Your Bitcoin isn’t just a balance sheet anymore. It's a home security problem.
Most people still treat Bitcoin risk like it’s a price chart, a hack, or a rug. But this Bloomberg Businessweek story is about a different failure mode: when attackers stop trying to hack your wallet and instead show up at your door and make you authorize the transfer.
As Bitcoin adoption goes mainstream, physical account takeovers — what the security community calls wrench attacks — become a predictable, scalable crime pattern, especially against normal people with decent holdings. This isn’t about Bitcoin uniquely causing violence or claiming banks are safe and Bitcoin is reckless. Robbery predates Bitcoin. But the incentive structure has changed in ways that make physical coercion increasingly rational for attackers.
The story spells out a simple machine. Irreversible settlement means once you authorize the send, there’s no chargeback. Attackers follow the path of least resistance, and as one crew member put it: “If we cannot hack them, we rob them.” Security upgrades can actually push crime offline, as remote hacks get harder with hardware keys and better authentication, coercion becomes the workaround. Targeting scales via data: crews mix leaked information with exchange footprints, surveillance, and remote “tech” coordination to identify and isolate victims.
This isn’t rare. There have been 215+ documented physical Bitcoin attacks since 2020, and 2025 has nearly doubled 2024’s numbers. The victim pool is widening too. A Gallup survey of US adults with $10k+ invested found Bitcoin ownership in portfolios has nearly tripled in four years to 17%.
If the goal is mass adoption, we need to focus on default personal-security-by-design custody patterns, not “number go up” culture. The question becomes: what should be the default setup for actual investors? Something like spending wallet plus delayed vault plus decoys plus multisig, so a forced transfer doesn’t equal total loss. Right now, most people haven’t even considered what happens when someone with a weapon asks them to unlock their phone.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-crypto-thieves-kidnappers/
This reminds me of Pix and all the security problems that came with its adoption. It's an instant payment system for Brazilian fiat currency. When it was implemented, adoption was huge—after all, it's fiat—and along with it came many problems. The same principle as mentioned here: since they couldn't hack it, criminals applied scams, robberies, and kidnappings. Banks imposed transaction limits during nighttime and transfer limits per period, which is why the kidnappings happened.
That's why with Bitcoin it's important not to expose yourself through KYC and to learn how to keep your wallets well-organized and distributed, to have plausible deniability in case a gun is pointed at your head or at the head of someone you love.
Very important subject
There was a good post on the subject on this a few years ago, but this is the stuff we need to get back to talking about more.