“The face of bitcoin” — that’s how one recent article described James Altucher, the self-proclaimed “crypto genius” behind those online advertisements that seem to have stalked you since the first time you typed “Bitcoin” into Google.

Bitcoin, when it first hit the presses in its own white paper, was heralded as this peer-to-peer cashless system that could revolutionize the financial world and break the shackles of banking hegemony.