What is a crypto for a crypta?

I thought for a long time that buying crypto is less like an investment, as is usually advertised and is more comparable to gambling. There are the promises to quickly get rich, the gamified trading platforms and the sheer unpredictability of the markets.

only when I moderated the latest series of the Tech Tonic Podcast of the FT did I realize how profound and disturbing the parallels are. "A Sceptic’s Guide to Crypto" took me on a wild journey, from Monoman Tech billionaires in Virginia to factual livestock breeders in Wyoming. But in the Scottish Borders, about 20 miles south of Edinburgh, I came across Castle Craig, an impressive manor house from the 18th century, which has been used as a rehabilitation center for more than three decades.

Castle Craig deals with all types of addictions, from alcoholism to compulsive gambling, but in 2016 it was the first rehab clinic that diagnosed and treated crypto. Since then it has worked with almost 250 patients and the number has grown every year.

The person responsible for the crypto clinic is Tony Marini, a 57-year-old Schotte Italian who uses the same 12-step program as he is to treat gambling. Marini, himself a former player, alcoholic and cocaine who has been in recourse for 17 years, tells me that, as soon as he started exploring crypto after this first patient in 2016, he was captivated.

"I spent hours looking at different cryptos and went back to check the prices," he says. "I was obsessed ... my brain was brought exactly to the same place where gambling would bring me." He almost put some money into it before realizing the dangerous path he hit.

A patient describes how he set several alarms on his phone so that he can check the prices all night

Of course not everyone is addicted to crypto trade, but it is not difficult to understand why it could be addictive, with its intoxicating mixture of volatile price movements, a market that never sleeps, an apparently endless stock of crypto token that can be bet on-more than 21,000-and an active online community.

But crypto has a problem that clearly does not have this as such as such a game of chance: People often don't know what they get involved with, even if they are addicted. There is no specific area that regulates this. There is no "beCryptoaware.org". The British Advertising Standards Agency finally tightens its rules for crypto advertising that appears everywhere, but they will only come into force next year.

"People don't think they have a problem with crypto, and that's the biggest problem," says Marini. "People who use crypto do not know that they are playing ... because it is not regulated."

Most of Marini's cryptopatants come with other dependencies - typically cocaine and amphetamines that help users stay awake while playing at the markets, and only when they start to discuss their behavior patterns do they recognize that they are also crypto -dependent.

A former patient who was already in recovery due to alcohol and drug addiction describes how he set several alarms on his phone so that he could wake up all night to check the crypto prices. He soon found his way back into alcohol and cocaine. Marini sees this as another example of cross addiction, in which one addiction drives another.

Usually I enjoy a kind of vague to make fun of the toxicity of the cryptoculture, especially if it is directed against “no-cooin” like me. But I don't enjoy stories like this. Krypto may be dressed in Memes and Dogecoin-T-Shirts, but it is time to see what it is: a rather dangerous form of gambling.

Jemima Kelly is FT columnist