At the end of 2013 I wrote a post titled “Bitcoin is evil,” riffing off Charlie Stross’s “Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire.” Charlie and I both keyed in on the obvious ideological agenda: Bitcoin fever was and is intimately tied up with libertarian anti-government fantasies.

So how’s it going? Bitcoin prices are down by two-thirds from their peak, and Izabella Kaminska, who has stayed with the subject, finds the sad story of a gullible rube who appears to have impoverished himself by believing in the hype. She comments:

Some extremely wealthy libertarians have a lot to answer for if these sorts of ppl lose all due to believing in them

But this is nothing new. Back in 2012 Rick Perlstein published an eye-opening piece titled The Long Con, in which he documented the close association that has always existed between right-wing organizing and direct-mail commercial scams — in fact, it’s pretty much impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Send us money to keep Obama from imposing Sharia law; invest in this sure-fire scheme to profit from the coming hyperinflation. Was Glenn Beck selling paranoid politics or Goldline? Yes.

Bitcoin may be sold as a technical marvel, and it does indeed solve an interesting information problem — although it’s not at all clear whether solving that problem has any economic value. But the psychology and sociology of the phenomenon are the same old same old.