Cryptocurrency
Bearer digital assets on a shared ledger, with no issuer and no recourse.
The invention
The problem. Making a digital payment without a trusted intermediary — considered unsolved for decades.
A pseudonymous paper published weeks after Lehman's collapse proposed a chain of proof-of-work blocks to prevent double-spending without a central party. The genesis block contains a headline about bank bailouts, which makes the intent explicit. Whether the intent survived contact with the market is a separate question.
Box
1779–80 · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0
Where it has failed
Not a list of disasters. A pattern library.
- 2014Tokyo
Mt. Gox
The dominant exchange lost roughly 850,000 bitcoin and collapsed.
An asset with no counterparty risk, held at a custodian, has counterparty risk. The property is in the protocol, not in your account.
- 2022Global
Terra and FTX
An algorithmic stablecoin lost its peg and erased roughly $40bn in days; a major exchange failed months later with customer funds missing.
The failure modes were bank runs and misappropriation — the oldest ones in the book, in new packaging.
Where it stands today
You now have the shape. Here is the reading.
Live from public data, pulled at request time. Read it with the failures above in mind — not because a repeat is due, but because knowing the mechanism is what lets you recognise one early.
Bitcoin
CoinGecko
65,126.43
Jul 27 · −45.5% y/y
In your ledger
Volatile enough that a position materially changes household runway — which is why this app models it as a change in runway rather than in spendable cash.
See it in the demoKeep reading