Preventing such a precipitous loss of value was one of the primary goals of Bitreserve, the startup launched by Halsey Minor in late 2013. Unlike most of the community, the founder of CNET wanted to emphasize Bitcoin’s use as a mode of transmission rather than a store of value, which immediately put him at philosophical odds with purists and crypto-anarchists.

Bitreserve’s product strategy was to mimic the function of a Bitcoin wallet, while actually storing your coins’ value in your preferred fiat currency. Sending Bitcoin to a Bitreserve wallet would instantly peg it against, say, the US Dollar price at the time of transmission.