Bitcoin Clowns, page 25
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
“And when would the time-out occurs?”
“Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. The longest I have heard was three days. It all depends on the protocol of the wallet he used.”
“I don’t get why you all young people are so obsessed with these cryptocurrencies,” Lt. Wu said, “How could anyone trust a system that takes your money without any certainty of when it would spit it back out?! Would you go to a McDonald’s and buy with it when it’s unclear whether the cashier would receive your coins and give you your burger in one day or three? It’s so absurd!”
I liked her analogy, but it was what it was, and in this case, the more congested McDonald’s was, the better.
“Jong!” It was Marv’s voice. She had snatched the phone back from Lt. Wu, hopefully without any consequences. “Where are you? Are you still in Bilious?!”
“I was…but not anymore, why?” I squinted through the windows to try to locate ourselves.
“Could you see the exterior of the Shanghai Tower from where you are?”
“Hmm…maybe? Why?” I turned my head around to find the tallest building in the whole of China, and the second tallest in the world. It should be pretty easy to spot. “I see it, what of it?”
“Look!” That was all Marv said and her agitated attitude was alarming. There was indeed a strange image now being displayed on the curved LED wall of the Shanghai Tower. Axe and Armando’s eyes followed my gaze.
“What’s on it?” It was just a bit past two o’clock in the afternoon. The sunlight made it hard for us to read what was on display, but I immediately recognized it to be the Chrome application of Ledger Wallet which interface design was unmistakable. Someone was broadcasting their screen activity.
“Is Mr. Olaf’s last name Lybeck?!” Marv asked me.
“Yes, his last name is Lybeck!” I replied, “How’d you know?”
“It says O. Lybeck at the top of the screen!”
Right, if someone logged into their Google account, Chrome would display their username at the top of the browser.
Through the noise of the engine I cried to the pilot to go closer. Mr. Armando gave his nod of approval when the pilot asked for confirmation from the boss. He was just as curious as I was what was going on.
Our helicopter swirled around and went back towards Lujiazui where the Shanghai Tower was located. We could see the giant mouse cursor clicking into its Bitcoin wallet and the user O. Lybeck was entering the address of a receiving wallet on the BTC transfer form. I hadn’t recognized the address, but it was a no-brainer what was happening. Cao had coaxed Mr. Olaf into sending him hush-money after all!
“Nooooo! Please don’t do it!!!” Frantically, I looked up Mr. Olaf’s phone number in my cell and tried to reach him before he could click the Send button, but the call went unanswered. I dialed again, cursing under my breath at Mr. Olaf’s lapse in judgment that, now looking at the screen, seemed to cost him a staggering 32,821 BTC (around 220 million USD at the time of writing).
In a few seconds, a pop-up that said ‘Verifying transaction’ changed into ‘Sending Succeeded!’ on the giant screen.
“Arghh!!” I let out a howl of grief. I didn’t care for Mr. Olaf’s money, or what would have actually been Bilious’s Bitcoin reserve from our mining farms which I had only found out not too long ago. I was just flabbergasted that he would rather trust a criminal to keep his secrets for him than to tell me what was happening. “Thanks Marv, I saw it. It’s bad.” I bid her farewell and hung up, still didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had been taken ‘hostage’ by the kindness of a stranger and was now heading to Buenos Aries. At least being American, Marv wouldn’t need a visa to visit Argentina. When I came to think of it, Argentina was actually closer to home than China for her. I tried my utmost to console myself that the situation was not as bad as it sounded.
“Did it just say thirty-two thousand BTC?!” Mr. Armando was moved to ecstasy by what he saw.
“Yes,” Axe might be old, but he had keen eyes and a clear mind. He confirmed Mr. Armando’s statement and added, “It’s all going to the same guy that stole Salamander’s Bitcoins. The same guy that tried to kill us just now.”
“What?!” That jolted the tiger out of his sleeping stupor. Mr. Armando was suddenly overcome with rage. Blinded by anger, he climbed to the front like a woken gorilla, shoving Axe and me to the sides of our seat along his way and yelled his order to the pilot over the loud noise of the rotating blades, “Go back! We’ll go back and kill that bastard! Turn the chopper around!!”
I watched the pilot nodded okay in horror, unsure now what my position on the matter of turning the plane around was. If I had been sick from the fact that my cousin was cold-hearted enough to commit manslaughter for just some pieces of codes, I was now even sicker for not being able to stop him from being hunted down by a South American Mafioso, condemning myself to be an equally vengeful accomplice to murder. If only I had the power to print money out of thin air and satisfy the greed of men and smooth out the unequal distribution of wealth, then perhaps all of this violence and potential bloodshed could have been avoided. This was the whole concept of a decentralized currency to begin with, although perhaps not even Satoshi Nakamoto realized the power of what he had dreamt up, but nee, in fact I already had the power vested in me and my Python-written PissCoin. It just appeared to have broken more things than it healed instead.— Are humans incapable of playing by the rules, even when technology had leveled out the playing field? I retched on the floor involuntarily, unsure whether it was from the shaking plane or the shaky foundation of our society supposedly built on human trust. The stench accelerated the pilot’s determination to get to the destination quicker, cutting the time for my fruitless reflection.
Chapter 44: Army
There was no use to stop Armando. Somewhere in his brain he had turned on the kill mode. I watched him unpacked an AK-47 from its bag and jumped out of the helicopter as soon as we landed back on the roof of Bilious. Axe jumped out after him, holding a handgun Armando gave him. He was equally worked up by the upcoming manhunt. I stood up and grabbed his arm as my last attempt to stop the madness, but he flung me off and said, “You’d better stay here. This is nothing for a geek like you.”
It was then I realized he had misunderstood me. “Please don’t kill Cao! He’s my family.” I found myself pleading for my cousin’s life, but Axe had already leaped off the chopper after Armando.
“You know what you can do, China boy? Go get a bucket of water and clean the mess you’ve made!” The pilot jabbed his chin towards the disgusting poodle of puke on the floor. “There’s a blue plastic bucket and a short mop at the back.” I clambered out of the chopper and landed on Bilious once again on my two wobbly legs with a bucket and a mop in my arms.
“Don’t take too long! The guys might come back soon!” The pilot cautioned, in case I had forgotten about the time and was left behind.
And so that was my chance. I scrambled as quickly as I could down the fire escape and went all the way down the 101-floored building without stopping. I thought I heard gun fires when I passed by the 72nd floor but I couldn’t care less. I wasn’t going to let them take me to Buenos Aries, thank you but no thanks.
“Hey! Hey! Stop you!” A police officer was interrogating the security guard at the lobby, likely called to the scene when they noticed the earlier shots coming from our floor. He spotted me sprinting across the hall suspicious and tried to stop me, but I hadn’t the time to be stopped. I knew I probably shouldn’t have done it but I did throw my bucket behind me and saw the poor officer fell over the rolling bucket like a tripping acrobat. Luckily I had the mop still in my hand and I used it to cover my face as I scurried off.
“Okay, now where do I go? Where can I go?” I hadn’t given this much thought, and suddenly I regretted having indirectly attacked the policeman. I stood in awe on the street staring at the wall of the Shanghai Tower just a few hundred meters from me. Mr. Olaf had already navigated out of his wallet and was now browsing the web for news of his wrongdoings and reloading Bloomberg news every thirty seconds to see if the news about our mining farms broke, still oblivious to the fact that the entire world could see what was on his computer.
The face of Prime Minister Modi suddenly appeared on the screen with our President. The two men shook hands and posed for photographs.
“Of course! I should have thought of it earlier!” In the direst of times, who do you rely on to save your ass if not your equally powerful rivalry slash ally neighbor?
Fifteen minutes later, I was in the office of Yakshit Bank of India, explaining my situation to the CEO of the bank Mr. Harikiran, an old friend from my last debacle with the scheming Mr. Qi that almost got me arrested for embezzlement.
“That’s a sticky situation you’ve gotten yourself into, John!” He said, after listening to my story, “more sticky than my woman’s skin under the Mumbai heat in summer.”
I nodded in agreement with his analogy despite my inability to verify it.
“But you’re in luck. We have just recruited a few blockchain engineers from India. And if they’re half as good as they claimed they are, then they should be able to help you. Come!”
The ‘few’ engineers that Mr. Harikiran referred to had turned out to be more or less an army of about fifty or so men and a few women. They occupied almost half of the floor. The sitting arrangement reminded me uncannily of a call center. I marveled at the manpower at Mr. Harikiran’s disposal. “Wow.”
These guys were smart beyond words. They understood the problem almost immediately, which was really two prongs: to stall Cao’s transaction to Simon Li, and that of Mr. Olaf’s transaction to Cao as long as possible such that they both get timed out and reversed eventually. The group divided themselves into two teams and started hurling different attacks at the Bitcoin network. It was atrocious but not vile in its motivation, although none less scary.
I sat at the end of the room staring at the group of men and women running around consulting each other in between feverish typing on their computers, conducting what would probably be the largest coordinated assault ever to the system. As I sat there exhausted, glossy-eyed and in pain, I searched deep inside my soul trying to figure out whether I really wanted them to succeed or not, because that would mean that a famous and much dreaded so-called ‘51% attack’ was not necessary to corrupt the entire system. We only needed to take down some nodes and slow down the others, to achieve our goals.
“The confirmation mechanism is a feature of the system,” Mr. Harikiran said to me suddenly, sipping his daily serving of goat milk which I had declined earlier, “not a bug,” he reassured me not to get too hung up on what we were doing. I derived only a slight comfort from his optimistic engineer’s viewpoint.
Chapter 45: Games
All stories came to an end, and so did this one.
After the good people of Yakshit Bank worked extra hard on clogging up the Bitcoin network, the media had officially announced that Bitcoin was dead, for the 500th time since the 9th year Satoshi Nakamoto mined the Genesis Block. The whole of cryptocurrency market fell to an all-time low, sparking further panic sell-off left and right.
While we were busy at the bank, the S.W.A.T. team had apparently found Axe and Dumbo locked in a surprisingly non-violent cake and cream throwing fight like two kindergarten kids in the Bilious cafeteria kitchen and arrested them both. I supposed Axe couldn’t bear to get rid of Dumbo forever just yet despite the young man’s betrayal.
Armando though had gotten into a shooting frenzy when his search for Cao had come up empty. He exchanged fire with the S.W.A.T. guys and injured two men, until he was shot in the trigger finger by one sharpshooter none other than our Pudong Hero Tam Seven’s very own Brother Fei who came to back the guys up, writing Armando’s finger off the trigger entirely. The S.W.A.T. guys swooped into Rebecca’s office and tasered the shit out of him until his massive body toppled to the ground and crushed her desk on his way down. He was handed over to the Interpol very soon after, and Brother Fei got a recommendation for promotion.
On the second day, the Police had gotten enough evidence from the conversations recorded by the surveillance app on my phone to obtain a warrant and raided Cao’s hideout under the highway restaurant. They found his companions, the web developer and the graphic designer still locked in the bathroom (Shit, I had forgotten about them completely!) By the time they were found, they had already been locked up without any food and clean water for days. They were almost grateful that someone called the cops on them. But Da Ming and Cao were nowhere to be found in the complex.
It was only on the third day that Cao was arrested in a very anti-climatic fashion when he was trying to coerce a hotel staff in a third-tier city to take his Bitcoins as payment for his room. He had run out of cash along the way, and was running berserk around town looking for a place that would take him and his wealth of coins. Everyone thought he was a scammer trying to take advantage of their lack of understanding about cryptocurrencies, as the new wave of giant cautionary red banners flying around the country warned. Multiple people had called the city patrols and they eventually arrested him and locked him up in their low-security detention room with other petty thieves for the three nights until they finally got wind of what he did in Shanghai. No one came to save him. He was transferred without any hiccup back to the city.
“You can’t stop someone like me,” Cao explained to the judges on his trial arrogantly. “I’m unstoppable. The new financial system is unstoppable, and you can’t do anything about it with your laws and your locks. You can put me inside a jail cell, but you can’t lock up my ideals. My people are out there, continuing what I do, with their computers in their homes, in their offices, in their dorm rooms. We are everywhere. We can’t be stopped.”
The judge seemed unfazed by his bold speech. “What is your point in all this?!”
“Financial justice, erect and establish a completely new financial system that is outside the control of any government and big corporation in the world beyond the imagination of your narrowed world view.”
“You targeted the Norwegian Bilious Banks in order to restore what you referred to as ‘financial justice’?”
Cao didn’t answer but smirked. Him and I both knew that he did much more than just attacking Bilious, but despite the digital footprints on the blockchains, it was hard for the current judicial limited rules and regulation on cryptocurrency to determine how to deal with rogue users like Cao and what was admissible as evidence in court. In fact, the only reason why Cao was here was because we had very clear recordings of him blackmailing Mr. Olaf and threatening to kill me.
My uncle wept when Cao’s ten year’s sentence was announced. My very own father had chosen to ignore me for a week because of my role in this whole thing, despite the fact that I was clearly a victim.
But he was not the only one who hated me. Little Buddha hadn’t forgiven me yet for my somewhat innocent involvement with the crash of PI2S-Coin, but his attitude towards me returned to normal, as if nothing happened, after I announced the fact to set up a PissCoin Foundation, a foundation that relied on volunteers much like that of Bitcoin to continue improving the original PissCoin without the meddling of any central figure. Mr. Harikiran bought a large chunk of PissCoin from the market immediately at a very low price despite my advice against it. The reputation of his bank in India drew a lot of new investors across South East Asia to PissCoin and the price shot up ten thousand percent in a few days. It ended up stabilizing somewhere around 0.000002 USD, thus making Little Buddha a little golden Buddha and a college drop-out as a consequence now that he had made up way more than he needed for his university tuition, much to my chagrin. The little guy launched himself fully into the career of sitting at home ‘day’ trading 24/7 because the crypto markets never end, forgoing his original plan of becoming a psychologist entirely. (I must say I felt a ping of relief when I heard that.) He got more and more emboldened and outspoken in the Chinese crypto-circle every day. And once he donated a hundred USD in PissCoins to me in a publicity sting and announced it on Weibo with the status ‘That’s what a brother would do for each other’, as a mockery of how I, as the founder of the PissCoin, did not even own a single piece himself. It was in fact a revenge for the fact that I refused to send him coins back then in times of need. I let my charitable girlfriend dealt with the donation however way she liked, and she donated it to the Rainbow Kid’s Gender-Neutral Toilets Initiative in China (I didn’t even know that exist until she told me), because she said PissCoin should be used for something related to personal hygiene. Well, you get the idea.
Because Little Buddha was so busy attending all the fancy crypto-conference and networking events in the company of other like-minded over-zealous crypto-investors, he hadn’t had much time for us anymore. He even stopped coming to our soccer games in the middle of the season. Kelvin, who was not a regular member of the team, finally got his chance to get off the bench and played as a regular member after LB left. He almost never touched the ball, but he seemed to be benefiting from the extra exercise. He looked a lot less gloomy and sarcastic in general. It was only after a while that I heard he had actually become a crypto-billionaire himself, because he did hold on to a small amount of PissCoins and survived the lull. His dad Mr. Zhang let him keep the profit after he returned the capital he took from the company. Unlike Little Buddha, Kelvin was very hush-hush about the whole thing, letting no one except the Tesla sales rep knew about it in order to get on the waiting list for their 2020 Roaster.
***
“Here we are again”, Axe looked at me from the other side of the dirty glass pane at the visitor center of the Yibin Chuannan Prison. “Thanks for coming. I don’t get a lot of real visitors,” he smiled amiably at me, with not a bit of enmity in his voice. Perhaps he realized that he was most at home in this place, or perhaps he already had a plan to get out as we speak. You never know with a man like him.
“Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. The longest I have heard was three days. It all depends on the protocol of the wallet he used.”
“I don’t get why you all young people are so obsessed with these cryptocurrencies,” Lt. Wu said, “How could anyone trust a system that takes your money without any certainty of when it would spit it back out?! Would you go to a McDonald’s and buy with it when it’s unclear whether the cashier would receive your coins and give you your burger in one day or three? It’s so absurd!”
I liked her analogy, but it was what it was, and in this case, the more congested McDonald’s was, the better.
“Jong!” It was Marv’s voice. She had snatched the phone back from Lt. Wu, hopefully without any consequences. “Where are you? Are you still in Bilious?!”
“I was…but not anymore, why?” I squinted through the windows to try to locate ourselves.
“Could you see the exterior of the Shanghai Tower from where you are?”
“Hmm…maybe? Why?” I turned my head around to find the tallest building in the whole of China, and the second tallest in the world. It should be pretty easy to spot. “I see it, what of it?”
“Look!” That was all Marv said and her agitated attitude was alarming. There was indeed a strange image now being displayed on the curved LED wall of the Shanghai Tower. Axe and Armando’s eyes followed my gaze.
“What’s on it?” It was just a bit past two o’clock in the afternoon. The sunlight made it hard for us to read what was on display, but I immediately recognized it to be the Chrome application of Ledger Wallet which interface design was unmistakable. Someone was broadcasting their screen activity.
“Is Mr. Olaf’s last name Lybeck?!” Marv asked me.
“Yes, his last name is Lybeck!” I replied, “How’d you know?”
“It says O. Lybeck at the top of the screen!”
Right, if someone logged into their Google account, Chrome would display their username at the top of the browser.
Through the noise of the engine I cried to the pilot to go closer. Mr. Armando gave his nod of approval when the pilot asked for confirmation from the boss. He was just as curious as I was what was going on.
Our helicopter swirled around and went back towards Lujiazui where the Shanghai Tower was located. We could see the giant mouse cursor clicking into its Bitcoin wallet and the user O. Lybeck was entering the address of a receiving wallet on the BTC transfer form. I hadn’t recognized the address, but it was a no-brainer what was happening. Cao had coaxed Mr. Olaf into sending him hush-money after all!
“Nooooo! Please don’t do it!!!” Frantically, I looked up Mr. Olaf’s phone number in my cell and tried to reach him before he could click the Send button, but the call went unanswered. I dialed again, cursing under my breath at Mr. Olaf’s lapse in judgment that, now looking at the screen, seemed to cost him a staggering 32,821 BTC (around 220 million USD at the time of writing).
In a few seconds, a pop-up that said ‘Verifying transaction’ changed into ‘Sending Succeeded!’ on the giant screen.
“Arghh!!” I let out a howl of grief. I didn’t care for Mr. Olaf’s money, or what would have actually been Bilious’s Bitcoin reserve from our mining farms which I had only found out not too long ago. I was just flabbergasted that he would rather trust a criminal to keep his secrets for him than to tell me what was happening. “Thanks Marv, I saw it. It’s bad.” I bid her farewell and hung up, still didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had been taken ‘hostage’ by the kindness of a stranger and was now heading to Buenos Aries. At least being American, Marv wouldn’t need a visa to visit Argentina. When I came to think of it, Argentina was actually closer to home than China for her. I tried my utmost to console myself that the situation was not as bad as it sounded.
“Did it just say thirty-two thousand BTC?!” Mr. Armando was moved to ecstasy by what he saw.
“Yes,” Axe might be old, but he had keen eyes and a clear mind. He confirmed Mr. Armando’s statement and added, “It’s all going to the same guy that stole Salamander’s Bitcoins. The same guy that tried to kill us just now.”
“What?!” That jolted the tiger out of his sleeping stupor. Mr. Armando was suddenly overcome with rage. Blinded by anger, he climbed to the front like a woken gorilla, shoving Axe and me to the sides of our seat along his way and yelled his order to the pilot over the loud noise of the rotating blades, “Go back! We’ll go back and kill that bastard! Turn the chopper around!!”
I watched the pilot nodded okay in horror, unsure now what my position on the matter of turning the plane around was. If I had been sick from the fact that my cousin was cold-hearted enough to commit manslaughter for just some pieces of codes, I was now even sicker for not being able to stop him from being hunted down by a South American Mafioso, condemning myself to be an equally vengeful accomplice to murder. If only I had the power to print money out of thin air and satisfy the greed of men and smooth out the unequal distribution of wealth, then perhaps all of this violence and potential bloodshed could have been avoided. This was the whole concept of a decentralized currency to begin with, although perhaps not even Satoshi Nakamoto realized the power of what he had dreamt up, but nee, in fact I already had the power vested in me and my Python-written PissCoin. It just appeared to have broken more things than it healed instead.— Are humans incapable of playing by the rules, even when technology had leveled out the playing field? I retched on the floor involuntarily, unsure whether it was from the shaking plane or the shaky foundation of our society supposedly built on human trust. The stench accelerated the pilot’s determination to get to the destination quicker, cutting the time for my fruitless reflection.
Chapter 44: Army
There was no use to stop Armando. Somewhere in his brain he had turned on the kill mode. I watched him unpacked an AK-47 from its bag and jumped out of the helicopter as soon as we landed back on the roof of Bilious. Axe jumped out after him, holding a handgun Armando gave him. He was equally worked up by the upcoming manhunt. I stood up and grabbed his arm as my last attempt to stop the madness, but he flung me off and said, “You’d better stay here. This is nothing for a geek like you.”
It was then I realized he had misunderstood me. “Please don’t kill Cao! He’s my family.” I found myself pleading for my cousin’s life, but Axe had already leaped off the chopper after Armando.
“You know what you can do, China boy? Go get a bucket of water and clean the mess you’ve made!” The pilot jabbed his chin towards the disgusting poodle of puke on the floor. “There’s a blue plastic bucket and a short mop at the back.” I clambered out of the chopper and landed on Bilious once again on my two wobbly legs with a bucket and a mop in my arms.
“Don’t take too long! The guys might come back soon!” The pilot cautioned, in case I had forgotten about the time and was left behind.
And so that was my chance. I scrambled as quickly as I could down the fire escape and went all the way down the 101-floored building without stopping. I thought I heard gun fires when I passed by the 72nd floor but I couldn’t care less. I wasn’t going to let them take me to Buenos Aries, thank you but no thanks.
“Hey! Hey! Stop you!” A police officer was interrogating the security guard at the lobby, likely called to the scene when they noticed the earlier shots coming from our floor. He spotted me sprinting across the hall suspicious and tried to stop me, but I hadn’t the time to be stopped. I knew I probably shouldn’t have done it but I did throw my bucket behind me and saw the poor officer fell over the rolling bucket like a tripping acrobat. Luckily I had the mop still in my hand and I used it to cover my face as I scurried off.
“Okay, now where do I go? Where can I go?” I hadn’t given this much thought, and suddenly I regretted having indirectly attacked the policeman. I stood in awe on the street staring at the wall of the Shanghai Tower just a few hundred meters from me. Mr. Olaf had already navigated out of his wallet and was now browsing the web for news of his wrongdoings and reloading Bloomberg news every thirty seconds to see if the news about our mining farms broke, still oblivious to the fact that the entire world could see what was on his computer.
The face of Prime Minister Modi suddenly appeared on the screen with our President. The two men shook hands and posed for photographs.
“Of course! I should have thought of it earlier!” In the direst of times, who do you rely on to save your ass if not your equally powerful rivalry slash ally neighbor?
Fifteen minutes later, I was in the office of Yakshit Bank of India, explaining my situation to the CEO of the bank Mr. Harikiran, an old friend from my last debacle with the scheming Mr. Qi that almost got me arrested for embezzlement.
“That’s a sticky situation you’ve gotten yourself into, John!” He said, after listening to my story, “more sticky than my woman’s skin under the Mumbai heat in summer.”
I nodded in agreement with his analogy despite my inability to verify it.
“But you’re in luck. We have just recruited a few blockchain engineers from India. And if they’re half as good as they claimed they are, then they should be able to help you. Come!”
The ‘few’ engineers that Mr. Harikiran referred to had turned out to be more or less an army of about fifty or so men and a few women. They occupied almost half of the floor. The sitting arrangement reminded me uncannily of a call center. I marveled at the manpower at Mr. Harikiran’s disposal. “Wow.”
These guys were smart beyond words. They understood the problem almost immediately, which was really two prongs: to stall Cao’s transaction to Simon Li, and that of Mr. Olaf’s transaction to Cao as long as possible such that they both get timed out and reversed eventually. The group divided themselves into two teams and started hurling different attacks at the Bitcoin network. It was atrocious but not vile in its motivation, although none less scary.
I sat at the end of the room staring at the group of men and women running around consulting each other in between feverish typing on their computers, conducting what would probably be the largest coordinated assault ever to the system. As I sat there exhausted, glossy-eyed and in pain, I searched deep inside my soul trying to figure out whether I really wanted them to succeed or not, because that would mean that a famous and much dreaded so-called ‘51% attack’ was not necessary to corrupt the entire system. We only needed to take down some nodes and slow down the others, to achieve our goals.
“The confirmation mechanism is a feature of the system,” Mr. Harikiran said to me suddenly, sipping his daily serving of goat milk which I had declined earlier, “not a bug,” he reassured me not to get too hung up on what we were doing. I derived only a slight comfort from his optimistic engineer’s viewpoint.
Chapter 45: Games
All stories came to an end, and so did this one.
After the good people of Yakshit Bank worked extra hard on clogging up the Bitcoin network, the media had officially announced that Bitcoin was dead, for the 500th time since the 9th year Satoshi Nakamoto mined the Genesis Block. The whole of cryptocurrency market fell to an all-time low, sparking further panic sell-off left and right.
While we were busy at the bank, the S.W.A.T. team had apparently found Axe and Dumbo locked in a surprisingly non-violent cake and cream throwing fight like two kindergarten kids in the Bilious cafeteria kitchen and arrested them both. I supposed Axe couldn’t bear to get rid of Dumbo forever just yet despite the young man’s betrayal.
Armando though had gotten into a shooting frenzy when his search for Cao had come up empty. He exchanged fire with the S.W.A.T. guys and injured two men, until he was shot in the trigger finger by one sharpshooter none other than our Pudong Hero Tam Seven’s very own Brother Fei who came to back the guys up, writing Armando’s finger off the trigger entirely. The S.W.A.T. guys swooped into Rebecca’s office and tasered the shit out of him until his massive body toppled to the ground and crushed her desk on his way down. He was handed over to the Interpol very soon after, and Brother Fei got a recommendation for promotion.
On the second day, the Police had gotten enough evidence from the conversations recorded by the surveillance app on my phone to obtain a warrant and raided Cao’s hideout under the highway restaurant. They found his companions, the web developer and the graphic designer still locked in the bathroom (Shit, I had forgotten about them completely!) By the time they were found, they had already been locked up without any food and clean water for days. They were almost grateful that someone called the cops on them. But Da Ming and Cao were nowhere to be found in the complex.
It was only on the third day that Cao was arrested in a very anti-climatic fashion when he was trying to coerce a hotel staff in a third-tier city to take his Bitcoins as payment for his room. He had run out of cash along the way, and was running berserk around town looking for a place that would take him and his wealth of coins. Everyone thought he was a scammer trying to take advantage of their lack of understanding about cryptocurrencies, as the new wave of giant cautionary red banners flying around the country warned. Multiple people had called the city patrols and they eventually arrested him and locked him up in their low-security detention room with other petty thieves for the three nights until they finally got wind of what he did in Shanghai. No one came to save him. He was transferred without any hiccup back to the city.
“You can’t stop someone like me,” Cao explained to the judges on his trial arrogantly. “I’m unstoppable. The new financial system is unstoppable, and you can’t do anything about it with your laws and your locks. You can put me inside a jail cell, but you can’t lock up my ideals. My people are out there, continuing what I do, with their computers in their homes, in their offices, in their dorm rooms. We are everywhere. We can’t be stopped.”
The judge seemed unfazed by his bold speech. “What is your point in all this?!”
“Financial justice, erect and establish a completely new financial system that is outside the control of any government and big corporation in the world beyond the imagination of your narrowed world view.”
“You targeted the Norwegian Bilious Banks in order to restore what you referred to as ‘financial justice’?”
Cao didn’t answer but smirked. Him and I both knew that he did much more than just attacking Bilious, but despite the digital footprints on the blockchains, it was hard for the current judicial limited rules and regulation on cryptocurrency to determine how to deal with rogue users like Cao and what was admissible as evidence in court. In fact, the only reason why Cao was here was because we had very clear recordings of him blackmailing Mr. Olaf and threatening to kill me.
My uncle wept when Cao’s ten year’s sentence was announced. My very own father had chosen to ignore me for a week because of my role in this whole thing, despite the fact that I was clearly a victim.
But he was not the only one who hated me. Little Buddha hadn’t forgiven me yet for my somewhat innocent involvement with the crash of PI2S-Coin, but his attitude towards me returned to normal, as if nothing happened, after I announced the fact to set up a PissCoin Foundation, a foundation that relied on volunteers much like that of Bitcoin to continue improving the original PissCoin without the meddling of any central figure. Mr. Harikiran bought a large chunk of PissCoin from the market immediately at a very low price despite my advice against it. The reputation of his bank in India drew a lot of new investors across South East Asia to PissCoin and the price shot up ten thousand percent in a few days. It ended up stabilizing somewhere around 0.000002 USD, thus making Little Buddha a little golden Buddha and a college drop-out as a consequence now that he had made up way more than he needed for his university tuition, much to my chagrin. The little guy launched himself fully into the career of sitting at home ‘day’ trading 24/7 because the crypto markets never end, forgoing his original plan of becoming a psychologist entirely. (I must say I felt a ping of relief when I heard that.) He got more and more emboldened and outspoken in the Chinese crypto-circle every day. And once he donated a hundred USD in PissCoins to me in a publicity sting and announced it on Weibo with the status ‘That’s what a brother would do for each other’, as a mockery of how I, as the founder of the PissCoin, did not even own a single piece himself. It was in fact a revenge for the fact that I refused to send him coins back then in times of need. I let my charitable girlfriend dealt with the donation however way she liked, and she donated it to the Rainbow Kid’s Gender-Neutral Toilets Initiative in China (I didn’t even know that exist until she told me), because she said PissCoin should be used for something related to personal hygiene. Well, you get the idea.
Because Little Buddha was so busy attending all the fancy crypto-conference and networking events in the company of other like-minded over-zealous crypto-investors, he hadn’t had much time for us anymore. He even stopped coming to our soccer games in the middle of the season. Kelvin, who was not a regular member of the team, finally got his chance to get off the bench and played as a regular member after LB left. He almost never touched the ball, but he seemed to be benefiting from the extra exercise. He looked a lot less gloomy and sarcastic in general. It was only after a while that I heard he had actually become a crypto-billionaire himself, because he did hold on to a small amount of PissCoins and survived the lull. His dad Mr. Zhang let him keep the profit after he returned the capital he took from the company. Unlike Little Buddha, Kelvin was very hush-hush about the whole thing, letting no one except the Tesla sales rep knew about it in order to get on the waiting list for their 2020 Roaster.
***
“Here we are again”, Axe looked at me from the other side of the dirty glass pane at the visitor center of the Yibin Chuannan Prison. “Thanks for coming. I don’t get a lot of real visitors,” he smiled amiably at me, with not a bit of enmity in his voice. Perhaps he realized that he was most at home in this place, or perhaps he already had a plan to get out as we speak. You never know with a man like him.
