Holy Smoke: the strange religion of cryptocurrency

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2019

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

In this week's episode of Holy Smoke Damian is joined by Jamie Bartlett, one of the world’s leading experts on the dark web, radical politics and technology, whose gripping podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen is currently being broadcast by the BBC. It tells the story of a shady Bulgarian tech entrepreneur, Dr Ruja Ignatova, who vanished just as her dodgy cryptocurrency OneCoin was raking in billions of euros from investors – or true believers – all over the world.

Despite her disappearance, it still has footholds in African villages, the Chinese business community, Scottish housing estates and Britain’s Muslims – it claims to be Sharia-compliant. Not only does Dr Ruja's operation resemble a religious cult, it also gives us a glimpse of how technology and belief are combining in ever stranger patterns, often inspired by the utopians of Silicon Valley,

Holy Smoke is a series of podcasts where Damian Thompson dissects the most important and controversial topics in world religion, with a range of high profile guests. Click here to find previous episodes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:05.0	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12 as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.0	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:19.0	Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson.
0:23.6	What can a global cryptocurrency scam tell us about the future of religion?
0:36.6	Strange question to ask, but the answer is quite a lot.
0:41.3	I'm joined by Jamie Bartlett, one of the world's leading experts on the dark web, radical politics
0:47.1	and technology, whose gripping podcast series The Missing Crypto Queen is currently being
0:54.0	broadcast by the BBC. It tells the story of a shady
0:57.7	Bulgarian tech entrepreneur, Dr Ruja Ignatova, who vanished just as her dodgy cryptocurrency,
1:05.2	one coin, was raking in billions for investors, or true believers, all over the world. Despite her disappearance,
1:14.1	it still has footholds in African villages, the Chinese business community, Scottish housing estates,
1:21.0	and among British Muslims, it claims to be Sharia compliant. Not only does her operation resemble a religious cult,
1:30.9	it also gives us a glimpse of how technology and belief are forming ever-stranger patterns,
1:38.3	taking their lead from the utopians of Silicon Valley. Jamie, can you give us a quick introduction to this bizarre drama, which has been playing out under the media radar until now?
1:52.0	So the brief version is that in 2014, this woman, Dr. Ruzha Ignativa, Bulgarian German businesswoman, comes out of nowhere and invents a brand new
2:01.1	cryptocurrency, which she said is going to be like the next Bitcoin. It's going to be bigger than
2:05.7	Bitcoin. You might have missed out on that one, but this is your new chance. It spreads around the
2:10.8	world very, very quickly and we'll get to why it spreads so fast. But by late 2017, over four
2:16.8	billion euros had been invested in this cryptocurrency,
2:19.3	at which point this woman vanishes into thin air and has not been seen since.
2:26.3	And yet the scam continues, people still believe in this, it's called One Coin.
	...

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