Who’d risk a fortune on Emperor’s clothes?

THERE are three possible reactions to the strange story of Stefan Thomas. He is the computer programmer who was paid in bitcoin for making a video about cryptocurrency. That was ten years ago.

At the time, bitcoin were worth a few dollars apiece. They have done rather well since then. His are now worth about £200 million. But there’s a snag.

To cash them in, he can’t just pop into the bank. He has to use his password to get into a hugely sophisticated hard drive — and he can’t do that because he’s forgotten it.

He’s made eight guesses. All wrong. He gets two more shots at it. If he’s still wrong, he loses the lot. It may all sound like a proposal from a pretty desperate game show producer — but not if you’re Mr Thomas. So those three reactions, it seems to me, are these:

The first: serves him right for being so careless. The second: poor chap . . . good luck to him! The third: what is a bitcoin anyway? I’m prepared to bet you don’t know either.

We’ve all read masses of stuff about the currency but that doesn’t mean we understand it. We know that to ‘mine’ bitcoins, they use unimaginable amounts of computing muscle and burn enough electricity to power an entire city. But do we really know what ‘mining’ means? Or why they’re going to stop mining them in 19 years? Or who invented bitcoin in the first place?

Maybe our ignorance doesn’t matter. There’s lots about the world of finance I don’t begin to understand. But the notion that a coin that doesn’t even exist can be worth a fortune today and virtually nothing tomorrow scares the life out of me.

Why do I keep wanting to shout: ‘The Emperor has no clothes!’