Bitcoin emerged in the darkness of the global financial crisis in 2008. The Bitcoin white paper represented a genuine breakthrough in thinking about coordinating complex systems in a decentralized environment. Though not every idea in it was new, Bitcoin’s combination was ground-breaking in its scope and potential for reliability.

The Bitcoin white paper was something else as well: a political statement about the inherent untrustworthiness of central banks, banking regulators and governments more generally. Satoshi Nakamoto expressed strong distrust of central banks in early emails introducing Bitcoin, and the Genesis Block itself contains a copy of a London Times headline from 2009, announcing that Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer was considering a second bank bailout.

Bitcoin is supposed to be an alternative to the corrupt and corruptible governments, a bulwark against totalitarian states that removes their power to debase currency and seize assets from the population. Proof-of-Work, its consensus mechanism, is designed to prevent bad actors from corrupting the overall path of the network and self-custody means that no central authority can expropriate your assets. It was designed not just as a system of money, but........

© CoinDesk