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Digital currencies were created to compete with central banks. Nakamoto’s (2008) design of bitcoin, as a ‘Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System’, was intended to allow network members to transfer value directly between each other without any role for a trusted third party, such as a central bank. Few people noticed the launch of bitcoin in early 2009, but its creator, still unknown today, had a clear political agenda. The first block of bitcoins was accompanied by the encoded text,‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks’(Elliott and Duncan, 2009). Appearing near the lowest depths of the global financial crisis, this headline from The Times provided an implicit commentary on the fragility of the world banking system and the inability of central banks to do anything about it. Bitcoin’s anonymous creators symbolically hardcoded this message into the ‘genesis block’of their main innovation, the …