-Warning: contains TV spoilers-

The value of Bitcoin hit its long-awaited milestone of US$100,000 ($156,000) on Thursday December 5.

That was also the day that the 9th episode of TV series, The Day of the Jackal was released, in which the Jackal actually kills the fictitious tech billionaire Ulle Dag Charles, known as UDC.

The irony in the coincidence of these two events is beautiful.

The Jackal is paid $100 million by other rich people to kill UDC because he had written software that would expose all their financial secrets.

Bitcoin is the token attached to a peer-to-peer electronic cash system designed not so much to expose the secrets of the world’s rich, but to make permanent, public records of their transactions and cut out financial institutions.

The software was, and remains, subversive – designed during the Global Financial Crisis and published in October 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Maybe he feared getting bumped off by an assassin, but for whatever reason Nakamoto has never surfaced and may not even exist. But anyway, the world’s rich elite didn’t need to kill him – they made his creation their tool instead.

So much so, that the proximate reason Bitcoin’s price went to US$100,000 was that having donated $135 million to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, the crypto industry persuaded him to appoint hedge fund manager, crypto fan and deregulator Paul Atkins as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Outgoing SEC head, Gary Gensler, launched dozens of lawsuits against crypto exchanges, declaring that cryptocurrencies are securities and must be regulated as such.

Trump’s pick as Treasury secretary, another hedge fund manager, and billionaire, Scott Bessent, is also crypto fan.

The two men charged with making the government more efficient, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are big bitcoiners.

Musk’s Tesla has US$1 billion worth of Bitcoin on its balance sheet and Ramaswamy’s Strive Asset Management has announced that it will start “integrating Bitcoin into standard portfolios of everyday Americans”.

And finally, the standwithcrypto.org website has worked out that 298 pro crypto candidates have been elected to US Congress, versus 134 who are anti crypto.

Do all these plutocrats understand what they are promoting? Have they read Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper describing a system for “two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party” (ie a bank)? Unlikely.

What they know is that crypto caught regulators napping like Uber and Airbnb so, as Gary Gensler says, it’s the unregulated wild west, and there’s nothing like a frontier for making money through scams and tax evasion.

And they know it’s a public gambling chip that keeps going up in price because the supply is fixed, causing mass FOMO (fear of missing out).

But the weird thing is that the purpose of bitcoin and most cryptos is like the mission of Ulle Dag Charles, the Jackal’s unfortunate target – that is to democratise finance and bring down the rich.

Bitcoin is a self-perpetuating decentralised ecosystem not controlled by anyone in which developers contribute to the code for free, while miners validate transactions and secure the network and turn electricity into bitcoins to get paid.

The Bitcoin Foundation is a non-profit organisation established in 2012 to support and promote it, but it doesn’t control the protocols, blockchain or the mining process, which are set and can’t be changed.

The system is incredibly sophisticated, but no more so than many other cryptos – it just has first mover advantage, big time.

For example, TRON, the crypto invented by Justin Sun – the bloke who bought the banana taped to a wall for US$6.2 million ($9.4 million) worth of TRON tokens a couple of weeks ago – is (according to its website) “dedicated to accelerating the decentralsation of the Internet via blockchain technology and decentralised applications”.

Nearly all the cryptos have similar high-minded purposes to do with decentralisation and disintermediation using peer-to-peer blockchains and smart contracts to empower ordinary people. Most are run by not-for-profit foundations and staffed by idealists, if not actual socialists.

They just happen to also have tokens attached to them that people are playing pass the parcel with.

And it is no coincidence that crypto is booming in parallel with artificial intelligence on the stockmarket: AI is the other way in which people are betting on a distant future they can’t predict, but are excited about.

With both crypto and AI there is a “model shift” taking place in thinking about the economic foundations of money and work.

A lot of people – including me – believe that we are in the early stages of a fundamental change to the way those things – and society as a whole – operates.

But for crypto tokens to be worth what people are paying for them, a lot of financial institutions must go out of business.

And for the bubbling AI stocks – and therefore the sharemarket as a whole – to be worth what people are paying for them, a lot of working people have to lose their jobs.

There might be enough in extra productivity from AI being used alongside humans, but I doubt it. Certainly, the profits needed to justify current share prices won’t come from fancier search engines that answer questions instead of linking us to websites.

Are the 19,790,000 bitcoins that have been mined so far worth US$2 trillion? Is AI leader Nvidia worth US$3.55 trillion?

I have no idea; no one knows. That’s the thing about both crypto and AI – you can’t value them in that normal way based on forecasts for the next few years, it’s a much longer game than that. Or rather, you can if you want, and therefore don’t touch them.

Something similar was happening in the 1990s when everyone thought it was different that time, and that didn’t go well.

But then it did go well, and the internet did actually work and tech businesses that survived the 2000 crash made heaps of money, and still do.

Oh, and the other reason Bitcoin is $100k is that it’s divided into 100 million pieces called satoshis; there is no other asset in existence divided into so many tiny, very cheap, bite-sized pieces.

So you don’t have to sell your house to invest in a bitcoin – you just buy a few million satoshis.

But if we just quoted the price of satoshis – 0.1c – instead of bitcoins, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as exciting, or newsworthy.

Alan Kohler writes weekly for The New Daily. He also writes for Intelligent Investor, and presents finance reports on ABC News.