The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

I couldn’t believe that every day, people sent millions of perfectly good U.S. dollars to the Inspector Gadget creator’s Bahamian bank in exchange for digital tokens conjured by the Mighty Ducks guy and run by executives who were targets of a U.S. criminal investigation.

It was both financial innovation and social protest. Crypto was like the friend you’d made only because you shared an enemy.

Into this world of broken trust Satoshi Nakamoto placed his bitcoin project, just one month after the Lehman collapse. Did he choose the release date because of those events? It’s impossible to know for sure.

One day the new crypto start-ups that currently hold the baton in society’s ongoing fight for liberty will become part of the establishment themselves, much as Google and Facebook now are. We should hope that at that time both our cryptocurrency networks are sufficiently decentralized and that our governments have written accommodative laws that ma