Tibor Fischer opens his new novel with a Latin verse: «O quantum est in rebus inane», how much emptiness there is in things. The line opens the Satires of the Roman poet Persius, yet Fischer attributes it to Persius’s older model Lucilius, and he is right to. We know this only from a note in the margin: an ancient commentator wrote beside the text that Persius had taken the line from the first book of Lucilius. Such marginal notes are called scholia, and this series takes its name from them. The borrowed motto is also the most accurate sentence in the whole book. Fischer sent me the novel from Budapest with the remark that it was, among other things, about Bitcoin and might entertain me. It is about Bitcoin only by half, however, and that half is what concerns us here.

The novel

«My Bags Are Big» was published in February by Salt, a small press in Norfolk. The cover shows two money bags marked with the Bitcoin sign in front of the Burj Khalifa, which the narrator takes for the largest phallic symbol in the world. Fischer, born in 1959 to two Hungarian basketball players who left their country in 1956, was once one of Britain’s celebrated young novelists. His debut «Under the Frog» came out in 1992 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993, after 62 publishers had turned the manuscript down, and Granta named him in 1993 among the 20 best young British novelists. «The Thought Gang» of 1994, the story of a philosopher who robs banks, is among the funniest books of that decade. Fischer can also dish it out: in 2003 he took apart Martin Amis’s novel «Yellow Dog» so thoroughly that the review is still quoted today. His early books came out with the big publishing houses; the new one comes out with a small press.

The narrator, Dan, is 60 and comes from Catford in south London. He has managed tennis players ranked around 600 in the world, nursed his mother and buried his wife. In 2016 he fed a twenty-pound note into a Bitcoin machine in a café on Old Street, because a television preacher had promised that the banks would weep. Today he lives in Dubai off his «bags», as the scene calls its holdings. The plot is a loose frame for digressions: an old love and her daughter, a crypto whale, that is, a large holder, with a gilded safe, a gangster from Catford with a pink boulder, and at the end a laptop full of Bitcoin that changed hands in a pub years ago for a few pounds. The chapters are dated by the Bitcoin price, six cents, 3,000, 20,000, 30,000 dollars; the price is the calendar of this life.

British critics praised the jokes, and The Spectator called Fischer a very British Houellebecq. On the cover the philosopher Andrew M. Bailey calls the book the first great Bitcoin novel, while the writer and editor Daniel Johnson calls it the crypto novel. Both mean the same book, and only one of them is right. Why tells us more about the Bitcoin scene than about the novel.

A British Houellebecq?

Michel Houellebecq carried the logic of the market over into love as early as his first novel, «Whatever»: some enjoy a rich love life, others remain alone, and the losers sink into misery. In «The Possibility of an Island» a rich comedian named Daniel confesses that he built his career and his fortune on the exploitation of base instincts. In the Scholien of 2009 and 2010 I called Houellebecq’s books documents of participant observation, which have to be read against the grain so that their nihilism does not rub off on the reader.

Fischer’s Dan is the counterpart without the confession. He bears the same first name, has likewise made a fortune out of nothing, and sizes up women like positions in a portfolio. He has extended the battlefield once more, to money, and considers the result just: crypto, he says, is the last lift going up, in which nail bars, taxi drivers and the idle also stand a chance, and a memecoin with a cartoon frog that became worth a billion over a weekend tramples the engineers who spent years working on useful things. Houellebecq’s narrators suffer from the market and understand it; Dan enjoys it without understanding it, for he won by chance and takes chance for achievement. The Spectator’s comparison therefore flatters the Briton and wrongs the Frenchman.

Bitcoin and crypto

After the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX I described in a newspaper article why Bitcoin bores bankers and regulators alike. It is a program without an operator and without a board that one could invite, advise or supervise, and it frustrates the financial industry by being impossible to get hold of. So the industry built «crypto» next to it: exchanges, tokens, conferences, price boards, a stage for speculation on which regulators, financiers and influencers feel at home. Fischer’s novel knows only this second world. Bitcoin appears in it as a price, as a bag, as an object of technical chart analysis and as a counter on the wall of a party on the 60th floor. The name Hayek comes up exactly once, as a buzzword in the sales pitch of a young Briton somewhere between staking and the metaverse.

Even the props of monetary history stand around as decoration. In the drive of the surgeon who brought Dan to Bitcoin lies a stone wheel from the Pacific island of Yap. Such stones served as money there, and they stand at the beginning of many introductions to monetary theory, because a stone could change owners without being moved: all that counted was the shared memory of whom it belonged to. That is, long before any computer, the idea of a shared ledger, and with it the idea of Bitcoin. In the novel the stone is a garden ornament and the occasion for a joke. The whale, for his part, makes a guessing game of what lies in his gilded safe, and what lies there is a comic from his childhood: glitter outside, nostalgia inside, which is exactly how crypto is built.

Proof of work and proof of luck

The principle that sets Bitcoin apart from everything else also turns up in the novel, as a party joke. Genius is only hard work, says Dan, proof of work. Proof of work is the procedure by which Bitcoin adds new blocks to its chain: whoever wants to write must perform computational work that costs electricity and time and cannot be faked. In it lies the network’s connection to reality. In the novel, proof of work is replaced throughout by proof of luck. The whale owes his fortune to a laptop from a pub, Dan to a twenty-pound note, the cartoon frog to a weekend.

Dan draws the conclusions with the honesty of the cynic: crypto is by now a stock market like any other, Bitcoin has helped some people and not humanity, and the problem with crypto is the people. For crypto every one of these sentences is true, because they describe what the last bull market made of a money designed for strangers. They miss Bitcoin itself, because Bitcoin depends on nobody’s good opinion, not even that of its holders.

The blurb

That also settles the dispute between the blurb writers. Johnson is right, it is the crypto novel, and Bailey’s sentence says more about the scene than about the book. Andrew M. Bailey is co-author of «Resistance Money», a philosophical defence of Bitcoin as a money of resistance against state control, and a senior fellow of an institute that advises lawmakers on Bitcoin. A philosopher of resistance money certifies the greatness of a novel in which nobody resists anything. To write that sentence one need not have read the book; it is enough to know that Bitcoin is on the cover and that one’s own scene could do with a novel: the symbol replaces the judgement.

In Money Is for Strangers I called this mechanism the disease beneath the symptoms. Almost the entire literature of Bitcoin is written in the key of self-congratulation, and the authors confirm one another as podcast guests, fellow panellists and blurb writers. Here the circle closes on a book cover, and of all books around one that holds the scene up to ridicule.

What the novel knows in spite of itself

Once in the novel, Bitcoin works exactly as intended. The gangster tells of a dealer who, before his conviction, put his cash into Bitcoin, because the police understood as much about it as about the bus timetable of Jakarta on a Sunday. He served three years, came out and bought a country house with the proceeds. A fortune that no authority can seize and no custodian can lose, held for years, without permission and without a counterparty: that is what Bitcoin was built for. Money is for strangers, in the limiting case for enemies, and in this book the limiting case is a criminal. Fischer tells the scene in half a page as a villain’s anecdote, and it is the only place where his novel is really about Bitcoin.

The truth about the last cycle the novel catches all the same, against its own intention. In Money Is for Strangers I described two failings that prop each other up: the LARP, the sincere self-affirmation of the believers, and the grift, the cynical exploitation of that belief, and Fischer’s characters embody both in pure form. The whale, who pumps memecoins and stages guessing games with his safe, is the grift. Dan, who took a rising curve for the abolition of scarcity and now sits on his bags, tired and sated, like a dragon on its gold, is the LARP. The novel is set in 2023, when the price stood still at 30,000 dollars, and appears in a bear market, far below the high of the year before. It is a snapshot of what the cycle made of Bitcoin, taken by someone who mistakes the snapshot for the whole picture.

What the novel lacks

What the novel lacks lies closest to its author. Fischer’s parents left Hungary in 1956, and anyone who was an adult there ten years earlier lived through the end of the pengő, the fastest debasement of money in history: in July 1946 prices were doubling, at the last, roughly every 15 hours. Inflation nonetheless does not appear in the novel. Dan’s father ran a betting shop in Catford and carried a cosh in his pocket, and year after year a third party took from him part of what he had put aside, without violence and without anyone making an anecdote of it. Bitcoin is meant to protect against this silent theft, as the first money whose quantity nobody can increase. Fischer gives this fact a single sentence, and then Dan goes off to the canapés, as he goes off to the canapés from every thought. A Bitcoin novel without inflation is a crime novel with the crime left out.

The book’s only theory is the wheel of fortune, and for crypto it holds: whoever got rich in the bull market mostly did so by chance and has taken chance for merit ever since. Dan’s reckoning with his life is that one cannot win, only put off losing for a long time. It is the reckoning of a man who has spent his life in zero-sum games, on the tennis court, in his father’s betting shop, in Dubai, and who takes the one positive-sum game he stumbled into for a lottery. Exchange is the other world history, and it appears in this book as little as inflation does. Bitcoin asks neither about the merit nor about the luck of its holders, and so in the book it looks as dull as proof of work must look among fortune hunters. Dan almost says it himself, boring has its uses, only he does not know which. Fischer at least borrowed the best line of his book, like Persius, from an older writer; sadly, it remained the only one.

Sources

Tibor Fischer, My Bags Are Big, Salt Publishing, Cromer 2026, ISBN 978-1-78463-385-1; cover endorsements by Andrew M. Bailey, Daniel Johnson and Michael Hofmann. Cover image: Salt Publishing, from the reading copy sent by the author. Reviews: Ian Sansom, The Spectator, March 2026; Houman Barekat, The Guardian, 28 February 2026; Kyle Wyatt, Times Literary Supplement. Biography: Hungarian Review, author profile; Granta 1993; The Daily Telegraph, review of Martin Amis’s «Yellow Dog», 2003. Persius, Saturae 1.1; the ancient scholion notes: hunc versum de Lucili primo transtulit. Michel Houellebecq: Scholien 03/2009 and 01/2010 (Institut für Wertewirtschaft, in German); Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994); The Possibility of an Island (La possibilité d’une île, 2005). Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley Rettler, Craig Warmke: Resistance Money, Routledge 2024. Bitcoin and crypto: «FTX: Regulierungsillusionen und Finanzblähungen», Finanz und Wirtschaft. Self-congratulation, LARP and grift: «Money Is for Strangers», scholarium.at, 2026. Pengő: prices doubling roughly every 15 hours at the last, July 1946. Bitcoin price: high of 126,198 USD on 6 October 2025; 79,524 USD on 9 September 2026.