A Satisfied Mind (Terms and Conditions Apply)

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 Mind 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 by American couple Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert. They were running a successful TV show in London, two in fact, at the time. Max Keiser—an electric, loud, economic evangelist—had just profiled the doctor-bolstered documentary I was making about corporate interference in the NHS. Fast-forward over a decade: he and Stacy Herbert now successfully advise El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele on cryptocurrency.

It was of course Bukele who recently turned up at the White House refusing to extradite a man whisked into one of his mega-prisons without due process—the victim’s tattoos already digitally edited in the US to suggest gang affiliation. Last week, presumably separate from that, Max Keiser was issuing dire warnings about the bond market ‘ushering in Depression 2.0’ and predicting Bitcoin would hit $2.2 million. Not a misprint. Two-point-two. Million. Per coin. It is presently just over $100,000, his initial once poo-poohed prediction.

At the same time, the New York Post was turning on MAGA-lorian Trump, accusing his family of Biden-style influence-peddling, only this time via crypto. The focus: a Chinese e-commerce shell called GD Culture Group. Eight employees, no revenue, all vibes. They announced plans to purchase $300 million of his $TRUMP memecoin. This was while Trump still dithers over whether to ban TikTok—a platform GD Culture relies on. In fact, 40 per cent of the president’s entire net worth today is said to be from 2 crypto coins, the other being World Liberty Financial, which received a recent $2 billion investment from the UAE. He was also last Thursday giving a gala dinner, including a 23-minute speech, for the top 220 holders of his $Trump memecoin, some flying in from overseas, before disappearing in a helicopter without staying for the meal. Even the Genius Act, which legitimates stablecoins, advanced in the Senate last week.

And what of China? ‘The least understood but most important to understand nation,’ as Cindy Yu wrote in The Times last week. Though we do know China wants to own the future through AI dominance, it has since 2021 kept a tight ban on cryptocurrency trading and mining. There has been talk of a reverse—Hong Kong is crypto-savvy—but most experts remain unconvinced. They point to how slow and regulated it would be.

And while all this plays out, crypto investor John Woeltz, known as the crypto king of Kentucky, is done for kidnapping and torturing Italian tourist Michael Carturan by allegedly dangling him from the fifth floor of a Manhattan townhouse, trying to get his Bitcoin password. A man in New Zealand is arrested for helping run a global crypto ring that made off with $265 million. Here in London, only last year, Jian Wen, a former takeaway worker, was convicted of laundering £2 billion ($2.69 billion) in Bitcoin. That’s billion, with a B. She’d already begun converting it into jewellery and property until the Metropolitan Police stepped in, dryly announcing the UK’s largest-ever crypto seizure.

Still looming over all this of course is the one and only figure a subpoena or writ could never touch: Satoshi Nakamoto, though most observers are bored with this story. The name. The myth. The ghost in the machine. A man? A woman? A group? ‘Satoshi’ famously posted the white paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in 2008—four months later, ‘he’ launched the first ever crypto message board. The P2P Foundation profile listed Japan as home, used very British spellings, and claimed the age of 47 in 2022.

A sharp-eyed friend—aka Offshore Man—messaged me back when I asked him about Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘It wasn’t a Japanese genius nerd who created Bitcoin,’ he said. ‘That’s just a beautiful cover story. Just like it wasn’t two kids in a garage who gave us Google.’ He added: ‘Crypto was designed as a hot-money sink. A trap. Something to absorb wealth fleeing fiat debasement and steer it away from hard assets. It’ll collapse. And the suckers will be left with nothing.’

It should also be noted that Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert—nobody’s fools, either—have more than emphasised Bitcoin’s role in not only challenging but potentially replacing—with its more peaceful nature—what has been called ‘the inherent violence of fiat money’. Ironically enough, given these recent attacks.

I gather Russian crypto mining continues to flourish, with its two largest firms Intelion and BitRiver making $200 million in revenue in 2024. Russia’s illegal crypto sector meanwhile is ruefully described as ‘largely unaccounted for’. Talking of which, the UK is tightening the screws on the sector. From 2026, any operating crypto firm must collect and report extensive user data. Cold wallets won’t save you. Anonymity is done. The borderless dream gets a border, after all.

Last week, I left a meeting in Mayfair’s Shepherd Market—now cheekily dubbed ‘Silicon Alley’—and descended into Green Park Tube. A busker was belting out the song John Wesley Harding. The real name of the outlaw in the song was John Wesley Hardin (no G)—as in Tim Hardin, coincidentally enough. Dylan said he simply misspelled the name and no one bothered to fact-check it. I suspect he added the G to make it scan. A lyrical mutation. An artistic fib. And perhaps, just perhaps, a metaphor. Anyway, as I began searching ads for crypto tax tools for this piece, I kept hearing the song in my head even past Westminster:

All across the telegraph his name it did resound
But no charge held against him could they prove
And there was no man around who could track or chain him down
He was never known to make a foolish move

Lovely idea. But these days, even your best move might still cost you a finger.

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