“Google, Microsoft and Wal-Mart can all eat flaming death as far as I’m concerned … where systems like bitcoin can be helpful is in making both government and big business irrelevant and obsolete.”

What remains is nostalgia for the recent past, when the takedown of the powers that be seemed possible. On the same 2010 thread, another cypherpunk added: “Bring it on. Let’s encourage WikiLeaks to use Bitcoins.”

But it didn’t happen. Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious, pseudonymous, probably not Japanese but possibly British, perhaps even multiple bitcoin inventor, nixed the idea: “No, don’t ‘bring it on’ … I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy … the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

That failure is not just down to bitcoin’s enemies, but also internal problems. Power over the bitcoin network has concentrated in the hands of those few whose computer power and maths skills are sufficient to mine for bitcoin (mining involves using costly software to solve maths problems and miners help keep the bitcoin network secure by approving transactions).

Just as the Sex Pistols got co-opted by the business they postured as seeking to destroy, and just as the vision of a decentralised, uncensored, free internet foundered with its commercialisation, so bitcoin has been taken over by those whom economist Nouriel Roubini calls “charlatans and swindlers”.

What’s worth salvaging is not so much bitcoin, but Nakamoto’s vision for it. Like FBI agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files only more so, Nakamoto trusts no one and that philosophy has underpinned his/her/their invention. In bitcoin, cryptographic proof replaces the uncertain trust of humans in institutions.

The tricky notion of the blockchain is key to that: what it amounts to is that verified but unconfirmed transactions are aggregated into a block that is spread across the network of users and added to a stack of other blocks. This blockchain is held, at least in theory, by every user, in a “distributed ledger” that removes the need for a central third-party authority.

The purpose of this little book is to explain how the blockchain works and why it still inspires. It consists of Nakamoto’s breakthrough 2008 paper bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, a guide to it by blockchain aficionado Jaya Klara Brekke, along with appendices, an introduction by James Bridle and informative essays paralleling bitcoin with the cryptographic work at Bletchley Park that helped the Allies defeat the Nazis.

“I want to make your eyes shine in bright-eyed wonder as you reread the bitcoin white paper, just as mine did,” Brekke writes. That’s the peril and pleasure of the book: her guide mixes the off-putting ardour of a doorstep God botherer with excitement over the elegance and unrealised potential of Nakamoto’s idea.

Bitcoin may be in the recycling bin of radical initiatives, and Nakamoto unheard of since 2014, but the blockchain idea of a self-sustaining framework for the development of consensus is still worth developing – and not just to change how we spend. In our serially disappointed age, the blockchain suggests a way better than mere cynicism about state and privacy-violating corporations, albeit one that doesn’t seem ready to take over the world any time soon.