Photograph Source: Edwin.images – CC BY-SA 4.0

We’ve all heard the line: ‘How many times have you heard someone say, if I had his money I’d do things my way?’ But that was the lie—reiterated later in Rich Man by Vampire Weekend—wasn’t it? As the original song A Satisfied Man goes—Joe ‘Red’ Hayes and Jack Rhodes wrote it but Tim Hardin sang it best—‘It’s so hard to find one rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.’

Macabrely, it only came to mind when a friend messaged me last week about the latest trend in crypto crime: violent, real-world attacks. Kidnappings. Pistol-whippings. In two instances, fingers literally severed. Jameson Lopp, a cyber-libertarian with a freedom-fighter beard and a GitHub account, has now catalogued 22 such ‘$5 wrench attacks’ this year. Why bother with sophisticated hacks when simple brute force works? As fortunes move offline—cold wallets, hidden vaults, paper keys—the violence simply adapts. Taking your assets off-grid doesn’t take you off the map. It just makes the extraction more medieval.

It wasn’t always so. (Or perhaps it was.) I recall a dim, low-ceilinged hall near London Bridge, some eleven years ago. A pokerfaced crypto meet-up. Barely a woman in sight. Geeks crippled with shyness. Hoodies and hush. City lads dashing in like accountants late to an orgy. Everyone giddy with the same idea: money without middlemen. Digital sovereignty. Revolution. Crypto in a crypt, really. I asked myself: was there a film in this?

If action is character, as they say about film, there wasn’t any. It’s never enough just to film people making money, though the dream was exciting enough: death to the banks, birth of the blockchain. The reality? PowerPoint decks, nervous coughs, and that lit-up look of early-adopter greed. They whispered of freedom but watched the charts. Hopeful. Hungry. Hooked on the number going up. Same old, same old.

I’d been invited........

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