In recounting her experience of being asked the ‘Bitcoin Question’, Lana Swartz reveals that her response to friends and family enquiring about the risks of getting in on the cryptocurrency game is to ask what they want to achieve through their acquisition. Simply put: what are all the Bitcoins for? The typical answers to Swartz's provocation are both achingly dull and easily anticipated. People have heard of others making decent returns by speculating on Bitcoin rallies and want to get in on the action. In other words, the primary motivation of those who want to acquire Bitcoins is to use them to acquire more Bitcoins, which at some point in the future will have risen to a price deemed high enough to ‘cash out’ via a fiat currency of choice. At the exit point of sale, after all, nobody imagines selling their Bitcoins for more Bitcoins.

The more imaginative would-be speculators answer in ways that reveal a growing sense of existential threat. As political, social and economic institutions lurch from one catastrophe to the next, at least they are providing a distraction from the impending world-ending breakdown of the climate. In short, if Bitcoin is to be the only non-institutionalized global currency within a matter of decades, doesn't it make sense to start hoarding them now?

In both responses, we can see the same instincts that drive people to save money. A desire to have more of it stored up against an uncertain future makes a good deal of sense from one point of view. But what is missing in the answers to Swartz's Bitcoin Question, and what we have been arguing for throughout this book, is any meaningful sense of the purpose of Bitcoin. As with mainstream finance, so much of the debate focuses upon the technical and functional possibilities of Bitcoin that we have failed sufficiently to pause and to reflect on what the advocates and users of Bitcoin are trying to achieve.

As we saw in Chapter Five, there is a reading of Bitcoin that would promote it – and the entire cryptocurrency and cryptoasset markets made possible by variations of DLTs – as the way out of the current interregnum and towards a more democratic future.