THE MORNING LINE
Watch this Latest Bitcoin Crime Start a Wave!
The internet has evolved into the perfect medium for spreading crime into every household and every age group, and now Bitcoin is fast becoming the perfect medium for pushing a more violent kind of crime out into the streets. There was a time when one could avoid getting mugged simply by not wearing Italian shoes, a Burberry coat or a Rolex watch in certain neighborhoods. Nowadays, though, any schlepper in a hoodie could be carrying a password in his head with access to Bitcoin enough to buy two-dozen solid-gold Rolexes. The assailant wouldn’t even have to risk carrying a gun, since a small pair of pliers to yank out the schlepper‘s fingernails would be the only tool a thief who uses unfriendly persuasion in its most recently popularized way would need. Don’t laugh, because you damned well know this is going to happen in some alley somewhere: a schmuck who wouldn’t give up an alphanumeric key stored in his head will lie disfigured in a pool of blood, and the story will instantly be at the top of the news across America.
It’s impossible to know whether Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, is feeling remorseful over the current blizzard of headlines concerning the New York crypto investor held captive, tortured, peed on, beaten and threatened with death by two or more young men sadistically determined to pry a bitcoin account password out of him. If Satoshi has any humanity, he is asking himself ‘What have I wrought?’ Hadn’t he simply wanted to invent a mathematically perfect money that would allow people to spend without being watched by the banks and the shadowy regulators who watch them? How ironic, then, that bitcoin has instead turned out to be an all but unusable medium for ordinary transactions while filling the heads of ten-year-old boys with the enticing idea that crime can pay much, much better than honest toil.
Something to Keep the Kids Busy
And anyone can do it! If not in a dark alley, then online in the virtual company of complicit friends. That is the power of social media, and even now, the New York abduction will already have energized the imaginations of enough copycats to unleash a crime wave such as none of us, not even the most inspired MAGA do-gooder, could have imagined just six months ago. Before long, a cottage industry will spring up on the dark web to provide the purloined names and local addresses of millions of Bitcoin and Ethereum hoarders. What’s surely coming as a result will make us nostalgic for a bygone era of pickpockets, three-card Monte grifters and charming bank robbers like Willie Sutton.
Rick's Free Picks
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