Bitcoin Clowns, page 19
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
Maybe he spotted the skepticism on my face. He stopped walking for a second and turned to look at me in the eyes. “Oh, I’m really sorry to have to put your wife and kid through all this, but sometimes you can’t even trust your own cousin. You just can’t trust anyone in our line of work,” he put his arm on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I felt the irony burning under my shirt.
I do have to admit that he had a very good point. For how much financial power RX Clubers control, a person with less integrity would easily succumb to the temptation of money and crossed over to the dark side easily. As my mind was busy formulating, uncontrollably I must add since I was born scattered-brain with an overdeveloped prefrontal cortex for impulsive creative activities, all the million ways of how one could hack the hacker’s group and rob them of their financial resources, Cao continued his introduction of the RX Club. “We have about twenty-nine people here, both men and women from all parts of the country, responsible for different things. They all have traditional careers before they join us. Lawyers, teachers, architects, marketers but mostly there are programmers, just like you. Your talent is grossly needed.” He paused briefly and poked his head through the door of one of the rooms that lined the basement of the rest-stop restaurant. “It’s occupied. Let’s keep going.”
I had to say the place was exceptionally well designed and well maintained for an outpost of a hackers’ co-working space under a road-side public bathroom and junk food restaurant. It was fitted with all the latest furniture that one could find in a Nordics furniture magazine without saying too much ‘IKEA’. After all, the RX Club was not in need of money.
“We play all kinds of roles every minute every day, trying to come up with new ways to penetrate the security systems of our targets and disrupt their daily operations. Max Venture, for example, is responsible for getting in touch with investors and businesses that deal with financial instruments. Damon and Terry, for examples, are on our target list.”
I nodded, now finally grasping the full depth and breadth of Max Venture’s actual operations. Cao was using Max Venture as a front to reach out to unscrupulous businessmen through cooperation and trick them into revealing weak spots in their operations which he could later exploit.
“Unfortunately, the target list only grows longer every day despite our effort. We’ve recently coordinated an attack on the fake trading platform CoinIzon for example, but a new one by the same group of guys cropped up again in less than five days.”
“Fake platforms?”
“Some of them fake everything from their trading volumes to the trading parties, with their own bots and so on. And as you know there are ICOs cropping up left and right with no true underlying technology or value. We also target anyone who uses cryptocurrencies for illegal activities on the side of course, such as Salamander and his Argentinian gang. These are low-hanging fruits and we picked a lot of them cleaned as well. That’s a lot of stuff to work on. That’s why the organization needs you.”
“You guys are playing internet police,” I said.
“No, we’re the blockchain police,” Cao said proudly. “We want to make the financial system of the future is truly distributed, decentralized and truly trustless, because human nature just can’t be trusted.”
“I’m sure you guys thought about it before, but don’t you think that this kind of stuff should just be left to develop on its own? People who got scammed will wise up next time, and organizations that are not built on trust will be forced out of the market eventually by the more reliable competitors. And governments around the world are slowly realizing what is going on in the crypto-world as well…”
“The laws are too slow in catching up with the highly sophisticated technologies and the natural process of capitalistic market forces is just way too painful for regular people who suffered. How many more people do you want to see jump off the buildings in Liujiazui from a mistaken investment because of scams? The RX Club serves to facilitate changes in this realm, and you can’t deny our contributions just because we are an underground society of common, regular people.” Cao answered my question with a reasonably convincing argument that I was deeply impressed. I could not believe that someone, whoever the founder of the RX Club was must be a very charismatic man (or woman) to have so totally brainwashed Cao to work for the cause. I was just finding it extremely odd that Cao had chosen to ignore the fact that by stealing Salamander’s Bitcoin, for example, he got his business partner Philip Zackary killed. And the accountant who got pushed off the building…did that guy Da Ming do it? The guy who Cao claimed to enjoy working with his hands and feet? I had never met the dead, of course, and perhaps they deserved what they got. But still, taking matters into your own hands seemed like playing God to me, and there is nothing so ‘decentralized’ in playing God at all. God-like-figure or organizations are themselves a manifestation of a ‘centralized’ power.
“Ah, a free room at last! This place is busy at night. We have a lot of night-owls among us,” Cao smiled and led me inside a room with only white walls, a white fan, a white desk and a single white chair. “Go on and sit down,” Cao urged me. “Our founder will dial into the teleconference soon. Good luck with the interview!” He smiled and closed the door, locking me in the room so clinical looking I started to worry whether I had actually just been tricked into an isolation room of a mental hospital. While what Cao said was moving and not at all unreasonable, it was still highly wacky, and who knew, perhaps one of us did lose our minds from the stress of living in this mad city.
I sat like an idiot staring at the wall for about five minutes, as I tried to calm myself down. My heart rate was still way above 100/60 beats per minute limits at the moment after suffering from the scare of my life. I meant, no amount of first-person shooter games would prepare one enough for this kind of situation in life. The adults could maybe fend for themselves, but I had a kid with me, which made the whole thing a totally different ball game. I finally understood what real-estate business mogul Feng Lun said about how everyone became equal after they took a sick to the hospital once. You just became a parent, full stop. All parents were the same.
Suddenly the massive blades of the fan in front of me started turning. I held on tightly to the corners of the desk in front of me and started to wonder whether the walls were going to compress together as I was being chopped into burger meats by the giant blender when a holographic image of a Western-looking man appeared in front of me. Despite the deafening noise of the giant rotating blades at breakneck speed, it was not a meat blender but an LED display the size of a full human. I gawked enthralled at the man in 3D in the device waiting for him to speak.
Chapter 36: Hack
“Привет!”
Russian. It was ‘hello’ in Russian. These hackers were always Russians, if not Chinese. I suppose something could be said about internet freedom and people’s ingenuity.
I replied in a rather mocking tone ‘Nihao’ at the guy. He gave me a smirk in reply, satisfied, I supposed, to see that I was not some wuss that could be easily intimidated.
“Welcome to our Chinese headquarters, Jong He,” he said, calling me by my real name directly. It didn’t take a genius to understand that it was a dare, a pronouncement that the ball was in his court. Normally, no hacker should identify each other by their real names over the net as a common courtesy. “I’m the founder of RX Club, Alexander Kushkin.” Real name again. This guy had some balls. He continued, “It’s very nice to finally meet you. You’ve been selected from a pool of more than twenty candidates for your skills and dexterity. I think you could be proud of yourself.”
Really? There was a nineteen out of twenty chance that I wouldn’t be picked, and yet here I was? I lamented my incredibly bad luck.
“I have watched you just now via our live video feed. It appears that you’ve successfully qualified for a temporary membership at the RX Club by showing your loyalty to the club as well. Very good.”
“I don’t believe that I could have actually transferred more Bitcoins out of the account even if I want to, can I?”
The Kushkin guy smiled and said, “A threshold has been applied when the transaction exceeds a certain value, so yes, you’re quite right.”
“Mr. Kushkin, as it appears that I have already passed your test, please let my family go.”
“Nah-uh, not so fast, Jong,” he replied. “In order to convert your membership from a temporary status into a permanent status, you must successfully complete the task we assign to you in the next twenty-four hours.”
I frowned.
“Don’t worry. Your family will be well taken care of while they are here. Should you successfully complete the assignment, you would have shown yourself to be an invaluable member of RX Club and your family is our family. We won’t let anything bad happen to our own people,” he smiled, almost too amiably for a kidnapper. “You should know, of course, that there are consequences should you fail the task, which I won’t bother you with the details for the moment.”
Another threat. I wondered if anyone ever told him that Jong He does not respond well to threats when they were doing his background check on me.
“What’s the task?” I asked the man, getting antsy. With my superior Chinese work ethic and reasonably reliable intelligence, I could do anything if I put my mind to it. Just tell me what it was already.
“You may recall we have our next Judgment Day on the 28th, 5 PM, precisely 24 hours later,” the man looked at the digits on his Apple Watch before continuing. “Like everyone else, you would need to contribute at least a five million dollars to the pot by the end of the day. You may coordinate with others, such as Cao and Da Ming for your first assignment.”
Let us not dwell on the impossibility of creating five million out of thin air in the first place. What I wanted to know was how much of that five million would actually be going into my pocket, and I suspected that the supreme leader of the RX Club would not be very pleased to hear my question.
“In exchange for your service to the RX Club, you would be awarded a permanent membership and you could enjoy access to our vast databases, equipment and networks to work with other experts on projects of your own choices, so long as they align with the group’s vision. You will have access to almost unlimited fund to complete your projects and be protected by our full security system 24/7. Should your identity be exposed, we would provide help to you legally and financially. You may also enjoy asylum within our networks of cooperating countries should push comes to shove. Within the RX Club, you can be a hero, or you can be a villain, but most importantly, you can finally be the person you are born to be, the vigilante behind computers, and use your great passion for technologies to help other people and uphold social justice. Jong, this is a chance of a lifetime. If you want to be the next Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, you can do it without having to worry about anything with us.”
I swallowed hard. The offer seemed too good to be true. Most hackers work alone, but some do work together, because one man’s ability and resources were often limited. Many hackers started hacking doing innocuous stuff because they were curious, but as their skills grew and gathered more and more information from the net, they started to see things they didn’t like, and realized that they might just have the ability to correct it. Before they knew it, they became some sort of online activists, for whatever causes caught their attention and triggered their sense of righteousness, even though in most cases what they did were practically illegal. As a cyber-security expert, while I understood their motivations, I could not agree with their means. I am a white-hat hacker, or at least that is what I want to think of myself, an ethical computer security expert. If you didn’t know, the difference between white-hat and black-hat hackers is that if we both find the same bug, I would either just ignore it or let the organization knows out of goodwill so they could patch it up immediately, while the black-hats would first exploit it and then put a picture of a middle finger on their public website. Now, Kushkin mentioned Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. The debate of whether they are white-hats or black-hats are as old and unresolvable as time, and that is why one can’t argue with the likes of Kushkin, because right or wrong really simply depends on the perspective. Personally, my perspective was a lot simpler: I don’t do anything that would put me in jail and put other people’s lives in danger.
But I was not ready to tell Kushkin how I really felt if he hadn’t figured out who I truly am himself after all the so-called thorough research, and so I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes silence was golden, really.
“So do you have any last question for me before I go?”
“Yes!” I said. “What does RX in RX Club stands for?”
“Did Cao not explain it to you? We are not the RX Club, but the Rx Club, spell capital R, lowercase x. It’s a medical term, a noun that means prescription from a doctor. Rx literally means ‘to take’. We’re the ‘taking’ club, we take resources from the bad guys and weed them out; the world takes our pills and becomes a better place. I personally love this name.” Kushkin seemed very pleased to have the chance to explain it to me. “Anyway, let’s speak again after Judgment Day. I have other matters to attend to. Have fun!” Kushkin winked, and his feed was turned off in seconds, leaving me staring into the rotating blades that used to be a holographic image, my mind on all twelve cylinders contemplating my next moves.
Chapter 37: Heck
I didn't really like to use my brain, not actively at least. It was not because I was lazy (okay, maybe a bit), but because I didn’t want to waste my brain energy for something that was not absolutely necessary. If you’re a Holmes fan then you should know: Sherlock Holmes didn’t like to use his brains for non-essentials, too, and that was why he had Watsons. I might not be Holmes, and it might sound almost science-fiction-like, but when I really use my brain, not only would I get terribly exhausted (One hour of intense brain activity equates to eight hours of physical activities, research shows. So if you think you’re not slim enough, you probably didn’t use your brain enough, sorry for my bluntness.) I would also inevitably create something brilliant that I would later regret. PissCoin was definitely on the top of my list right now. — If I hadn’t created PissCoin, Cao probably wouldn’t have remembered me and abused my name everywhere. Simon probably wouldn’t have forced Teddy to change the mining algo for PissCoin and burn down our lab by accident. He wouldn’t have chased us on the highway out of anger, caused a series of collisions and forced Paula and me to run away. If we hadn’t run away, perhaps we wouldn’t have fallen into the trap Cao set up for us. Was this Domino Effect or Butterfly Effect? It appeared that the outcomes were unpredictable and non-linear, fitting the Butterfly Effect model better than…
“Still thinking about what Kushkin said to you?” Cao put his hand on my shoulder and broke my train of thoughts. “One can’t not be moved after hearing his beautiful speech. I felt so blessed to be able to bask in his presence every time. He’s an amazing guy.”
I mentally shut my ears temporarily to shunt out the stuff coming out of Cao’s mouth. He was so beyond brainwashed I didn’t know whether he could be saved anymore. Funny I had always thought that my loser cousin Cao was more likely to join a multi-layer-marketing firm than actually be working for organizations that attacks and destroys multi-layer-marketing firms, but it appeared that these organizations were both cult-like, regardless of which side he part-took.
“I’m thinking about how the eff I’m going to find five million.”
“Don’t worry. You have us.” Cao led me into the open work-space we passed a while back and set me in front of a computer. “Our colleagues from oversea just sent us the updated target list. You can pick one with assets more than five million to work on.”
I scanned through the list Cao showed me. There were a lot of companies with the word ‘Coin’ in their names, naturally. “What are they?”
Cao squinted at the screen and pointed, “If I recall correctly, these six are shit ICOs.”
“What’s your definition of shit?”
“Kushkin’s people have vetted them thoroughly, don’t you worry. We won’t target the innocents.” Cao looked annoyed at my question. “Da Ming, you answer him.” He waved the muscle-man over.
As a sign of good will, I shook Da Ming’s hand and thanked him for saving us in the lab. I felt like if I have one ally in here, it might just be him. Da Ming only shrugged and took over my mouse.
“Look, look at their website.” He right-clicked on the profile picture of the CEO of CasualCoin and did an image search with the Chrome’s built-in function. The search pulled up the same photo of the guy from a royalty-free photo depository. “Fake CEO picture.”
“And here,” Da Ming clicked open their white paper, copied and pasted it through an anti-plagiarism software installed in the computer. “The whole white paper was copied off of Ethereum’s.”
“And not to forget, CasualCoin offered no solution to real world problem. The world wouldn’t miss it if it was gone.”
“But we’re just going to take their money?”
“The scammers already took people’s money.” Cao chimed in, indignant. “Only the investors are too slow to realize it.”
“What about this one? MedzCoin?”
“Guaranteed return.” Da Ming shook his head and said, “that’s a big red flag. No coin should give you guaranteed return.”
“Damn right.” I couldn’t help but felt impressed by Da Ming’s clear thinking.
