pretend was hers, but in her insistence on the metaphysical priority of cognition to wealth. In Francisco d’Anconia’s “money speech” in Atlas Shrugged, the line that matters here is the one that has become, for better or worse, the whole of her economics in popular memory: “Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think” (Rand, 1957/1992, Part II, Ch. 2). The same speech, a few paragraphs earlier, makes the constructive claim explicit: “Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions — and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth” (Rand, 1957/1992, Part II, Ch. 2).
What Rand is doing here is not an economic claim in the technical sense. It is a claim about the nature of production. Reduced to its analytical content, it amounts to this: every act of production presupposes a piece of knowledge that some prior mind discovered, retained, and transmitted; the physical motions of labour are subordinate to and useless without that prior knowledge; therefore the economic process, even at its most physical, is at root the application of cognition to matter. Strip this of its rhetorical setting and what remains is a doctrine consistent with — though not derivable from — much later treatments. Romer’s later formal model of endogenous growth makes the same claim in different language: ideas are non-rivalrous and partially excludable, and the long-run growth rate is determined by the rate at which a society generates and uses them (Romer, 1990). Rand had no formal apparatus for this; she had the insight and the rhetoric. The insight survives the absence of the apparatus.
The reason this matters for a discussion of “noonomy” or any other proposed novelty is that the supposed novelty rests on a contrast between an old economy — material, labour-driven, mechanical — and a new one — informational, knowledge-driven, automated. Rand denies the contrast at its root. There never was a purely material, knowledge-free economy; the fantasy of one is what she calls, in the same speech, “the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt” (Rand, 1957/1992, Part II, Ch. 2) — and even there, the seed of wheat had been discovered by some prior mind, and the architectural mathematics of the pyramid embodied a prior cognitive achievement. To say the economy is “becoming” knowledge-driven is to say that water is becoming wet.
Where Rand goes beyond this — into the domain of moral philosophy, of the proper political response to the productivity of the mind, of capitalism as the only social system compatible with reason — is where this essay parts company with her. The metaphysical claim about cognition and production survives independently of the political programme she built on top of it; one can affirm the first without affirming the second, and a great many economists who would never identify with her have. North’s transaction-cost theory of institutions is, on this question, in agreement with Rand without sharing her politics, as we shall see.
III. Hayek: prices as compressed knowledge
If Rand insists that production is cognitive, Hayek insists that coordination is cognitive — and that the principal achievement of a market price system is the coordination of cognition that no single mind possesses. This is the argument of “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (Hayek, 1945), and it is the argument that, more than any other piece of twentieth-century economics, deserves to be the textual centre of any serious discussion of the so-called knowledge or data economy.
Hayek’s opening move in the 1945 paper is to deny that the economic problem is the problem standard textbooks treat. The textbook problem — given preferences, technology, and resource endowments, find the allocation that maximises some aggregate — is, as Hayek puts it, “purely one of logic” (Hayek, 1945, p. 519). It is the problem you would face if all the relevant information were given to a single mind. The actual economic problem is different in kind: “the data from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society ‘given’ to a single mind which could work out the implications, and can never be so given” (Hayek, 1945, p. 519). The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use, Hayek insists, exists “solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess” (Hayek, 1945, p. 519).
The economic problem of society, on this account, is the problem of how to make the best use of dispersed knowledge — knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place, knowledge of one’s local market, knowledge of one’s own preferences and capacities, knowledge of which machine in the next workshop is currently idle. No central planner, however well-equipped, can collect this knowledge in time to act on it, because the knowledge is in part constituted by the local situation that is changing while the planner collects it. The price system, on Hayek’s argument, is not a market mechanism in the narrow allocative sense; it is, primarily, a communication system. A change in relative scarcity somewhere in the world — a tin mine fails, a substitute becomes available, a use is discovered — propagates through the price system to every actor who needs to respond, without any of those actors needing to know why the price has changed (Hayek, 1945, pp. 525–527). The price carries the relevant information in a compressed, actionable form.
Several consequences follow that bear directly on the noonomy question. First, the supposed contrast between an information-poor old economy and an information-rich new one is, on Hayek’s diagnosis, a category error. Every economy that has ever used prices to coordinate exchange has been, by construction, a knowledge-processing economy. The price system is a distributed information protocol. If it were not, it would not work. Second, the planner’s dream — that now, with computational power, we can finally collect and process the dispersed knowledge centrally — is precisely the dream Hayek argued against, and the argument is not weakened by the existence of larger machines, because the constraint is not computational but informational: the local knowledge is not captured in any record at the moment of action, and centralising it requires a prior step (collection, codification, transmission) which destroys its time-value. Third — and this is the point I will return to in the section on Bitcoin — anything that lowers the cost of transmitting verified information about scarce resources does not displace the price system; it extends it.
Hayek’s conclusion on this last point is worth quoting in full because it is the strongest possible statement of the argument I am building toward: “I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind” (Hayek, 1945, p. 527). The reason it is not so acclaimed is that it was not designed; it grew. And what grew is, in essence, a distributed protocol for handling dispersed knowledge — exactly the kind of thing a contemporary data scientist would build, except that no committee built it.
IV. North: the economy is the history of transaction costs
If Rand gives us the claim that wealth is cognitive and Hayek gives us the claim that coordination is cognitive, Douglass North gives us the claim that economic history is the history of the falling cost of measuring, recording, and enforcing the cognition involved in exchange. This is the substantive content of North’s institutional economics, and it is the bridge between Rand and Hayek on the one hand and the question about Bitcoin and tools on the other.
North’s framing in Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (North, 1990) builds directly on Coase. In Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost,” only in the absence of transaction costs does the neoclassical paradigm yield the implied allocative results; with positive transaction costs, resource allocations are altered by property rights structures (North, 1990, Ch. 4). North’s contribution is to ask what makes transaction costs positive, and to give an answer in terms of measurement and enforcement. As North puts it, “the costliness of information is the key to the costs of transacting, which consist of the costs of measuring the valuable attributes of what is being exchanged and the costs of protecting rights and policing and enforcing agreements. These measurement and enforcement costs are the sources of social, political, and economic institutions” (North, 1990, Ch. 4).
Two empirical observations from North anchor the rest of the argument. First, transaction costs are not a small residual; they are the bulk of modern economic activity. Wallis and North’s measurement of the U.S. transaction sector found that more than forty-five percent of national income was devoted to transacting — to banking, insurance, finance, wholesale and retail trade, and the work of lawyers and accountants — and that this share had risen from approximately twenty-five percent a century earlier (North, 1990, Ch. 4, citing Wallis & North, 1986). Second, the historical evolution of European long-distance trade is, in North’s account, not a story of more goods or better goods but a story of cheaper transacting: the bill of exchange, the development of negotiability and discounting, the rise of fairs at Champagne and then specialised banks and finally financial houses; the printing of price currents, weight and measure manuals, and exchange rate tables; the transformation of uncertainty into actuarial risk through marine insurance (North, 1990, Ch. 13). Each of these is, in the language used here, a tool: an instrument that reduces the cost of measuring an attribute of the exchange or enforcing a claim arising from it.
The institutional consequence is that “when it is costly to transact, institutions matter” (North, 1990, Ch. 2, citing Coase, 1960). Institutions matter not because of any moral content but because they are the structures within which the costs of measurement and enforcement are paid. The institutional history of the West, on North’s reading, is the history of inventing — and sometimes failing to invent — instruments that reduce these costs (North, 1990, Ch. 13). Western Europe’s long-run divergence from other regions where primitive forms of exchange persisted is, on this account, not a matter of cultural superiority; it is a matter of the cumulative path-dependent invention of a stack of measurement and enforcement technologies that lowered the unit cost of impersonal exchange.
There is a second strand in North that deserves direct attention here, because it ties his argument to Rand’s: the claim that the demand for knowledge is itself shaped by the institutional incentives to acquire and use it. North argues that the institutional framework dictates the maximising opportunities for organisations, and the kind of skills and knowledge that pay off depends on what the institutional framework rewards (North, 1990, Ch. 9). To be a successful pirate one needed to know about naval warfare and trade routes; to be a successful chemical manufacturer in early twentieth-century United States required knowledge of chemistry and large-scale organisation (North, 1990, Ch. 9). The institutional structure determines what is worth knowing, and successful organisations invest in the knowledge that pays. This is, again, a claim about the cognitive substrate of the economy: economies that build institutions which reward productivity-raising knowledge generate productivity-raising knowledge, and economies that build institutions which reward predation generate the knowledge of how to predate. The economy is, in either case, a knowledge economy. The institutional question is which knowledge.
V. Tools: the slow lineage of cheap measurement
If we accept that production is cognitive, that coordination is cognitive, and that economic history is the history of cheaper measurement and enforcement, then a particular reading of “tools” follows. A tool, in this argument, is any instrument that lowers the per-unit cost of some economic operation. The plough lowers the per-unit cost of planting; the printing press lowers the per-unit cost of duplicating text; the bill of exchange lowers the per-unit cost of moving value across distance without moving coin; the marine insurance contract lowers the per-unit cost of bearing the risk of a voyage; the double-entry ledger lowers the per-unit cost of detecting accounting fraud; the patent lowers the per-unit cost of monetising an invention; the telegraph lowers the per-unit cost of transmitting a price; the standard container lowers the per-unit cost of moving a unit of cargo; the relational database lowers the per-unit cost of querying a transaction history.
In each of these cases, the tool is the historically available embodiment of a falling cost. None of them is a discontinuity; each of them is an increment. North’s discussion of these increments — fairs, banks, financial houses, price currents, manuals, marine insurance contracts, accounting and auditing methods (North, 1990, Ch. 13) — is the inventory of a continuous economic-historical process. There is no point in this inventory at which a “labour economy” gives way to an “information economy”; there is, instead, a single long line of declining unit cost on operations that were always informational at root.
The point about path dependence matters here too. North, drawing on David’s account of QWERTY (David, 1985, cited in North, 1990, Ch. 7), and on Arthur on increasing returns (Arthur, 1989, cited in North, 1990, Ch. 7), insists that the choice among tools is path-dependent: the technology that wins is not always the technology that, on a clean-sheet design, would have won. This applies to institutions as much as to technologies. We do not have the most efficient set of payment rails; we have the rails that won the path. SWIFT, the card networks, the automated clearing houses, and the correspondent-banking layer are each, on their own terms, tools that reduced some cost in some prior environment, and each then locked in. The locked-in tool is not optimal; it is incumbent.
This is precisely the framing within which a successor tool has to be evaluated. The relevant question is not whether the new tool is “compatible” with some philosophical commitment of the old order; the relevant question is whether the new tool reduces the unit cost of the operation it performs, and by how much, and on what attributes, and at what level of credibility. An honest comparison is an empirical exercise on those parameters.
VI. Bitcoin as the next tool
Set against this background, the question of where a system like Bitcoin sits is not a metaphysical question. It is an engineering question with an institutional accompaniment.
The engineering question is what Bitcoin reduces the cost of, and by how much. The answer, in the version of the system documented in the Teranode work and the surrounding analysis (Wright, 2026b; Wright et al., 2026), is a sharp one. Bitcoin, in the form Nakamoto specified and the form Teranode demonstrates can be operated at scale, reduces the per-transaction cost of a specific operation: the atomic, final, cryptographically verifiable transfer of a unit of recorded value from one party to another, with the resulting record publicly available and tamper-evident from the moment of inclusion in a sufficiently deep block (Nakamoto, 2008; Wright, 2026b). The Halborn independent verification of the Teranode milestones reports zero double-spend violations across approximately 520 million unspent transaction outputs and 12.8 million deliberate attempts (Wright, 2026a).
This operation — atomic final settlement against a verifiable public record — is not a new economic activity. It is the activity that the entire stack of bills of exchange, double-entry ledgers, central bank reserve accounting, ACH, SWIFT, and card-network clearing exists to perform. Each of those tools, in its time, was the lowest-unit-cost way of doing it. The empirical claim of the Teranode work is that the unit cost can now be lowered substantially further: validated transaction throughput at 1.12 million transactions per second per node in measurement, with the architectural projection that a fleet of approximately one hundred nodes annually produces more transaction data than the world manufactures in storage media (Wright, 2026b, §8.6 and Fig. 10). Whether the projection holds in production is, of course, an empirical question that the surrounding empirical work is attempting to answer; the claim is that the unit cost falls by orders of magnitude on the operation that the entire prior stack performs.
The institutional accompaniment is the question North’s framework was built to handle. A tool that reduces the unit cost of an institutional operation does not, by itself, reorganise the institutions; it can, if the cost reduction is large enough that the institutions built around the prior cost no longer earn their incumbency. North’s framing of path dependence and incumbency is the appropriate way to describe this, and it does not require any apocalyptic language about “displacement” of intermediaries. The Visa, Mastercard, ACH, and SWIFT networks each emerged as the lowest-cost solution to a settlement problem of their era; if a new tool reduces the unit cost of that operation by enough, the existing networks face a competitive question that is no different in kind from the question the bill of exchange posed to coin-bearing caravans, or the telegraph posed to messenger-borne price quotations. The question is not a moral one; it is a margin calculation, repeated across millions of transactions.
There is, however, a sharper version of the point that the long-form work I am drawing from makes, and it is worth stating cleanly. The argument is not merely that Bitcoin, properly engineered, is cheaper than the existing rails. The argument is that the existing rails exist because of problems that atomic final settlement does not have. Reconciliation between sub-ledgers, settlement-finality delay, chargeback windows, routing complexity across correspondent layers, and counterparty exposure between settlement events are not features of payments per se; they are features of the architectures that were available before atomic settlement was. A system in which the recorded transfer of value is final at the moment of inclusion in a sufficiently deep block does not need a chargeback mechanism in the form a card network has one, because the operation the card network’s chargeback mechanism solves does not arise. This is not an argument about competing on cost; it is an argument about a class of problems being eliminated structurally. Whether one accepts that argument as fully demonstrated is a separate question — the long-form manuscript argues it does (Wright, 2025) — but the form of the argument is the form one would expect from a tool that lowers cost not by being faster at the same operation but by performing a different, smaller operation that achieves the same economic goal.
It is worth pausing on the analytical structure of this kind of cost reduction, because it recurs across the lineage of tools just enumerated. The bill of exchange did not compete with the coin-bearing caravan on the speed of moving coin; it eliminated the operation of moving coin between commercial centres for routine transactions and substituted a recorded claim that could be settled locally against an agent in the destination market. That is, the bill of exchange did not make the coin-caravan faster; it made the coin-caravan unnecessary for the operation in question. The same structure applies, with the appropriate translation, to the marine insurance contract relative to the operation of bearing the full risk of a voyage on a single venturer’s account, and to double-entry bookkeeping relative to the operation of detecting accounting fraud through laborious manual reconciliation. In each case, the new tool did not race the old tool; it dissolved the operation the old tool existed to perform and replaced it with a smaller, cheaper operation that achieved the same economic end. Bitcoin’s relation to the prior settlement stack, on the architecture defended in the work cited, is of the same form: not a faster card network, but a system in which the operation that the card network performs is no longer the operation that needs to be performed. Whether the empirical magnitudes hold is, again, a question the long-form work is set up to test (Wright, 2026b; Wright et al., 2026); the conceptual placement is straightforward.
VII. The noonomy claim, evaluated
We can now return to the question that prompted this essay. The X exchange asked, in effect, whether “noonomy” — an economy driven by knowledge, information, and automated systems rather than traditional labour — is something new, and whether it is consistent with the architectural commitments of Bitcoin.
Bodrunov’s noonomy, as I understand it from the publishers’ descriptions, the review literature, and Bodrunov’s own English-language summaries (Bodrunov, 2018, in Routledge edition cited 2024; Anthology of Noonomy, 2023; Kolganov, 2019), proposes a transition from the current socioeconomic formation to a “non-economic” stage in which knowledge-intensive material production gradually displaces humans from immediate material production. I have not read the full monograph in English translation; I am working from secondary descriptions, and I disclose this rather than pretend otherwise. With that caveat, three observations.
First, the descriptive part of the noonomy thesis — that production is becoming more knowledge-intensive, that the ratio of information cost to material cost in finished goods is rising, that automation is removing humans from increasingly large parts of the immediate production process — is not new. It is the claim Schumpeter made about the routinisation of innovation (Schumpeter, 1942/2008). It is the claim Machlup made about the production and distribution of knowledge in the United States (Machlup, 1962, cited in Kolganov, 2019). It is the claim Bell made about the post-industrial society (Bell, 1973, cited in Kolganov, 2019). It is, in a different register, the claim Rand made about the cognitive substrate of all production and the claim Hayek made about the informational substrate of all coordination. As description, it is correct; as novelty, it is not.
Second, the prescriptive part of the noonomy thesis — that a non-economic stage will follow, that solidarity relations will replace market coordination, that property will be diffused and “simulative needs” removed — does not follow from the descriptive part. The descriptive observation that knowledge intensity is rising is consistent with, and on Hayek’s argument is positively predicted by, an extension of price-mediated coordination over a wider range of attributes and a finer grain of resolution. It is precisely the falling cost of measurement that lets price-mediated coordination reach into domains it previously could not. To argue from “knowledge is rising” to “markets must give way” is to skip the step Hayek devoted his career to making, namely that markets are the mechanism by which dispersed knowledge becomes actionable. Without an argument that this mechanism fails because of rising knowledge intensity — and I have not seen one in the secondary descriptions — the prescriptive conclusion is unsupported by the descriptive premise.
Third, and this is where the question about Bitcoin can finally be answered. If one reads “noonomy” as the descriptive observation that the cognitive content of economic activity is rising and the cost of handling that cognitive content is falling — which is, again, what Rand, Hayek, North, Schumpeter, Machlup, Bell, and Romer all said in their various ways — then a system that reduces the unit cost of verifiable settlement of facts about who has transferred what to whom is not in tension with the descriptive observation. It is one of the tools the descriptive observation predicts. The economy was always handling data; it is now handling more data, with finer resolution, at lower cost. Bitcoin, on the architecture defended in the long-form work, is a tool for handling some of that data — specifically, the subset that consists of the verifiable transfers of recorded value — at a unit cost that the prior tools could not match.
If, on the other hand, one reads noonomy in its prescriptive sense — as a transition to a “non-economic” stage with diffused property and replaced market coordination — then the conflict is not a conflict with Bitcoin specifically; it is a conflict with the entire institutional and theoretical apparatus of Rand, Hayek, North, and the modern theory of distributed coordination. Bitcoin is neither friendlier nor less friendly to such a programme than any other instrument of property and exchange. The conflict, if there is one, is at the level of social philosophy, not at the level of payment architecture.
VIII. A continuous lineage
The claim of this essay is at this point fully on the table. I will close by stating it once more, cleanly.
The economy has always been data-driven, in the technical sense that what is being exchanged in any economic transaction is, at root, a transfer of recorded claim against some attribute of some good or service, and the historical limit on what can be exchanged has always been the cost of measuring the attribute, recording the transfer, and enforcing the resulting claim. What changes from one century to the next is not the substance of what an economy is; it is the available technology for handling the data that the economy has always consisted of.
Tally sticks were a tool. Coinage was a tool. The bill of exchange was a tool. Double-entry bookkeeping was a tool. Marine insurance contracts were tools. Price currents were tools. The telegraph was a tool. The standard shipping container was a tool. The relational database was a tool. SWIFT was a tool. The card network was a tool. ACH was a tool. Atomic, cryptographically verifiable, publicly recorded settlement is a tool.
Each of these tools, in its time, lowered the unit cost of an operation that was always informational. None of them invented a “knowledge economy”; each of them extended the scope of the knowledge economy that already was. To declare in 2026 that the economy is becoming knowledge-driven is to misread by some centuries. To declare that automated systems are displacing human labour in a way that is novel is to misread by at least one industrial revolution and probably more. To declare that any of this is in tension with a settlement protocol that lowers the unit cost of recorded transfer is to misread the entire lineage in which both the economy and its tools sit.
The mind, on Rand’s argument, is the source of every wealth-producing act. The price system, on Hayek’s argument, is the distributed protocol by which the partial knowledge of every mind is made coordinatively useful. The institutions of exchange, on North’s argument, are the historically available technologies for paying the costs of measurement and enforcement that the price system imposes. Bitcoin, on the engineering and empirical work that motivates this essay, is the next entry in the lineage of those technologies — not a discontinuity but an increment, of unusual magnitude.
That is the argument. Whether you accept the empirical claims about the magnitude of the unit-cost reduction is a separate matter, and the long-form work is where that argument is made and tested. The conceptual point — that the data economy is not new, that the knowledge economy is not new, that the noonomy is not new, and that none of this is in tension with the engineering of cheaper settlement — is the point of this essay. There is no metaphysical novelty here. There is only the next tool.
References
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Disclosure: I cite Bodrunov (2024) and the Anthology (2023) on the basis of the publishers’ detailed descriptions, help from Google Translate, the review literature (Kolganov, 2019), and Bodrunov’s English-language summaries. I have not read the full monograph in translation and do not attribute fine-grained claims to it.