HOW MONEY GOT FREE

"The rollicking, delightfully told tale of the creation of one of the most profound new technologies of our time." - Nicholas Thompson, editor-in-chief, Wired

After ignoring it for the first few years of its existence, major investors—venture-capital firms, Goldman Sachs, the New York Stock Exchange, and billionaires like Richard Branson and Peter Thiel—have now decided to risk more than $1 billion of investment capital on digital-currency businesses. How did an invention that, a few years ago, wasn’t taken seriously by anyone, come to be praised by Bill Gates as "better than currency"?

Bitcoin was founded on a renegade ideology by a bunch of outlaws: cryptographers, hackers, Free Staters, ex-cons and drug dealers, teenage futurists and entrepreneurs, those with a grudge against government and big banks. For some of the early adopters, now millionaires themselves, the world of global finance goes against everything they stand for, and they are not going down without a fight.

Brian Ehais a freelance journalist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, CNN Money, Entrepreneur, Outside Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He lives in New York City.