I would argue we have never seen a totally free market. A free market would be where government only protects life, liberty and property. Gold is the original governor of government. A gold standard restricts a governments ability to spend more currency than it can redeem for its gold holdings. It acts as a check on prudence. However this introduces counter party risk, the need to trust the custodian, the government/central bank. Eventually all governments via the central bank, abuse this trust and produce more currency than the gold they hold, then modify (or counterfeit) the supply of currency to suit their political agendas.
Creating ever more amounts of currency leads to inflation of prices and artificially increases perceived scarcity, diverging away from true price signal of supply and demand and becoming more a product of policy than it is of free market fundamentals. Perceived scarcity leads to division, the need to fight over existing resources verses a world where there is no increase in currency supply, prices would decline. As prices decline, this is a signal to the market participants that scarcity is declining, thus less need to fight over things inducing more cooperation. Throughout history people have always preferred money that has been the most resistant to inflation, thus the most scarce and difficult to artificially increase the supply. Gold fulfilled this characteristic and became hard money. Alchemy, if it had succeeded, would have destroyed this characteristic, making gold worthless. In order to increase gold supply, work is required which is an expensive process which will tend to find market equilibrium with the price so gold miners cannot heavily dilute its supply. Whereas the cost to produce more fiat currency, is essentially zero. The end result historically is that fiat currencies converge to zero. As good as gold is at holding its value across time, it is rather limited in terms of portability. Had gold's portability been really high I suspect the need produce redeemable paper notes would not have happened and central banks would never have existed. An unfortunate technological shortcoming for gold.
This is why bitcoin is so interesting. It is the disrupter to the base level operating system of money that has existed throughout all of human history.
So what makes good money? Durability, Portability, Divisibility, Recognisability and Scarcity. Metals best satisfied these features historically. Bitcoin the most superior technology that has ever existed essentially perfects them.
Durability (pure information stored in a distributed format)
Portability (speed of light)
Divisibility (sub units- satoshi)
Recognisability (verify and audit total supply with a node at any time)
Scarcity (known issuance schedule and fixed supply, eventually 21 million mined by 2140)
Bitcoin is actually the discovery of absolute scarcity. It unveils a property of money that we will only discover once leading to major ramifications for the world. No matter how much effort or energy expenditure that is put into the bitcoin mining network we cannot deviate from bitcoin's fixed and diminishing supply curve. This is due to the difficulty adjustment which is adapting to the human action of applied hashrate looking to discover the next block.
Bitcoin is voluntary. In order to obtain adoption it needs to be better than the current monetary system. To the many unbanked billions of people around the world, bitcoin will change their lives.
The inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, walked away by design gifting the technology to the world with a set of rules without the need for rulers.
Bitcoin incentivises sovereignty, sustainability, peace, freedom, a lower time preference, fairness, resistance to censorship and the reclamation of money by separating it from the state.
"I don't believe we shall ever have good money again before we take it out of the hands of government. We can't take it violently out of the hands of government. All we can do is by some sly, roundabout way introduce something they can't stop" - Friedrich Hayek