Knut Svanholm

Knut Svanholm is a Bitcoin author, educator and self-described armchair philosopher. His first book, Bitcoin: Sovereignty Through Mathematics, is regarded as a classic of the genre, and he coined the meme (and wrote the book) “Everything Divided by 21 Million”. A committed voluntaryist, he sees Free Cities as a practical way to implement Austrian principles in real-world societies.

Sovereignty Through Mathematics appeared in 2019 and is deliberately not an introduction to how Bitcoin works. It is an argument about what follows once money is separated from the state, and it has been recommended widely enough to have become the standard gift to newcomers who are already past the technical explanations.

He has written several further books in the series, some with co-authors, and the phrase he coined, Everything Divided by 21 Million, has become the shorthand for pricing the world in a fixed supply rather than in a currency that keeps expanding.

He lives on Madeira, where the island’s Bitcoin community and the Free Cities movement overlap, and serves as a Free Cities Ambassador there. His case for these projects is Austrian rather than technological: a society is a set of voluntary agreements, and those agreements only hold over time if the money underneath them cannot be quietly diluted.