>"At 32, Stefansson is the most famous thief ever to emerge from this polite and friendly island, ranked by the Global Peace Index as the world’s most peaceful nation."

Patently false. So far our most famous criminal would be (Tomas)[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/iceland-murd...] or runner up for any of the various banking / cartel that siphoned money out of the country during the crash. Sindri doesn't even register with most people here except as a petty thug. Bjarni Ben the old prime minister or Sigmundur David both appeared in the Panama Papers here as well.

>It was cryptocurrency, ironically, that helped save Iceland after the bankers bankrupted it. I have no idea where the author got this but Cryptocurrency has provided any material benefit to Iceland in any form or shape, I say this even though I'm a BTC advocate. First it was our fishing industry which was able to sell high abroad and return with Euros to exchange for ISK and then it was the tourism boom (as much as we all hate it here) from 2014-onwards. Crypto currency mining here doesn't employ anyone, doesn't get aggressively taxed (it should) and often gets industrial market rates on large enough consumption (just like the aluminum smelters).

Oh and to correct another misunderstood thing about Iceland we get around 70% of our power generation from HYDROpower not Geothermal like everyone things (that goes towards home heating mostly). Which means .......Dams, lots and lots of dams flooding areas of Iceland and destroying the nature the tourists come to see.

> Today, Bitcoin mines consume more energy than all of Iceland’s homes combined.

This is just repeated ad-nauseam abroad now more than any other statement and its entirely attributed to a single electrical engineer for the electric producer company who was commenting on if the building trend kept at the same rate back in 2018. It didn't obviously but any idiot journalist now stumbles across some _other_ article saying it so they just repeat now too. Smelting consumes FAR more electricity here than any other industry.

These are just a handful, nobody likes these guys here, no one is cheering for them we're mostly embarrassed that they're gleefully unaware of badly they make Iceland look international as the posterboys for big, dumb, meat-head rubes, that were used by a foriegn criminal who never got caught. Classic Icelandic hnakkar.