Bitcoin billionaires want a crypto utopia in the sun

There is a well-known phenomenon whereby hedgefund managers who have a bit of success begin to fancy themselves experts in everything. The typical case begins with style creep in investing: A merger-arbitrage expert will have a few good years and will then start making macro bets on currencies. How hard can it be? Politics and policy will be next, and he will begin lecturing politicians on optimal education policy. Eventually no domain is off limits; he'll buy a sports team and start giving advice to its coach, or show up at NASA and explain how they've gotten astrophysics all wrong.

This often ends up looking kind of silly but, to be fair, many successful hedge-fund managers really do have a lot of general intelligence and knowledge. They tend to have been successful in academics and business all their lives; some of them actually have astrophysics Ph.D.s. And while the experience of being a successful hedge-fund manager can involve a certain amount of flattery and insulation from criticism, the experience of becoming one is decent training: It is hard to succeed at investing by being dogmatic and ignorant; success requires deep research, humbling failures, and a willingness to admit error and learn from mistakes. If we are going to have a class of overlords who control all human activities, success at hedge-fund management is not, like, the optimal way to choose them, but it is not the worst way either.

The worst way is success at cryptocurrency investing! Good lord. Here is another dispatch from Nellie Bowles's travels among cryptocurrency subcultures, and it is gruesome stuff:

Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter. They are selling their homes and cars in California and establishing residency on the Caribbean island in hopes of avoiding what they see as onerous state and federal taxes on their growing fortunes, some of which now reach into the billions of dollars.

And these men - because they are almost exclusively men - have a plan for what to do with the wealth: They want to build a crypto utopia, a new city where the money is virtual and the contracts are all public, to show the rest of the world what a crypto future could look like. Blockchain, a digital ledger that forms the basis of virtual currencies, has the potential to reinvent society - and the Puertopians want to prove it.

"What's happened here is a perfect storm," says one of them, about Hurricane Maria. "If you take the MY out of money, you're left with ONE," says another, who also plays a video of Charlie Chaplin on his phone for the benefit of a tree.

But they are also "debating whether to buy Puerto Rico's Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, which measures 9,000 acres and has two deepwater ports and an adjacent airport," because at least some of them seem to have rapidly become wealthy beyond the dreams of hedge-fund managers or Bond villains. And the screening mechanisms that tend to mitigate the ridiculousness of hedge-fund-managers-turned-universal-experts-on-society don't apply here. You don't have to know anything to have bought bitcoin three years ago. You don't have to have learned humbling lessons about being wrong if you just bought bitcoin and it kept going up until you were a zillionaire. A single trade is all the evidence you need that you're a genius -- and the proceeds of that trade can fund whatever dumb thing you want to do with your brilliance.

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