The NYT claims are inaccurate and misleading, but even saying so misses the larger point: Bitcoin is a revolutionary monetary invention that disproportionately benefits the global south, the oppressed, the marginalized, the unbanked, the billions of people living under authoritarian regimes, people who dare speak truth to power in a world in which individual privacy and political freedom are more difficult to defend than they have ever been. In this new world of *digital* government currencies, the activist, the refugee, the dissident, and the freedom advocate are easily severed from financial services and quietly neutralized. Bitcoin empowers the disenfranchised against those who would have them silenced. The printing press wasn’t well received by the halls of power either, for similar reasons. It’s ironic that now the printed press is complicit in a campaign to impugn. The environmental claims are misleading and even false, but environmentalism wasn’t the motivation for the article anyway. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you — and we are entering the thick of it.