“Bitcoin is under siege” — CNN Money headline 9 hours ago (Was the US dollar under siege when Bernie Madoff was first outed as a crook? Was broadband Internet under siege when ISP @Home went bankrupt?)

“A dangerous mistake lies at Bitcoin’s intellectual core”—Financial Times, 6 hours ago (and written by the former Federal Reserve examiner who is known as “Professor Bitcorn” within the Bitcoin community for not knowing how to pronounce a bitcoin—and for publicly offering up a bold prediction to any media outlet that will listen that Bitcoin will lose 99 percent of its value by June… the clock is rapidly running out on that prediction, but the good Professor’s fearmongering shows no signs of letting up!)

“The Glitch That Will Help Kill Bitcoin” —Bloomberg, 1 hour ago (An article which seems so singleminded in its approach and intellectually lazy that I’m not even going to link to it here, it doesn’t deserve your traffic. And part of it states “What kind of ‘experiment’ has a $14 billion market cap?” to give you an idea of the piece’s dishonesty. At time of the article’s publication, Bitcoin has a $7.9 billion market cap… talk about a straw man argument. The article also never identifies this “glitch” that will “kill” Bitcoin. Pretty intense judgment call from someone who has probably not sent or received a single Bitcoin transaction.)

And a MarketWatch article from three hours ago: “Bitcoin crash is gold’s gain,” the headline states, even though MarketWatch’s own live market data shows gold has only gained a paltry 1.3% today—and it’s a rather dubious claim to suggest that has anything to do with Bitcoin. A bit like saying, hey, I wore my black socks today—whenever I wear those socks, gold goes up!

Logical fallacies, basic misunderstandings of how Bitcoin works, fearmongering for traffic. Is this the 4th estate of American society or a freshman intro to journalism class?

The media is rapidly talking themselves out of any lingering shreds of legitimacy they might still have. The same people who told us for months Edward Snowden was a dangerous criminal selling our nations’ “crown jewels” to foreign powers—if spying on US citizens’ domestic call data in clear violation of the law and using rubber stamp secret courts to do so are our country’s “crown jewels,” we’re in some serious trouble as a society!

These same people now tell us Bitcoin is scary and we should have nothing to do with it. We’re supposed to trust them?

That’s right: Crush innovation, fellow Americans! (So that China, India, and other enterprising nations will come to completely dominate the cryptocurrency space within two years, putting American consumers and companies at a serious competitive disadvantage? That makes no sense.)

Bitcoin is an emerging technology that has Silicon Valley and high-paying American jobs written all over it. Literally all we have to do as a country and as a sector is not completely fuck this one up. Cryptographic currency is something that “sells itself”—not only is it decentralized, it doesn’t need advocates. It doesn’t need to sponsor stadiums and Super Bowls like the banks do.

The drastically lower transaction costs and settlement times within minutes instead of days—these are things that consumers and business owners find inherently attractive.

It’s the fact that you can send it back and forth so quickly — and that so many people already recognize it as currency—that’s what makes bitcoin so valuable. It allows us to participate in a most fundamental, powerful form of social media: transferring value.

A lone voice of reason in the mainstream financial press lately is David Morris at Fortune. He wrote this today:

“Though there is still the distinct possibility that some other cryptocurrency will out-innovate bitcoin itself, the basic cryptocurrency model solves problems for so many constituents that its eventual adoption is something of a fait accompli. It is vastly more efficient and secure for online payments than the current maze of credit cards and ACH systems, promising to reduce merchant fees and fraud losses. It allows true peer-to-peer payments, with near-zero costs. And it finally enables the micropayments model that has been dreamt of since the dawn of the Internet, opening up potentially huge new revenue streams for writers and other content creators.

We are sure to see more steps backwards and forwards before all of this comes to fruition. But five years from now, a few ethical faults, management catastrophes, and protectionist Hail Marys will barely merit footnotes.”

Given this airtight logic, I’m surprised the mainstream media continues to embarrass itself by lending a platform to people like Professor Bitcorn. In fact, when you look through the negative major hit pieces on Bitcoin, it is surprising how many of them use that individual as a sole or primary source.

Take, for example, “Bitcoin Is Not Yet Ready for the Real World,” an authoritative-sounding piece on The New York Times Dealbook blog authored by Professor Bitcorn that would have probably scared me away from digital currency if I hadn’t spent a large portion of the past year researching every aspect of it. (In the piece, he asks unbalanced leading questions such as “Is Bitcoin an innovative response to facilitate meaningful commerce or simply a designer currency for the criminally inclined?” Really? A designer currency for criminals?)

The media can always find cranks and doomsayers—there are no shortage of those people, on any subject matter.

I would challenge the editors and show bookers at America’s major papers and networks to do better. Book actual experts who spend their time with Bitcoin’s protocol day in and day out. People like Andreas Antonopoulos, or any business owner who actually uses and accepts Bitcoin, or any customer who has bought something with it, or the crop of (mostly) young entrepreneurs who are innovating more in a month than Professor Bitcorn’s beloved Federal Reserve innovates in a decade.

And it’d also be nice if the media points out that Bitcoin’s recent “market chaos” hasn’t—and won’t—cost taxpayers a penny.

Instead of a trillion dollar bank handout that didn’t prevent a single foreclosure and which led to years of red tape, Bitcoin’s own “banking crisis” is being resolved in a matter of hours—not months or years.

We’re seeing precisely what should happen with a decentralized system of capitalism: users are moving their Bitcoin away from firms they no longer trust, and to firms with the competence level required when running a 24/7 electronic currency exchange. The competent and honest will thrive, the incompetent will be driven out of business.

That sounds like a good thing to me.

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You can follow me at https://twitter.com/d_seaman and find some of my other stuff at DavidSeaman.com.

Disclosure: I own some Bitcoin (BTC) and Vertcoin (VTC) at time of publication. This is not investment advice and no warranties or guarantees are provided.