My first in-person encounter with the cryptocurrency world was at Progressbar, a hackerspace in Bratislava, on a freezing winter weekend in early 2014. I’d traveled from New York to write a profile of Mike Gogulski, an ex-Floridian ex-raver who’d become stateless by choice and started a life on the margins of Slovak society with his then wife, a cat, and dozens of personal computers. Progressbar was where Mike hung out with other hacker types. They spent a lot of time thinking and talking about cryptocurrencies; there was even a local Bitcoin ATM – at the time a real novelty.

Mike was the only one to have changed his life so radically. Nobody I met there seemed to think it was a wise move on Mike’s part to renounce his US citizenship. Still, they respected the ideas behind his decision. Those ideas, Mike explained over whiskey and bong hits, were political: as an anarchist, he wanted no part in the business of citizenship, or states, or nations. ‘Citizenship is a tool of class division, a tool of hierarchy, an instrument of social control,’ he said. ‘There is no equality between citizens and non-citizens.’

A stateless currency represented an extension of that ideal. Mike supported himself by operating a Bitcoin ‘mixing’ service – essentially, a way to add a layer of anonymity to cryptocurrency – while working as a translator on the side. He wrote a blog, nostate.org, and dabbled in commerce on the dark web.

My trip only lasted a few days, but it was enough to get a feel for the (admittedly modest) Bratislava crypto scene. It was also, in retrospect, a critical moment for digital currency – not just its market value, which began fluctuating wildly, but for what it represented beyond the screens.

Because if Bitcoin and its sister cryptocurrencies once attracted the likes of Mike Gogulski, who saw in it the contours of life outside the mainstream, it has since transformed its public face. Critics contend that cryptocurrencies neither produce nor represent anything of value, and that any value ascribed to them is nothing more than a speculative bubble. But the currency has also been absorbed into the architecture of the global economy – roughly 30 percent of traditional hedge funds now invest in crypto assets. It has gone from obscure to overexposed. Progressbar is still around. It has pivoted to coworking.