Apparently Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center had obtained copies of a conversation in which Epstein had proposed the creation of a BRICS4 cryptocurrency as a means by which Russians could evade the international sanctions imposed in the aftermath of Putin’s first and far more successful Ukrainian adventure5. Devoted readers of The Cryptocalypse Chronicles will have heard me describe the ideal user base for cryptocurrency as “a cabal of organized crime groups, kleptocratic regimes, and rogue nuclear states”6. That’s because criminals, kleptocrats, and rogue nuclear states are all dealing with the one problem crypto can actually solve that traditional finance cannot: they want to move money around the world and they don’t want anyone to be able to stop them. And now I was reading that Jeffrey Epstein had pitched cryptocurrency to exactly that user base as a way to solve exactly that problem more than ten years ago.