If things are feeling a bit gloomy at the moment, and you think you might benefit from a hit of weapons-grade optimism, I would urge you to spend some time online among the world’s cryptocurrency believers.

To be clear, this is not something I do regularly. In fact, I try to avoid the crypto coven as hard as I can to escape flashbacks to the time I bought a small amount of bitcoin at the what turned out to be the bubbliest top of the bubble, and then spent the next few months watching it slowly deflate, before I capitulated and sold everything about eight minutes before it started its next meteoric climb.

I am, however, not bitter. As someone who knows nothing about how any of this stuff works — I still think that “blockchain” is something that requires a plumber — I consider cryptocurrencies to be nothing more than a digital roulette wheel, where the only thing that decides whether you get rich or poor is the bounce of the ball and the tech billionaires who have their foot on a brake pedal hidden under the table...