Happy 10th birthday, bitcoin. It’s amazing you still exist | Tibor Fischer
False prophets, a rogues’ gallery of blaggers, and fiendish technical complexity: the cryptocurrency has defied them all
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.