One Saturday morning, a few months back, I caught a bus to a showcase of the future. Alighting at London’s Russell Square, I walked through an internal courtyard that locked out the September sunshine, into a drab hotel. Picking their way through tourists with improbably large suitcases were entrepreneurs, programmers, crypto-anarchists and anti-statists – 99 per cent male. Event organizer Amir Taaki billed them as ‘explorers of a new world’.
The event in question was a conference about Bitcoin, a digital currency that allows you to spend cash on the internet, anonymously. But its complicated software has far more interesting possibilities, including the potential to create a peer-to-peer money market that precludes banks.
