How Money Got Free: Bitcoin and the Fight for the Future of Finance

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.