Crypto Leeches and Open-Source Bees
Cryptocurrencies bring out the worst in digital greed: John Woeltz, 37, and an accomplice were charged with holding a man captive for three weeks in a Manhattan townhouse— torturing him in an attempt to steal his Bitcoin password . The horror of it is hard to overstate. But even more unsettling is what it reveals about a growing subculture: a ruthless obsession with crypto wealth, removed from any sense of ethics, community, or shared future. These are the crypto leeches—people who see money not as a lubricant for life, but as the point of life. Their behavior mirrors what I described in a recent post about how money, when disconnected from meaning, begins to take over the host like a parasite—hijacking the human mind, turning imagination into speculation, community into competition, and security into surveillance. If parasitic control is one metaphor, then nature offers us a better one: In that earlier post, I proposed a different vision: mycorrhizal finance, modeled after the underg...