Happy 10th Birthday, Bitcoin. It’s Amazing You Still Exist
False prophets, a rogues’ gallery of blaggers, and fiendish technical complexity: the cryptocurrency has defied them all
By Tibor Fischer
Bitcoin, the Big Daddy of cryptocurrencies, which celebrates its 10th birthday today, rarely inspires temperate or informed debate.
For its detractors — mostly elderly bankers and economists — it is tulip-mania, moonshine, hi-tech smoke and mirrors. For its most fanatical adherents — techies and latter-day hippies — bitcoin is not merely a viable currency, but salvation: a universal panacea, not just to combat governmental ineptitude or malevolence, and poverty, but to end them. Hallelujah and kumbaya.
The sneerers cite the rampant criminality in the ranks of the cryptosphere. It is true, in the 10 years since bitcoin was born on a couple of desktop computers — becoming an entity worth more than the M1 money supply of Argentina — its retinue has accommodated an incredible rogues’ gallery. There have been old-fashioned cony-catchers, saltimbancos and bubblers who did a runner with other people’s money in the time-honoured manner, but also drug-dealers, murderers and blaggers — not to mention the lethal dreamers and false prophets.
