Revan

“The U.S. government stepped in during economic crises all the time. Less than five years earlier, the United States had used billions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street banks during the 2008 financial crisis. During the Great Depression the government had prohibited U.S. citizens from owning gold: in 1933, President Roosevelt had signed executive order 6102, requiring citizens to turn in their gold for cash. It wasn’t until 1975, when President Ford repealed this order, that it was again legal for Americans to own gold that wasn’t jewelry or coins. And all bank deposits were only insured to the tune of $250,000. “More than twenty thousand account holders at Laika, the second largest bank in Cyprus, are going to have half of their savings taken away,”
― Ben Mezrich, Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption

“He could geek out about cryptography and decentralization with them and make nerdy math jokes and they would get the punch line.”
― Camila Russo, The Infinite Machine

“Which left only rhodium, palladium, platinum, silver, and gold—five of the eight noble metals. Rhodium and palladium wouldn’t be discovered until the 1880s, well after money had been in use for thousands of years; and platinum’s melting point would have been too high for preindustrial furnaces. By process of elimination you were left with silver and gold. Silver tarnished easily and had a much greater industrial application—too useful to make good money—leaving gold just useful enough. “Gold is valuable because of its naturally occurring properties: it’s scarce, durable, portable, divisible, fungible, hard to counterfeit, and easy to authenticate,” Tyler said. “Exactly,” Voorhees responded, “and bitcoin has all of those properties too—”
― Ben Mezrich, Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption

“Libertarians or individualists believed people should be free to do whatever they wanted with their money. But in reality, people had never been free to do whatever they wanted with their money. There were laws, regulations, criminal statutes.”
― Ben Mezrich, Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption