Bitcoin Clowns, page 26
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
“Is Dumbo here with you?”
“Yeah…I sorted him out. He’s one of us again. Your cousin has some clout though.”
“I have no idea.” Indeed I had no idea at all. Apparently Cao had spent a couple of years in prison for multi-level-marketing fraud. That was why he skipped a few years of Chinese New Year dinners. To save ‘face’, my uncle didn’t tell us, and we thought Cao was just an unfilial bastard. Maybe he was as well when I came to think of it.
“Did you hear me that day?” I was referring to the fact that I told him not to kill my cousin.
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
“You’re not as bad as you make yourself appear,” I doled out my judgment of Axe’s character.
“No one wants to be bad, if he has a choice.”
I nodded. I did not envision the day that I would feel sympathetic for a criminal. Perhaps it was because of the close call with the law myself that I started to grasp the arbitrary nature of society’s definition of right and wrong.
“Do you know where Paula and Jessie are?” I asked. This was the second time I had come to ask him that question. The pair had slipped through my fingers again.
“They are safe. That’s all I can tell you now,” he replied. His answer was not satisfactory, so I pressed on.
“Do you still remember my offer on the helicopter?” He asked me instead.
“What offer?”
“Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean. We need a tech guy in our organization. We’ll be invincible together. In fact, I have been reading up on the crypto-stuff on the news. I read a lot in here in fact, you know? Cryptocurrencies are all the hype right now. People will pay up for anything that’s remotely related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. We could launch our own ICO and use the money we raised to fund this project of mine. — I have been thinking about it for years. I want to build a floating casino; we can make it the first floating cryptocurrency casino in the world. That’s brilliant isn’t it? I’m surprised at my own creativity. It will be massive. We just need a guy like you.”
“I’m not interested,” I mumbled, although I must say the idea was kinda interesting.
“What do you mean you’re not interested? It’s money.”
“It’s better than money. When even our currency is getting better, us humans should get better, too. Gambling is a total waste of human effort and economic resources, you know?”
“Why do all of you crypto-nerds like to talk about it as if it is some sort of holy body of divinity?”
“See, I have made you upset. You don’t want me in your organization. I would turn it into a boring Bible study group.” I didn’t really read the Bible nor did I believe in Christianity, but Marv told me enough about it. Instead of the evening Toastie meetings, she had started to take me to these evening Christian fellowship meetings instead. She said that spiritual pursuit was good for my mental well-being, such that I could find my bearings and overcome all kinds of temptations in the licentious, lascivious, salacious modern world. I didn’t really understand what she was saying and how different it was from reading philosophies of Laozi, for example, but I loved her, so I went anyway and kept my sarcasm in check.
“Jong, you’re really not doing your talents justice. It’s a great pity, but I respect your choice.”
“And I’ll respect yours, too. I won’t ask you how you’re managing all these from inside the prison.”
“You better turn off your snitching little app right now,” he glared at the approximate location of the inner pocket on my jacket.
I tapped my chest twice and smiled at him, “Only if you will tell me the whereabouts of Paula and Jessie.”
Chapter 46: Trip
“Are you sure about this?” Teddy looked at me with his puppy eyes from across the table. “Don’t you want to reconsider?”
Marvey and I went to Bilious to resign from our positions officially. I looked at the lawyer who had her head down reading through the resignation documents, then back at Teddy with a weak smile. Although I was sort of flattered by his offer, I knew I couldn’t bear having my ‘intern’ be my boss. It was one of those things that they said mediocre, older workers needed to learn to cope with. I considered myself far from mediocre, and in which direction was something debatable.
“Yes, I will focus all my energy on PissCoin Classic from now on. You guys can keep the new PissCoin, or PI2S, whatever you want to call it. I have signed the papers, waiving my rights to claim any intellectual property of it permanently. Don’t worry. I won’t regret it.”
“That’s not…” Teddy said, then changed the subject half-way. “I need to thank you. Thanks for saving my ass,” he looked at me like a scared animal. His demeanor now reminded me of how he was on his first day at Bilious. Nervous, hesitant and disarming. Did I have that effect on him? Or was he playing me again? Precisely because I was not wise enough to see through the external façade of people that I much preferred working with computers. They were arguably much more predictable.
“You can thank my girlfriend. She was the one who convinced Lieutenant Wu. By the way, she was the intern you were talking about.”
Ted bowed a couple of times at Marv, who smiled at him. His face reddened instantly from embarrassment for his loose tongue.
“What did you guys say about me?”
“Nothing!” I replied, and changed the subject, “Rebecca’s not coming in here anymore?”
“No, since the sale to the Sun of China group didn’t go through after the whole debacle, it’s back to Norwegian management again. There’s no need for her consultancy any longer. Actually, I’ve got to thank you for asking the guys in Oslo to keep me. Rebecca doesn’t really trust me anymore after what happened. I won’t have a place to go back to in her company.”
I nodded amiably and bided him farewell after the lawyer confirmed that everything was all set.
“I don’t understand why you would still recommend the board to keep Teddy Wang as the Head of the department! The job belonged to you from the very beginning,” Marv said to me in the elevator.
“Teddy’s okay. He’s a smart guy. Plus he’s into mining. His expertise would be useful to them.” Because of the blackmailing case with Cao, Mr. Olaf’s covert mining operations were exposed in the end. The board was surprisingly open-minded about them, contrary to his initial concern. The Chinese government too was more lenient and reasonable than he had initially thought. They gave him a thirty-day notice to close down its operation in Inner Mongolia and that was that, with no particular legal consequence. And because we were able to recover the lost fund, Bilious came out unscathed and regained control of the Shanghai subsidiary once more.
“You’re too nice,” Marv pursed her lips and looked at my reflection in the mirror. “But I’m proud of you. You remained honest to yourself throughout, not taking a single cent in all these. I can’t say for certain I would be able to do the same if I were in your shoes.”
I shrugged. That was what everybody thought, that poor Jong had lost out completely in order to uphold whatever nonsense I was trying to uphold. But to be honest, I hadn’t let anyone knew about the ten thousand dollars reward I received since the incidence. — Remember that I found a security loophole in the POSH architecture? I made both Cao and Da Ming believed that I had exploited it to their gains, but in fact I sent the POSH coins to its founder John Delaware’s personal POSH wallet address which was publicly listed. I didn’t expect John Delaware to find out whom the doer was, but apparently news from China was no longer for Chinese eyes only these days and the whole Rx Club heist reached his ears. He immediately figured out it was me who did it and we chatted briefly online. The bug was patched within the same day. I got a handsome reward as he had promised on the Twitter announcement.
“Wanna take a trip to Buenos Aries?”
“Buenos Aries?” Marv turned around to look at me. “Why?”
I shrugged, trying to appear as disinterested as I could, “There was a travel show about it, it’s beautiful. So I thought, why not? I haven’t been a very good boyfriend lately. I didn’t even hit Elon Musk’s ten hours a week dating mark.”
“Well I need to finish my graduation thesis on the economics of solar thermal power plant.”
“What a coincidence, there’s a lot of solar and a lot of plants over there!”
“You’re so silly. There must be something about Buenos Aries you didn’t tell me,” she crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You never watch any television. And where’d you get all the money suddenly?”
“Bilious has severance payments,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I lied, but perhaps I preferred that no one ever knows of that dark episode in my life.
“You know what? The mining farms Bilious set up in Norway actually gave me an idea. They used all the excess geothermal energy that had nowhere to go for mining coins, can you imagine? That means that all the coins were mined for free, and most importantly no pollution whatsoever. It’s a sustainable circular economy. I am going to write about it in my thesis. This is so gonna beat all the boring economic analysis on sustainable energy written by my classmates.”
“Wonderful! You’re brilliant!” I grabbed her hand and walked out of the elevator.
“Somehow I feel like you’re just patronizing me. You’re so exaggerated.”
“What do you mean? My girlfriend’s not only smart but extremely beautiful. There’s no exaggeration in any of what I said.”
It’s brilliant, the sustainable mining farms.
“It’s him!!!” A group of maybe twenty to thirty angry men and women holding banners and signboards in their hands spotted me as soon as I walked out of the elevator. The leader among them, a woman around fifty years old in purple sweater and a visor around her head screamed and pointed me out to her companions. “Don’t let him get away!”
“What’s going on?!” Marvey was shocked. Instinctively she took a step back into the elevator, but I stood unmoved in my spot, trying to understand the situation. A scan of their protest materials in their hands told me that they were here to rip me apart regardless of whether I understood what was going on or not. As I stood there thinking, the elevator doors closed behind us and we were completely cornered by the angry mob.
“Give us our hard-earned money back! Give us our hard-earned money back!” The woman led the group into a premeditated chant.
“It’s about the Max Venture’s ETFs!” Marv realized it at the same time I did. These people were the victims of Cao’s elaborate labyrinth of scams. He first cheated these people out of their money together with his collaborators, Damon and Terry, taking advantages of the two’s excellent salesmanship and pendant for theatrics to get them to invest in their cryptocurrency funds, while in fact he invested in none of the underlying coins, then he let his poor business partners bore the brunt of all legal responsibility and ran off with the profit he made from market manipulations. Since the prosecutors had yet to sort out the complicated details of the scam, the funds were shut down and any asset not in Cao’s control was seized by the police. The legal proceeding to get these men convicted for similar kind of cases usually takes long, and the victims suffered to no end, with no real guarantee that they would ever receive their money back.
Hence, typically the only thing they could do, although I did not recommend at all, was to pester anyone linked to the case that may have their money. And unfortunately in this case, it was me, the guy whose head was misused on all the Max Venture advertising materials; the guy that gave them a half-hearted lecture on the history and future of cryptocurrency in a recent conference.
“We want refunds! We want refunds!” They chanted loudly in the lobby of the building. It caught the attention of others on their way to their offices. A few onlookers pulled out their phones and started to make a movie of us.
“Please have mercy on an old woman like me. I invested all of my life savings in your products. I need my money back, young man,” an old lady said, and she tried to grab my arm. I dodged it with a ping of guilt.
“Sorry, but I honestly don’t have your money. I’m also a victim in this case,” I put my palms together in a gesture to beg her for forgiveness on my lack of control on the matter. “Please go back and wait for the final court’s order on your restitution.”
“Stop playing games or we’ll crush your skull!” One man threatened after hearing my unsatisfactory answer. “Give us back our money now!”
“He doesn’t have your money!” Marv spoke up for me.
“Shut up bitch! We won’t fall for it!” A young woman interjected. “He works for a big bank, and he was the founder of PissCoin! How can he not have any money?!”
A young man waved a large red banner with white words that said ‘Down with the evil cryptocurrencies’ on it. I was too busy placating my agitated girlfriend (who had just been called a bitch in public) to point out the error on his slogan to him.
“I am no longer an employee of the Norwegian Bilious Bank,” I held up the stack of papers in my hand that we had just signed, “and if you would just check the news, PissNet is an open-source, non-profit, decentralized network maintained not by any one individual but a group of anonymous volunteers distributed all over the world. You could go online and check on the blockchain explorer and you’ll not find any amount of coins worth killing me for in my PissCoin wallet, and in fact in any wallet be it digital or physical, fiat or crypto. I am and have always been a technical guy and I do apologize for not realizing the unintended abuse of PissCoins and the reputation of my previous employer in the whole Max Venture fiasco early enough to prevent the harm that had been done to many of you. Here I officially give you my apology!” I bowed to the group with the heaviest heart. Despite my sincerity, I couldn’t help but feel myself extremely unnatural and fake, and if I were them, I might just punch myself in the face as well for making these kinds of useless gestures.
Behind me, I noticed that Marvey bowed along with me as well, and it made me feel extra guilty. What kind of guy would have his woman apologize for his mistake to the public? Only a clown or a cheating politician who thought his public image was more important than his wife’s dignity would make her apologize for his behavior in public. I internally facepalmed myself. This should never have happened.
“Why should we believe you?” The young guy with the banner asked. “All the wallets are anonymous. How do we know which one is yours and which one isn’t?! You could be hiding a lot of money somewhere and we would never know!”
He had a good point. And yes, indeed, no one would ever know, not at least for a while. (Of course, chain analysis tools are getting more and more sophisticated every day. They could trace and identify the owner of the wallets through features of the transaction s in and out of them. But I am not sure whether the ability to de-anonymize accounts was the best for the development of cryptocurrencies.) I was caught off guard by his clear thinking, not for catching me out but for the fact that someone like him with a reasonable understanding of how cryptocurrency works could also be scammed.
The group pressed themselves closer to us. I felt Marvey’s hand turned cold in mine. A look at her and I realized that she was actually not bowing but actually fainting instead.
“Are you alright? Let’s get out of here.” I said. “Please let us pass. My girlfriend needs some air.” I asked as politely as the circumstances allowed and when my civilized request was ignored, I pushed forward, ignoring the protests of the group. I hugged Marv in me and charged through the crowd, feeling a tap here, a kick there, a tug here, and a jab there.
Suddenly a hand reached out and touched my shoulder. It was Kelvin’s. Behind him, four bodyguards stood looking like pure menace at the frightened scam victims. I took the opportunity to pass him Marvey, whom he wrapped under his suit jacket immediately and carried her off. I followed him out, relieved to see that my best friend didn’t abandon me. Some bonds were stronger than family’s.
“Irresponsible assholes!” Someone shouted at us.
That was the last draw. I turned around and looked each of them in the eyes.
“I heard someone called me ‘irresponsible’ just now,” I said. “I heard someone called my friend ‘irresponsible’ just now. What is actually ‘being responsible’?” I paused and waited for an answer that would not come.
“Is being ‘responsible’ investing in financial products that you have not the slightest clue about? — Did you know what was in your product? Did you know how your fund managers were picking them? Did you even read the complete brochure beyond my name and my photograph?”
“And is being ‘responsible’ blind faith in the system’s fairness? Is being ‘responsible’ waiting for the law to tell you what’s right and wrong? Is being ‘responsible’ expecting someone to erase your mistake and let you start all over again without any consequences? Is that being responsible?”
“Us technical guys might not have done much in your eyes, but people like me have worked hard in keeping all of your money safe in your bank accounts. We have worked hard to make sure you could send money, receive money, use money, and entertain yourself with high-risk activities with your money smoothly and reliably, whatever it is. We have worked hard to fend off malicious attacks such that your mindless everyday actions online do not unfold into privacy calamities. And we have also worked hard to figure out what was wrong with the current financial system and tried to rebuild a better one that might just prevent the financial crises like we have experienced ten years ago. And yet you people, you people used the fruits of our hard work for speculation, for personal gain, for…for the extra 7% commission by inviting everyone around you to do the same, to be greedy, to expect windfalls, sure profits, guaranteed returns. And here I risked my life… I risked my family’s and my friend’s lives to protect…” I was getting emotional and I couldn’t continue my sentence that was supposed to end with ‘the integrity of our financial systems’.
