Die-hard fans of cryptocurrencies have an impressive knack for turning nightmares on their head. Influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Tim Draper have all given careful thought to the importance of crypto for when the shit hits the fan. They’ve been busy acquiring land on remote islands and building subterranean Jerusalems all powered by Bitcoin. For them, war in Ukraine brings hope that their planning was worthwhile.

Inspiration for their nightmare utopia comes from an obscure libertarian manifesto, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. The book’s authors argue that out of the wreckage of war will emerge a “cognitive elite” rising to power as a class of sovereign individuals, no longer subject to the power of sovereign states. Writing in the 1990s, the authors specialized in profiting from a world gone mad — and made impressive predictions on the rise of cryptocurrencies. For the many crypto-cult followers of the book, war is an opportunity⁠ — providing “validation of their increasingly radical beliefs.”

Belief in Bitcoin is not a new thing for Ukraine. At the height of the Euromaidan protests in 2014, “mining” Bitcoin was so prolific that Ukrainian miners nearly brought down the whole global network. Nearly half of all the world’s Bitcoins were made here. Despite the boom in crypto markets globally, Ukrainians remained some of the most avid cryptocurrency users. Until a few weeks ago, roughly $8 billion worth of Bitcoin entered and exited the country annually. The value of daily cryptocurrency transactions totaled $150 million, exceeding the volume of interbank exchanges. Even after the 2014 ouster of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych — widely accused of electoral fraud and corruption — trust in Ukraine’s financial systems didn’t improve.