While inflation careened out of control throughout last year, the financial class celebrated the precipitous decline of bitcoin’s price. Those wacky libertarians who had replaced their dreams of abolishing the Federal Reserve with creating a viable alternate currency to bypass the inflationary tendencies of the federal government altogether were lumped in with the celebrities sued for advertising the scam of FTX and the dummies who lost their savings on stablecoins such as terraUSD.

But contrary to the hopes of the financial establishment, crypto isn’t a monolith. And while other digital currencies have died for good, bitcoin is bouncing back, not as a hedge against inflation itself, but rather against the credit of the U.S. government.