I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly.

While the traditional web-based architectures that have predominated in the first decades of the 21st century are built upon pre-existing societal and economic structures, cryptocurrencies and the blockchain represent an entirely new ecosystem of human transaction.