From marijuana dealer to crypto millionaire
Be Embraced, Millions

In his new book, Juan S. Guse writes about men who got rich quick with cryptocurrencies. And about how this mysterious scene works.

Juan S. Guse stands out from contemporary autofictional literature with his two novels to date. They are literary diagnoses of society. His debut novel, Lärm und Wälder (Noise and Forests, 2015), is set in a gated community near Buenos Aires. His second novel, Miami Punk (2019), is set in the gaming scene, enriched with dystopian images of the Florida coast after the sea has receded overnight.

The fact that he is interested in social contexts as a sociologist – he is currently working on his dissertation – is even more evident in his new book: Tausendmal so viel Geld wie jetzt (A Thousand Times More Money Than Now) is a literary field study from the world of cryptocurrencies. For a year, he met with men who became rich through cryptocurrency. The fact that they are exclusively men under the age of 40 reflects reality.

I Could Buy This Cemetery

One of these guys is Basti, ‘a career refuser who works at the cemetery’ – for £10.50 an hour. He tolerates his chatty boss, even though he could buy the cemetery. Basti's love of plants began when he secretly grew cannabis in various parks in Dortmund for years and earned some extra money with it until – after a noisy night-time visit from the police to his house – his fear of being caught became too great.

Basti still had around £17,000 ‘lying around that he couldn't easily deposit at the bank’. Since he was familiar with the darknet due to his drug deals and knew that people paid with bitcoins there, the origin of which could not be traced, he drove to Belgium ‘to send all his money to his crypto wallet at a bitcoin ATM across the border’. Then everything took a turn for the better for Basti: the value of his bitcoins quickly quintupled, he heard about ether by chance, invested in this cryptocurrency and suddenly became a crypto millionaire, even though he ‘couldn't have done anything with the money anyway, I couldn't have taken that many drugs’.

An Eerily Good Atmosphere

Apart from gender and age, Basti – like the other men portrayed by Guse – is "not representative of anything... But it is cases like his that interested me the most: ordinary people who, due to a combination of chance, excess money and belief in this one very specific technology, experienced an overnight class leap that changed their relationship to the world forever." The other men Guse portrays continue to drive their old Saabs, camp at campsites and pursue their passion for climbing.

What unites the protagonists, however, is the belief that they possess secret knowledge, have cheated fate and are ahead of their time. Guse also talks about crypto conferences. In the last chapter, he reports on SmartCon 2023 in Barcelona, where the industry attempted to win ‘our parents' trust’ with a new name (‘Web3, which sounded as sedate and boring as Industry 4.0’). Overall, these events are brimming with confidence and self-affirmation, with the sense of belonging to the circle of initiates: ‘We here inside no longer need to have all this explained to us. This narrative gives us something else, namely cohesion and recognition. It assures us: you are pioneers, far-sighted and clever. That's another reason why, I think, the atmosphere at all the crypto fairs I've attended has been so eerily good.’

When Guse reproduces the language used in the crypto scene, it sounds like a parody:

Not Recommended for Imitation

The industry likes to paint itself in utopian colours. But the assumption ‘that crypto is about techno-economic changes in the service of the common good’ quickly turns out to be an illusion when Guse talks about the motives of the players involved. Ultimately, these men are only pursuing very personal goals, primarily to be financially independent and escape the lifelong rat race. Although this goal is often given a socio-theoretical superstructure, for example by denouncing ‘wage slavery’, these men are never concerned with others, but always only with themselves. The conclusion is not: How do we change the situation? But rather: How do I get out of it?

Guse makes no secret of the fact that the cryptocurrency business is difficult to understand and that the promises and heroic narratives of the industry can drive one crazy. This reminds him of Javier Milei, then a presidential candidate and now the incumbent Argentine president, who, when confronted with doubts about the feasibility of his plans, always responded with this joke: ‘What is the difference between a genius and a madman? Success.’ In a surreal anecdote at the end of the book, the narrator runs through the labyrinthine conference building, cannot find the exit, and encounters men whom he frightens with the fear of ‘never finding their way out of this building again, where the doors looked like mouths and the people like cutlery.’

In his book, Guse strikes a good balance between intimacy, curiosity and distance, and the occasional sociological passages are stimulating in their homeopathic doses. He can certainly understand the appeal of the promise of quick money. As proof, Guse includes a small, personal warning: he himself was unable to resist the temptation and lost 2,500 euros. Investing in cryptocurrency is therefore not recommended.