Cryptocurrency seems futuristic. The crimes around it are not

'Old-fashioned' gangland methods of kidnapping and torture are being used to obtain passwords.

- Ginia Bellafante

"I smell money, crypto, crypto, blockchain and all the good things," Mayor Eric Adams said recently in what New York City officials billed as the "first ever NYC Crypto Summit".

Referring to himself as a "tech mayor" who used to program in Cobol and Fortran, he reasoned that hating on crypto was like hating credit cards 65 years ago.

"The naysayers and the DNA of naysayers of yesteryears - they are the DNA of naysayers of these times as well," he proceeded to say, his convoluted speech oddly well-matched to the generally opaque understanding of alternative currencies.

The Mayor's goal remained as it always had, he said: to make "New York City the crypto capital of the globe". He then headed to a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.

It was a strange time to set these particular priorities. What was happening in a Prince Street town house, about 1.5km from City Hall, already suggested that New York was the crypto capital of the world - if in a Martin Scorsese adaptation of a Stephen King novel.

Over the course of 17 days, according to police reports, two men had been holding an Italian millionaire captive and torturing him - with chicken wire, Taser shocks, pistol whips, a chainsaw aimed at his leg, splattered urine and the forced consumption of crack cocaine. The point was to torment him into giving up the password to his Bitcoin wallet.