My city elders don’t trust Bitcoin

I was not on 6ABC’s Sunday-morning Inside Story panel last week. I watched it the way a man watches his own dinner party from the sidewalk, nose pressed to the glass, listening to the conversation happen without him. The topic was Bitcoin. The verdict from last week’s panelists, delivered with easy confidence, was that Bitcoin is fraudulent, criminal-adjacent, unproven, mysterious, not climate friendly, will be worthless, and is not practical for the average public.

I have sat in that chair as a panelist for over two decades, and I know exactly the tone in which it was said. It is not a foolish tone because it belongs to people who are, in all respects, quite accomplished, intelligent and influential. But it is the familiar tone of my city that instinctively treats anything unfamiliar, anything that arrives without a pedigree, as guilty until it proves itself or is allowed to be interesting. And it sent me back, in memory, to the first time I ever stood inside a bank lobby and understood, without anyone telling me, that I was standing inside a kind of church.

The cathedral I grew up believing in

I was fourteen years old in 1984 when I first walked into a PSFS bank. What struck me was not the architecture, though the marble floors and cathedral ceilings were their own quiet argument. What struck me was the ceremony: the formal queue, the ledger-bound teller, the solemn ritual of a deposit slip handled as though it were an offering laid on an altar. Money, I understood immediately, had its priests. And like every priestly class in history, the bankers had, over time, confused their role as intermediary for something closer to divine appointment.