26th January 2026 > > The Dutch & a scam.

tl;dr

The Dutch have got it badly wrong, encouraging us to make the same mistake. A hot wallet owned by the CC Treasury has been scammed – read on for details of how this could possibly have happened.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Investor sentiment leans towards expecting spot BTC ETFs to have another week of outflows. Until that changes BTC price action will be weak.

Occasional Series – Incredibly, this man was not the very worst Governor of the Bank of England

But he is the very worst PM for Canada. It’s a bit like having Ed Davey in charge, and not even Lib Dem party members truthfully want that to happen.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – Capital Gains Tax

The Netherlands is about to embark on a dangerous and deluded experiment. It seems that the Dutch parliament will vote in favour of taxing both realised and unrealised capital gains. It is such a stupidly bad idea I don’t even know where to begin. It is so stupid that we can be confident of wholesale adoption across the EU and the UK at the earliest opportunity.

If you really want to raise productivity and increase prosperity for everyone you would lower the cost of capital for all business by scrapping capital gains tax on investments made from income that has already been taxed. That is the sensible and the morally right thing to do, which is why it will never happen.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – The CC Treasury has been scammed!

Let me talk you through it, to see if there are any lessons to be learned.

On 25th November 2019 I set up a Portis wallet, an online hot wallet maintained by a centralised company. Inherently risky, and not a wallet I ever intended to use, I received an airdrop of 100 FOX coins. That was the reason I signed up. At its price peak of $1.50 in May 2021, these free cryptos were worth $150, but at that time the airdrop had still not vested.

By February 2025, those 100 FOX coins were worth $5, hardly a sum worth bothering with, but in the interests of research I can’t leave these things alone – I wanted to know whether the whole Portis setup was a scam or not, though my assumption veered to the former.

FOX coins are issued on the Ethereum blockchain. On 13th February 2025 I transferred 0.005 ETH worth £8 into my Portis wallet with public key 0xad73c92d84968bab6c3e72fd2debdfbef2adfc77. Attempting to move the 100 FOX coins to an exchange, ETH gas fees at the time were too high, so I left it as it was.

In May 2025, Portis announced it was shutting down, and that its online hot and highly vulnerable wallet would no longer be accessible. However, access to the private key would be made available. I imported the private key into MetaMask and up popped the 100 FOX and the ETH balance of 0.005. All well and good, but this idea that a centralised company had access to the private key must surely be sounding a very large warning siren to all readers.

On 18th January 2026, this wallet was drained of its ETH and FOX, worth a grand total of $16. You can view the transaction here:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3640b7191192b146a75f7fcd930768cbe4fbd37b365fbb0762744cd7508c8940

The relevant extract is this one:

Losing $16 is annoying but the bigger question is, how did this happen?

…

The first port of call is to consider whether my personal procedures for storing private keys has been compromised. That is a definitive no, because my other hot wallets that collectively hold less than $200 of assets would have been drained too.

The next possibility is whether I have been phished. That seems impossible to me regarding this specific wallet – I have never interacted with it except to send ETH to it from another wallet. I did add the private key into MetaMask but given MetaMask’s prominent position in the hot wallet world, I would be surprised if the feral scammers that work for genocidal Putin, mass-murderer Xi, and the portly megalomaniac Jong-Un, focussed on my $16 rather than the other riches on offer.

Which leads me to conclude that my original fear that the centralised organisation that held all the private keys for all Portis wallets has been compromised.

…

So, here is a very urgent task that must be done: if you have any cryptos held in a wallet for which the source private key came from Portis – MOVE THOSE FUNDS RIGHT NOW. Don’t dither nor delay.

Next, what can we learn from this sorry tale?

The most obvious conclusion is that the value of cryptos stored in your hot wallets should be always kept to a minimum. Using a Ledger Nano (preferably the Flex) to secure your crypto assets is the way to go. So long as you never fall victim to scam calls or scam messages urgently advising you to input your secret phrase into a scam website, your cryptos are safe.

The final point is one of the CCC’s long-standing bugbears.

If the UK’s regulatory authority recognised ETFs issued in the US, it would be a simple matter to switch from holding actual BTC and ETH to holding the ETF with no security risk at all. Much like the fact that scrapping CGT is the sensible and moral decision to take thus ensuring it will not happen, the same principle applies to the UK’s non-recognition of US ETFs.