Is the financial establishment coming round to bitcoin?

TWELVE YEARS ago, on January 3rd 2009, a headline on the front page of the Times read: “Chancellor on brink of second bail-out for banks”—a reference to the British government’s efforts to save the country’s financial system from collapse. When Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of bitcoin, created the first 50 coins, now called the “genesis block”, he permanently embedded the date and that headline into the data. The hidden text was a digital battle cry. Mr Nakamoto had decided it was time for something new: a decentralised cryptocurrency, free from the control of governments and central banks.