Thus, met with the screeching bile of the chattering classes, Bitcoiners went from utopian tinkerers to dissidents in short order — even as the movement was still in its infancy. Check the financial pages of your newspaper of record; you will find nothing but derision and mockery (and the very occasional nod of grudging acceptance). This is for an asset class which went from 0 to $200 billion in a decade, with no venture backing, no IPO, no corporate entity, an absent founder, and a purely open-source body of maintainers. In the U.S., the government saw fit to give Ross Ulbricht two non-parole-eligible life sentences plus 40 years for the crime of creating a free market denominated in Bitcoin. China has banned the formal exchange of bitcoins; India is mulling over legislation to make mere ownership illegal.

It is telling, for example, that much of the general public has ignored Bitcoin’s core innovation over the past decade: instead, buzzwords like “blockchain” have been cherry-picked and declared hype. he actual innovation of the Bitcoin system, which is all of its components working together, has been left behind and mangled