In June 2013, the police raided a squatted former police station in Soho, London, arresting 57 activists who had turned the premises into an anti-G8 headquarters. A “Carnival Against Capitalism” was being held in central London as the Group of Eight leaders met in Northern Ireland to discuss international trade, global action on tax avoidance, and the Syrian civil war. Inside the occupied Soho address, a group of idealistic computer programmers plotted the downfall of the world’s financial system. Their plans centred around Bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency, developed five years earlier, could be stored and spent anonymously, and could be minted without interference from the watchful eyes of government. When the anti-G8 Bitcoin squat was raided, 1 Bitcoin (BTC) was worth around $100. Today 1 BTC is worth around $57,000 – an increase of 57,900 per cent. In February this year, Bitcoin hit a market capitalisation of $1trn after a 296 per cent rally in 2020. A report released last month by Citigroup conceded that “large swathes of the traditional banking and financial markets view Bitcoin as a completely valueless asset”, and quoted the economist Nouriel Roubini as saying “the Flintstones had a better monetary system”.
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