Farrington believes that Bitcoin is an asset, not “just” a currency. As it has an independent existence, it is not “tethered to” or dependent on any intermediary or central institution for its existence. Assets need not “degenerate” the way fiat currencies do, thanks to central bank monetary policies and, er, investment bank grift. So whereas fiat currency implies indebtedness, Bitcoin does not. It is pure abstract, tokenised capital — the inverse of fiat currency: to actual capital what a non-fungible token is to the artwork it represents, only generalised. Whereas an NFT is a token representing a specific cultural artefact, Bitcoin is a token representing generalised, fungible “capital” in the sense of abstract value — this is a vision of capital as a shared community resource before it has been transmogrified into any specific form. Bitcoin shares this investable “fungibility” characteristic with fiat currency — and also other traditional tokens of capital like shares — but we should not be misled by that superficial similarity into treating them alike. In this way, Bitcoin is anticurrency.

In any case, the proposition, “Bitcoin is liberated capital” seems to make a similar category error. A cryptoasset is, and can only ever be, a token for the capital it signifies. You cannot imbue an electronic token with the productive qualities of plant, machinery, receivables and real estate. For if this is what Bitcoin had achieved, it indeed would be something wondrous. Alchemical, even: “capital” as never before experienced: a Platonic essence: a Midichlorian life force. You know, like the Force. An electronic token humming with radioactive energy, radiating bottled prosperity. This seems to be the argument Farrington is making — Bitcoin represents some kind of transubstantiation.

So Bitcoin may now be here to stay. But not because it has fixed anything. Rather, Bitcoin has been fixed: The traditional institutions have cemented it into the existing system, validating it and giving it institutional weight, heft and credibility. The young rebel has made good: Mick Jagger becomes a knight of the realm. (That took Jagger 41 years. It only took Bitcoin 15). When even the fraudsters are lobbying for regulation — a classic barrier to entry and defence against better fraudsters — the utopian dream is truly over.

The complacent assumptions of the new economic consensus must be, and are, zealously and unrelentingly incepted into the public consciousness in order to obfuscate that finance has gradually shifted over the twentieth century from what we might call a peer-to-peer model to a client/server model. We used to be allowed to learn by experiment by having a good old scrap with our financial competitors. Now we are told what is to be done by decree. Client/server models of any kind of social organization are typically objectionable on the basis of fragility, single points of failure, lack of feedback, and simple unfairness: Who gets to be the server? Who guards the guards? Finance now has an aesthetically minded design that patently doesn’t work, and what’s more, nobody seems to be bothered that it doesn’t work, as if working isn’t even the point.