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 underground fungal networks that connect forests—sharing nutrients, warning of danger, and fostering resilience through mutual aid. This is how we should be thinking about wealth, connection, and digital systems.

And that’s where the open-source bees come in.

Unlike crypto leeches who hoard tokens and pump schemes, open-source developers pollinate the digital ecosystem. Their code, shared freely on platforms like GitHub, creates the infrastructure we all rely on. These are the digital mycorrhizae, linking and enriching rather than isolating and extracting.

Think of Tim Berners-Lee, who could have privatized the web but chose to make it available for free.

Or Linus Torvalds, whose Linux kernel became the invisible foundation of the internet, built collaboratively by thousands.

Or Jimmy Wales, whose Wikipedia proved that collective knowledge—not curated elites—could map the world.

They, and the countless unnamed contributors behind open libraries and open models, are the open-source bees. They don’t demand keys to private blockchains. They don’t hold your data hostage. They build platforms so that others can stand on their shoulders, not kneel before them.

Meanwhile, at $500,000-a-plate fundraisers like the one recently attended by crypto billionaires and political power brokers hosted by President Trump, a different ethos is celebrated: speculation without substance, accumulation without contribution.

It is tempting to believe we live in a zero-sum world, where one person’s gain must come at another’s loss. But the natural world shows us that symbiotic systems scale better than parasitic ones. That’s true in forests. It’s true in economies. And it’s true in code.

So we must ask:

Do we want a digital future run by leeches?

Or one nourished by bees and fungi—by collaborators, not predators?

The future of tech isn't just about algorithms. It’s about ethics.

It’s about what we choose to build: a hive, a forest—or an ambush.