Cryptocurrencies & Blockchain

Bitcoin's launch in 2009, following the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 whitepaper, ushered in cryptocurrencies as the subject of a long-running and unusually contested moral panic. A quick primer: a cryptocurrency is digital money recorded on a blockchain, which is essentially a shared ledger copied across thousands of computers, with each new batch of transactions cryptographically linked to the one before it so the whole history is hard to alter. No bank or central authority is in charge. Regulators, economists and politicians warned that cryptocurrencies were tools for money laundering, tax evasion and terrorism financing, and dangerous speculative playthings for ordinary investors. Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, declared in March 2018 that it was "time to address the dark side of the crypto world." Nobel-adjacent economist Nouriel Roubini called Bitcoin "the mother or father of all scams and bubbles" in Senate Banking Committee testimony in October 2018.

The panic had substantial empirical grounding. Mt. Gox, then the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, collapsed in February 2014 with hundreds of millions of dollars missing. Silk Road (2011–2013), an online drug market accessible via the Tor network, showed crypto's utility for black markets. The November 2022 implosion of FTX — whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried was later sentenced in March 2024 to 25 years in prison for fraud — vindicated many of the sector's critics. Energy concerns mounted as Bitcoin mining (the computational race that secures the network and issues new coins) drew more electricity than entire countries, according to Cambridge University's CBECI tracker.

Yet the landscape has since pivoted sharply. Spot Bitcoin ETFs (exchange-traded funds, which let ordinary investors buy Bitcoin through a regular brokerage account) were approved in January 2024, and Ethereum ETFs followed in July 2024. President Trump in March 2025 established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. Whether "crypto panic" is a moral panic or a well-founded warning is one of the most genuinely unresolved cases on this timeline.