Peace Index as the world’s most peace-
ful nation. Major crime is almost nonex-
istent; in 2018, there was only one murder
in all of Iceland. Police question suspects
in cozy “conversation” rooms decorated
with soothing photographs of swans.
The total prison population for the entire
country seldom rises above 180.
“It’s the biggest burglary in the history
of Iceland,” Stefansson boasts of the Bit-
coin heist. “So I guess it’s my biggest yet.”
He speaks in a guarded growl, still wary
of saying too much after being sentenced
to four and a half years in prison. In a
country known for its niceness, Stefans-
son was naughty from the start. Born and
raised in the small town of Akureyri, he
committed his first breaking and enter-
ing in kindergarten, smashing a window
at school and reaching inside to open thedoor. In that moment, he says, he expe-
rienced the adrenaline high he would
spend his life chasing.
“I was a naughty boy,” he recalls.
“Screaming, yelling, stealing, biting.”
Around the age of six, he met his best
friend and partner in crime, Hafthor
Logi Hlynsson. “The first memory of us
is going behind the counter at a shopping
mall,” Stefansson says. “We stole a purse
from an old woman who was working
there.” Hlynsson, who was convicted of
joining his childhood friend in the Bitcoin
heist, has grown into a muscular, tattoo-
covered drug smuggler and money laun-
derer known as Haffi the Pink.
In his teens, Stefansson graduated to
drugs: pot, speed, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD.
By the time he turned 20, he was growing
cannabis. His rap sheet soon included 200
cases of petty crime. He broke into people’s
homes to steal TVs and stereos, and some-
how managed to extract $10,000 from
some slot machines in a Reykjavík bar.
Then, during a 10-month stint in pris-
on with Hlynsson, he managed to getclean. Determined to turn his life around,
he got married, took a job driving a postal
truck, and graduated with a degree in
computer science from the University of
Iceland, where he was voted Prankster of
the Year. He started a string of businesses:
creating websites for car rental compa-
nies, selling protein pills online, even leas-
ing warehouses to expand his marijuana
crop. But he was deep in debt and unable
to support his three children. “I was fail-
ing as the provider for my family,” he
would later say. “I just needed more.”
The answer, he decided, lay
in the unsecured buildings at
the old naval base, packed with
zillion-dollar money machines.
“I wanted to start Bitcoin min-
ing,” he says, “because it is very
similar to growing cannabis.Everything is related: electric-
ity, air, heat, cooling systems.
So I started asking around on
the internet.”
It was cryptocurrency,
ironically, that helped save
Iceland after the bankers bank-
rupted it. For years, the coun-
try’s economy was centered
around fishing and aluminum
smelting. Then, in the new
millennium, Iceland’s three
biggest banks found a way to
get rich quick off of foreign
debt. Flooded with cash, the
banks grew nearly seven times
larger than the national econ-
omy. They plowed their paper
profits into foreign assets—
real estate, fashion brands,
soccer teams—only to go
bust in the global financial crash of- When the banks defaulted on
$85 billion in debt, Iceland’s currency col-
lapsed and unemployment soared. The
International Monetary Fund pumped
$2 billion into the economy to stave off
an even greater disaster.
Six years later, in 2014, a new bonan-
za arrived in the form of Bitcoins. One
wintry day, a German cryptocurrency
entrepreneur named Marco Streng
stepped off a plane at Keflavik Interna-
tional Airport. Like most German kids,
he recalls, he had only seen Iceland on
TV, which glorified the frozen nation as
“something from another planet.” Now,
driving from the airport to the old naval
base at Asbru, he encountered a “ghostCYBER PUNKS
Sindri Stefansson (top), the gang’s
leader, and his childhood friend, Hafthor
“Haffi the Pink” Hlynsson.The thieves weren’t
robbing banks. They were
stealing the presses
that print digital money.
DECEMBER 2019 113