Muhuhahaha ( evil laugh ), and my parents thought I was crazy when I told them there was a new digital currency you kept in files, that had no inflation, was (almost) completely anonymous, and - get this - that it was real and traded on actual markets. When I started talking about Bitcoin mining, that was when they seriously thought I was going off the deep end. And really, most non-tech-savvy people would think the…
ideology behind the currency is fascinating and remarkable I'm going to take the liberty to nit pick. There isn't any ideology behind bitcoin. It's just a protocol. Among existing serious bitcoin users, there's a pretty diverse range of political opinions (some of which I find pretty distasteful), plus disagreement on the actual merits and potential demerits of bitcoin.
I disagree. It was motivated by particular strains of cryptopunk thought, has features designed specifically for long-desired applications like multi-signing or a built-in programming language for stuff like Szabo's smart contracts, the original Satoshi whitepaper was explicit about goals, and multiple design choices were made for non-technical reasons (such as a hardwired limit to coin issuance). Finally, in the very first block in the official blockchain, Satoshi included a newspaper quote about bank bailouts! Not the most neutral non-ideologically-charged topic in the world, let us say.
Certainly serious Bitcoin users have a wide range of views, but to say 'there isn't any ideology behind Bitcoin' is to just plain ignore everything about its conception.