What the Hell Is Going On With Bitcoin?

As Dan Gross wrote in his book Pop!, the soapsuds of burst bubbles often fertilize the next generation’s breakthrough technologies. Before the national telegraph, train system, and tech giants, there was a telegraph bubble, a train bubble, and (who could forget?) a dot-com and online-retail bubble. The blockchain, like each of those technologies, has the potential to become a critical piece of infrastructure for the digital economy, even if the price of bitcoin is crashing as you read this paragraph.