Bitcoin has a media problem. Or, perhaps, the media has a Bitcoin problem.
Mainstream media has often framed Bitcoin with the same scandalous curiosity that may publicize a troubled former child star or a controversial tech startup. Most journalists have viewed it as a sideshow, a distraction that warrants only so much attention lest it detract from the supreme spectacle of the 21st century’s historic advancements in technology, business and finance. By some combination of apathy, lack of curiosity and ignorance, Bitcoin is often misrepresented or represented poorly in mainstream news outlets.
Let’s cut these career journalists some slack. After all, a traditional finance reporter may be daunted by this new and confusing world of decentralized digital currency. And fluent as they may be with the ever-evolving world, seasoned technology reporters may nonetheless view Bitcoin as a leviathan of the technically arcane.
Bitcoin is indeed a complex esoterica. So it’s little wonder that just four years after its creation (when Bitcoin was beginning to formally enter the international conscience), Vitalik Buterin opined in the seventh print volume of Bitcoin Magazine that “a significant amount of disinformation about Bitcoin continues to float around the internet.”
Read Vitalik Buterin’s “Common Misconceptions About Bitcoin — A Guide for Journalists.”[1]
In an article called “Common Misconceptions About Bitcoin — A Guide for Journalists,” Buterin listed five prevalent misconceptions and attempted to set the record straight.
“Whether a given story is unfairly biased against Bitcoin, or even unfairly biased in its favor, it is important to work together to make sure that the truth always comes out — in the first case, not to needlessly scare potential Bitcoin adopters away, and in the second case, not to disappoint,” he wrote.
When writing for the February 2013 print issue, Buterin admitted that things
