How Money Got Free Bitcoin and the Fight for the Future of Finance

After ignoring it for the first few years of its existence, major investors-venture-capital firms, Goldman Sachs, the New York Stock Exchange, and billionaires like Richard Branson and Peter Thiel-have now decided to risk more than 1 billion of investment capital on digital-currency businesses. How did an invention that, a few years ago, wasn't taken seriously by anyone, come to be praised by Bill Gates as ""better than currency""?Bitcoin was founded on a renegade ideology by a bunch of outlaws: cryptographers, hackers, Free Staters, ex-cons and drug dealers, teenage futurists and entrepreneur.