Cypherpunks once saw the crypto-currency as a victory for freedom and decentralization. Instead, bitcoin has become a playground for the already powerful, creating new forms of control. It was 1992. Every day, from his home in Oakland, California, Eric Hughes waded through a stream of emails from “The List,” an electronic mailing list he had helped set up to bring together a small group of fellow travellers. Hughes was a mathematician, and on The List were academics, computer