Crypto Rebels Trip Over Each Other en Route to Financial Utopia
Ashleigh Schap’s quest for a digital ideal illuminates a generation’s aversion to mainstream banking and the regulatory establishment.
For Ashleigh Schap, the 2008 Great Recession was more an ideological awakening than an economic crisis. Her hometown of Houston escaped the worst of the maelstrom that ravaged large parts of the U.S., her parents kept their jobs, and the house she was living in retained most of its value. She had little reason to imagine the wheels would come off America’s capitalist machine.
Yet the events of that year left a lasting impression on the teenager. The financial crisis and its aftershocks, which she read about on blogs and discussed with her classmates, made her realize that good times don’t last forever. More important to what she would do later in life, she says they left her with a distaste for a lopsided financial system that benefits and protects those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom.