Whenever you think the bitcoin story can’t get any stranger, it does.

A wretched few months for the currency culminated yesterday in the apparent revelation of the true identity online currency’s creator, followed by strong denials, culminating in a bizarre car chase as a media scrum pursued a 64-year-old man across the streets of California.

It’s only the latest in a string of misfortunes to strike bitcoin – the first of a generation of crypto-currencies: digital coinage not backed by any government or institution.

First the main marketplace for actually spending bitcoins, the Silk Road – essentially an eBay for drugs – is shut down by US authorities. In the following weeks, several similar sites were hacked or shut down.

Then disaster begins to strike bitcoin itself: a string of the largest exchanges (where bitcoin can be converted to real-world currency) are hacked, and several shut down. Some of the survivors face investigation over money laundering. The currency’s value is well down from its highs.

Just as bitcoin was reaching acceptability, attracting investment from major Silicon Valley players, and talk of “legitimate” services, the currency is back in crisis. Lots of fixes are being discussed, but almost never sensibly.

The biggest hurdle facing those trying to rebuild bitcoin is a clear but rarely acknowledged truth: the coalition of bitcoin supporters is fraying. There are multiple visions of what the currency is for, and they’re mutually incompatible – and each calls for something different to happen next.

The most ambitious and idealistic vision for bitcoin is the one that seems to have been shared by its earliest supporters: a libertarian currency beyond the reach of government or regulators. The supply of bitcoin is fixed, meaning no government could ever tinker with it – preventing the monetary policies which so influence the dollar, euro, and every other global currency.

Similarly, the anonymous nature of bitcoin made it perfect for those wary of government interference, whether people simply hoping to buy some MDMA for the weekend, launder cash, avoid an oppressive regime, or just prove government isn’t a political necessity.

To these initial true believers (or ne’er-do-wells, depending on your point of view), to make bitcoin respectable by falling in with regulators and government is to undermine the point of the currency. Here, the solution has to reside in technology: more secure wallets, clever tricks to make institutions trustworthy, and more. But for others, the case isn’t so clear.

Perhaps the most cynical view of bitcoin is as a get-rich-quick scheme: the latest in a long line of Ponzi schemes or commodity bubbles – a 21st-century version of the Dutch tulip mania.

Such a view isn’t entirely baseless: while currencies vary in relative value, rapid changes are generally a very bad thing – and bitcoin in a few short years has fluctuated from being worth less than $1 to more than $1,000. Perhaps more surprising still, more than half of the total holdings of bitcoins lie in the hands of fewer than 1,000 accounts. The top 1% is alive and well in the brave new world.

For such people, the substantive future of bitcoin hardly matters. All that’s important is making sure enough suckers think they’re worth a fortune until you sell.

There’s a more subtly opportunistic play taking place with bitcoin, though, and this is where the big-name and respectable players are: people trying to use the currency as a Trojan horse to fight the existing banking sector.

There’s nothing Silicon Valley likes doing more than “disrupting” existing industries, whether that’s AirBnb taking on hotels or Uber going head-to-head across the world with taxi firms. But in practice, such efforts revolve at least as much around finding ways to circumvent (or simply ignore) existing laws and regulations as huge technical innovation: build a tech, roll it out, discover it breaks existing law, then blame the council/city/government for holding back the progression of history.

Bitcoin is a handy way to extend this kind of “disruption” to banking. Services aiming to reduce the cost of sending money overseas more cheaply, for example, don’t need bitcoin at all. But saying your service is based on it gives you a chance to ride the hype machine – and perhaps even to turn a blind eye to some cumbersome and costly anti-money-laundering policies. And that saves a buck or two.

It’s this camp that’s got the most to gain by making bitcoin respectable, and bringing regulators in a little – but not too much. Almost no services in this area tally whatsoever with the potential (for good or evil) of a stateless currency – here the stakes are more around quicker, easier, cheaper ways to move money around. All potentially to the good, but hardly revolutionary.

No sensible conversation about saving or sinking bitcoin, then, can take place until people have the tricky one they’re skirting: what, exactly, do we want it to be?

Whatever bitcoin really is, and whatever the right answers are for what should happen next, one thing’s for sure: chasing a Japanese man in a Prius isn’t going to tell anyone anything.

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