Bitcoin has spent years being defined by people who didn’t really understand it.

Mainstream coverage focused on crime, scams, energy use and volatility.

That is how many people came to understand Bitcoin, including the politicians and policymakers now being asked to regulate it.

I don’t necessarily blame journalists. Bitcoin is complicated, newsrooms are under huge pressure, and once bad information is out there it gets repeated incredibly quickly.

That’s what I’m trying to undo through my journalism and through @Bitcoin Policy UK, because Brandolini’s Law is painfully real. It takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute bad information than it does to create it in the first place.

I spoke to CK about Bitcoin’s perception problem, what policymakers understand about it, and what happens when years of bad information begin feeding into policy.