Matt Levine

These are all delightful worries. There is, however, another future of investing: Bitcoin. Not Bitcoin really—Bitcoin is maybe the December 2017 of investing—but it’s suggestive that an utter speculative mania for cryptocurrency grew up in parallel to the boring, automated, set-it-and-forget-it rise of indexing and robo-advising. And there’s the rise of legal sports gambling and daily fantasy sports.

The Fed hasn’t yet said why it denied TNB an account. But you can see how that business model—and that sort of competition—might worry a central bank. The point of a banking system is not to be as safe as possible—or not just that, anyway. The point of banking is to mobilize capital, to pool society’s wealth so it can be invested in productive endeavors. “The money’s not here,” says George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, film’s most famous depiction of banking.

Speculation mounted that a major holder of cryptocurrency with an electronic wallet that dated back to 2011 -- long before anyone had heard of HODL -- was moving to sell. His or her wallet had once had as many as 111,114 Bitcoins, which at their peak would have been worth about $2 billion. The rumors that began two weeks ago were that this whale -- as big holders are known -- was looking to cash out after this year’s plunge in prices.