Cash and Catastrophe

Dateline: Woking, 1st May 2025.During the Great Fire of London, in 1666, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys buried his cheese and wine in his garden to keep them safe from the conflagration threatening to consume everything in its path. I was thinking about this because of the terrible Los Angeles wildfires in which dozens of people died and damage was in the hundreds of billions.Subscribe nowFireI could not help but reflect on how money works in times of disaster, whether that disaster is caused by the climate or conflict or cyberterrorism. What is the best way to ensure you can buy groceries when systems are down! While Italian parmesan cheese and French wine are no longer the symbols of great wealth that they used to be, I could not help but reflect on Pepys precautions when reading about the fires raging around southern California. If Pepys had lived in an age of cryptocurrency, I am sure he would have followed my lead and buried his hardware wallet rolled up in tinfoil under a tree in his backyard and engraved the pass phrase on a metal plate buried in a secret location with the directions to it held sealed by a lawyer, only to be revealed after his death.It seems that many people did not take such precautions. I read that Angelenos fleeing the wildfires have lost their hardware wallets and their digital assets. One unfortunate 70-year-old resident’s life savings (mostly in Bitcoin) were lost when her private key, written on…Cash and Catastrophe