While bitcoin lost 85% of its value over 2018, the real tragedy of the bear market has been the human cost. In this series of guest posts, Inferno publishes interviews with members of the blockchain scene whose lives have been ruined by the technology and its downturn. Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Ken looks at websites. He knows he’s not supposed to and he’s tried to stop many times, but he can’t. There’s a magnetic attraction, he tells me, and it’s destroying him – his work, his relationships, his finances.

He’s talking to me over drinks in a pub on Amhurst Road in London. Ken is a forty-something estate agent, with a wife and two kids, at least for now. His habits, he says, are starting to put a strain on his marriage, and he wonders how long it will be before things come to a head.

‘It all started a couple of years ago,’ he tells me, the words coming out in a rush as he decides to trust me with the story he has kept hidden from everyone for so long. It’s a story I’ve heard before, many times, but I don’t tell Ken this. He needs to feel in control at this point and I won’t cheapen this moment of unburdening for him.

‘Work was busy. It was really stressful, the boss was breathing down my neck 24/7. There were targets none of us were meeting, there was talk of people being laid off. It was tough.’ One day, Ken was clearing out the Spam folder of his email and was tempted to click on one of the messages. ‘That was it, really,’ he says. ‘The start of an addiction. Compulsion. Habit, I don’t even know what to call it.’

Ken followed the links and pretty soon he was immersed in an online world to which he’d previously had zero exposure. ‘It was intoxicating, at first,’ he continues. ‘What I was seeing on those sites, it was…’ He exhales, slowly. ‘Well. I’d never seen anything like it before. It gripped me, immediately, and I needed more. Then you get used to it, and you need to find something more extreme to get the same buzz.’

Pretty soon, says Ken, he was spending hours a day on those sites. He looks up at me, with his sallow, lined face – evidence of chronic sleep deprivation, of long nights spent on websites in secret from anyone else. ‘I’d say I was working late, but I’d be checking this stuff out instead, looking at different sites, chatting to strangers on the web, watching videos. Most nights it was way after midnight when I finally stopped and went to bed. Sometimes the sun was coming up.’

That was bad enough, but then Ken made the mistake of downloading an app onto his smartphone. ‘Updates. Every minute, every hour of the day. Always something new, always new models, new things to see and new ways to spend money. I couldn’t stop. It was too late by then, I was up to my neck.’

Ken found himself checking his phone dozens, sometimes hundreds of times a day. He’d take long breaks in the bathroom, browsing away from the prying eyes of his colleagues. After a while his boss started to notice, and he had to curtail his habit or risk losing his job. ‘Sometimes I left my phone at home to give myself a break,’ he says, ‘but usually I wasn’t strong enough.’ He now faces disciplinary action, and unless he can end his addiction, he knows he’ll be out of a job within weeks.

Ken has been living with his secret for nearly two years now. There was a time, he says, when his wife nearly found out. One night she walked in on him as he was sat on the sofa with his laptop. It was 2am. ‘All of those hours, all those nights online, all those live feeds and conversations with strangers. Time I could have spent with her, and the kids.’ He shakes his head in shame.

‘And she really wouldn’t have understood?’ I ask him. He laughs.

‘Not a chance. Magical internet money? The best investment of your life? Retiring at 50? No. I just told her I was looking at porn.’

The author is an experienced financial journalist whose opinions and interviews have been featured in The Guardian, Forbes and the Financial Times. He writes here under the pseudonym Marcus Aurelius.

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