On the Bitcoin community’s last day of referring to themselves as “the Bitcoin community,” the hottest topic was the new altcoin that Coinbase had released. In retrospect, the company blog undersold the coin a bit.

Again, Occam's Razor tells me that all the above is equally possible and simpler by virtue of a couple rounds of golf with the Winklevoss twins, and a few other influencers pre-gaming the hearing, plus the China spike being fortuitous in inducing a bit of "are we being left behind? Is the terrorism excuse worth giving this to China?" fear, even among senators that didn't really understand dick about it. They don't understand a lot, but they know increasingly powerful things are popping out of China. And if they're into it, then by god...

Fortunately for America, politicians don’t have much of a say in which currencies people use for trade. Markets do. Those markets had seen the relative stability of the dollar over decades as well as the stockpiles in banks around the world, and time and time again, they came to the conclusion that dollars were still the easiest way to trade. Still, the Treasury Department has always been wary that, in the same way we switched from barter to trading shiny things and from shiny things to paper, we’d one day move to something else.