A Scholion on a Bitcoin Novel

Tibor Fischer opens his new novel with a Latin verse: O quantum est in rebus inane, how much emptiness there is in things, and he attributes it to Lucilius. The verse opens the Satires of Persius. That Persius took it from the first book of Lucilius we know from a single scholion, the marginal note of an ancient commentator who returned the line to the older satirist. Fischer, then, follows the margin against the text. In a series that calls itself Scholien this wins some sympathy, and the borrowed verse is also the most accurate sentence in the book that follows it. The author sent me the novel from Budapest with the remark that it was, among other things, about Bitcoin and might entertain me. The first claim is half true, and that half is the subject of this marginal note.

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 had left the country in 1956, reached the Booker shortlist in 1992 with «Under the Frog» after 62 publishers had turned the manuscript down; Granta counted him among the 20 best young British novelists in 1993, and «The Thought Gang» of 1994, the story of a philosopher who robs banks, remains one of the funniest inventions of that decade. Fischer knows the genre of the demolition from both sides: in 2003 he finished off Martin Amis's «Yellow Dog» with a review that is quoted to this day and that appeared shortly before the day on which his own novel reached the shops together with Amis's. The publisher's address on the new book tells the rest of the story.

The narrator, Dan, 60, from Catford in south London, has managed tennis players ranked around 600, nursed his mother, buried his wife and, in 2016, fed a twenty-pound note into a Bitcoin ATM in a café in Old Street after a television preacher had promised that the banks would cry. Today he lives in Dubai on his bags, and the plot is scaffolding for digressions: an old love and her daughter, a crypto whale with a gilded safe, a gangster from Catford with a pink boulder, and finally a laptop full of Bitcoin that changed hands decades ago in a pub for a few pounds. The chapters are dated by price, Bitcoin at six cents, at 3,000, at 20,000, at 30,000 dollars; the price is the calendar of this life. The wheel of fortune turns, nobody has earned anything, everybody claims to have. British critics counted the quips and were content; the Spectator called Fischer a very British Houellebecq. On the cover the philosopher Andrew M. Bailey certifies the book as the first great Bitcoin novel, and Daniel Johnson takes it for the crypto novel. Both mean the same book, and the difference between their sentences is the difference this note is about.

Daniel and Dan

In the Scholien of 2009 and 2010 I described Houellebecq as a late epigone of the French tradition of a defiant cult of life's shipwrecked, with the warning that his books are documents of participant observation, to be read against the grain, because their nihilism otherwise rubs off on the reader's soul. Already in «Extension du domaine de la lutte» he had carried the logic of the market into the love life: some enjoy a varied sexual life, others are confined to loneliness, and the extension of the battlefield produces its own pauperisation. His Daniel in «La possibilité d'une île», a rich comedian, confesses to having built his career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of base instincts, and he tells his story from a point after the end of civilisation.

Fischer's Dan is the mirror figure without the confession: the same first name, the same fortune from nothing, the same bookkeeping on women, whom he appraises like positions. He has extended the battlefield once more, to money, and calls the result justice: crypto, he says, is the last lift in which nail technicians, taxi drivers and the idle still get a chance, and a cartoon frog that reached a billion over a weekend tramples the engineers who spent years working on useful things. Houellebecq's narrator suffers from the extension; Fischer's enjoys it. Dubai, where by Dan's own diagnosis nothing holds up the scenery, is Houellebecq's time after the end with better air conditioning. Where Daniel pleads guilty, Dan congratulates himself on his attentive ignorance. The Spectator's comparison flatters the Briton and wrongs the Frenchman: Houellebecq's losers understand the market they are losing in; Dan has won by accident and calls the accident work.

The price as calendar

Bitcoin is equally boring to financial intermediaries and to regulators, because in it the abstraction has been completed in pure software, with no operator and no board that could be invited or regulated. So «crypto» was erected beside it, a staging of the financial industry with exchanges, tokens, conferences and price boards, a metaverse of speculation in which regulators, financiers and influencers feel at home. I have described this difference at greater length in the essay on money for strangers; here it is enough to observe that Fischer's novel knows only the second world. Bitcoin appears in it as a price, as a bag, as a fork, as an object of technical analysis and as a ticker on the wall of a party on the 60th floor. Hayek is mentioned once, as a word in a young Briton's sales patter between staking and metaverse, and Satoshi is, for the assembled company, a man who put existing parts together.

The book even knows the props of monetary history, and it uses them as decoration. In the driveway of the surgeon who brought Dan to Bitcoin lies a rai stone from the island of Yap, the stone money with which every introduction to monetary theory begins; in the novel it is a crypto joke and a garden ornament. Dan himself keeps a small bag of sceats, silver coins from the early Middle Ages, as his own punchline. What the whale keeps in his gilded safe is a comic from his childhood: gold outside, memory inside, which is the exact construction of crypto. Bitcoin is built the other way round, without a shell, and is therefore useless to decorators. The pink boulder that the gangster passes off as a starship engine is the memecoin of the plot: valuable as long as somebody believes the story, and the Geiger counter does not move.

Even the principle that separates Bitcoin from everything else appears, as a bon mot. Genius is just hard work, Dan says at a party, proof of work. Proof of work is the network's link to reality: energy burned, time spent, costs nobody gets back. In the novel it 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 frog to a weekend's work by two semi-nerds. Dan draws the conclusions with the honesty of the cynic: crypto is basically the stock market now, Bitcoin has helped a few humans and never humanity, the problem with crypto is people. For crypto every one of these sentences is true; they describe what the bull market made of a money designed for strangers, and they miss Bitcoin, because Bitcoin depends on nobody's good opinion, its holders' included.

The blurb

The blurb writers' dissent resolves itself here. Johnson is right, it is the crypto novel. Bailey's sentence is the blurb for it, and it is more revealing than any review. Andrew M. Bailey is a co-author of «Resistance Money», a philosophical defence of Bitcoin, and a senior fellow of an institute that advises legislators on Bitcoin. A philosopher of resistance money certifies greatness in a novel in which nobody resists anything, because the word is on the cover. To write that sentence one need not have read the book; one need only know that it has to do with Bitcoin and that one's own scene could use a novel. This is precisely the mechanism I described in the Bitcoin essay as the disease beneath the symptoms: almost the entire literature of Bitcoin is written in a single register, that of self-congratulation, and the author is confirmed by his podcast guests, who are also his blurbers. Now the loop closes on a book jacket, and it encloses, of all things, a book that holds the scene up to ridicule. The blurber did not notice, and that is the confirmation.

What the novel knows in spite of itself

Once in the novel Bitcoin works, and Fischer does not notice. 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 Jakarta bus timetable on a Sunday; he served three years, came out and bought a country house with the proceeds. It is the only scene in which Bitcoin does what it was built for: to hold a fortune that no authority can seize and no custodian can lose, without permission and without a counterparty, for years. Money is for strangers, in the limiting case for enemies, and the limiting case in this book is a criminal. Fischer files the anecdote under a crook's luck; it is the passage in which the novel is about Bitcoin, and it is half a page long.

What the novel otherwise captures is the truth about the last cycle, against its intention. Dan knows that his fortune came from a twenty-pound note and the whale's from a laptop out of a pub; he takes this for the truth about Bitcoin, and it is the truth about crypto in a bull market. There, as I described in the Bitcoin essay and recently repeated on the occasion of a Bitcoin treasury company, LARP and grift prop each other up: the sincere buy what the cynical print, until the difference to fiat is a rounding error. Fischer's characters are the two poles in their pure form, the whale who pumps memecoins and runs a guessing game with his safe, and the narrator who mistook a rising chart for the abolition of scarcity and now sits, tired and sated, on his bags like a dragon on gold. The novel is set in 2023, when the price stood still at 30,000 dollars, and it appears in a bear market, well below last year's high. It is one of the dis-illusions I wished on the bear market, though an involuntary one: a snapshot of what the cycle had made of Bitcoin, taken by someone who takes the snapshot for the whole.

What the novel lacks is the memory closest to its author. Fischer's parents left Hungary in 1956; anyone who was an adult there in 1946 lived through the end of the pengő, the fastest monetary collapse in history, in which prices at the last doubled within hours. Dan's father ran a bookmaker's in Catford and carried a cosh in his pocket; in every year of his life a third party took a share of what he had put aside, without a machete and without an anecdote to show for it. That is the crime inside which the novel is set and which it never mentions. Bitcoin is the first money whose quantity nobody can increase, not even a mine; Fischer gives this fact one sentence, something out of nothing, it should not have happened, and then Dan walks off to the canapés, as he walks from every thought to the canapés. A Bitcoin novel in which inflation does not occur is a novel about a casino set inside a mint, with the mint cut for being dull.

The wheel of fortune is the book's only theory, and for crypto it holds: whoever got rich in the bull market mostly got rich by chance and has taken the chance for merit ever since. Dan's balance sheet of his life reads that one cannot win, only avoid losing for a long time; it is the balance sheet 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 after the merit nor after the luck of its holders, nor after blurbs or novels; it is the only institution in the book that depends on nobody's good opinion, and for that reason it looks as dull in it as proof of work must look among fortune hunters. Dan almost says so himself: dull has its uses. He just did not know which. Fischer at least borrowed his best sentence from an older writer, as Persius did. 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); Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994); 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; «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.