Getting down with the cool kids on bitcoin

EVERY TUESDAY for most of 1979-80, the Blitz wine bar in Covent Garden was host to an influential club-night. London was then a run-down city. The Blitz was a seedy spot. What made it remarkable were the Blitz Kids, the extravagantly dressed Tuesday-night regulars. A teenage Boy George worked in the cloakroom. The door policy was strict. To get in, said Steve Strange, who ran the club-night, you had to look “like a walking piece of art”. Mick Jagger was once refused entry.

This all seemed shallow and transient. The make-up, the get-ups and the evident disdain for people who were not walking pieces of art were marks of unseriousness. Yet the Blitz Kids, a mix of art students and urchins, would go on to shape popular culture, according to “Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics”, a new book by Dylan Jones. This brings us to another hangout for oddballs, fantasists and drop-outs: bitcoin. To most people it seems at best a fad, at worst a con-job. But it refuses to disappear. And its price in dollars is up by around 150% since March.