Bitcoin paradise? Briton creates ‘crypto utopia’ in South Pacific

For the past 12 years Anthony Welch and his partner Theresa have been living a Robinson Crusoe life alone on a South Pacific island mostly untouched by humanity.

Welch, a retired British property investor, hopes the tranquility will soon be shattered by 21,000 cryptocurrency investors he is trying to convince to move to his island and form a regulation-free "crypto utopia".

Under Welch's plan, the 3 million sq metre (32 million sq ft) island, which is part of the Vanuatu archipelago between Australia and Fiji, would be transformed from 90% undisturbed rainforest into a "sustainable smart city", filled with multistorey apartment blocks and offices for cryptocurrency investors from around the world.

Welch, who has renamed the island from its native name Lataro to Satoshi (in a nod to Satoshi Nakamoto the pseudonym of the person who invented bitcoin), has joined forces with cryptocurrency evangelists to create a "blockchain-based democracy" and "the crypto capital of the world".

However, Welch will first have to unwind his previous marketing of the island as a "wildlife nature reserve" home to rare giant crabs.

In his previous attempt to sell the island for $12m (£9m), Lataro is described as an ecological paradise "covered in lush rainforests, together with a wonderful array of flora and fauna that's been here for thousands of years undisturbed and will surely make anyone believe they have gone back in time".

A video promoting the island for sale in 2017 boasts that the 4 miles of "pristine coral reef surrounding the island is a marine conservation area" that "teems with beautiful fish and coral life". It says only a handful of people have ever dived at the reef and "most parts of it have never been explored".