Cryptocurrency: Of Crypto Citadels, Rocket Ships, and The Game

[grarpamp]

“It’s basically a metaphor for the sovereign individual.” The Citadel
“is a visualization of the kind of world they genuinely want to build
- a world full of Singapores”
“It’s a way to visualize and contextualize the promised wealth”
“A giant supervillain house? I desire that”

Since forever, libertarians have dreamed up these sorts of cosseted
micro-communities, and it wholly gels with their twofold
just-leave-me-the-hell-alone/have-fun-staying-poor set of political
beliefs. And, rather ominously, crypto people are actually getting
close to building these things...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliversmith/2018/11/13/bitcointopia-how-libertarian-fantasy-turned-into-crypto-dystopia/amp/
https://decrypt.co/63255/satoshi-cruise-ship-sold-to-new-owners-will-it-sail-again
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satoshi-cryptocurrency-cruise-ship-seassteading
https://decrypt.co/20969/nevadas-170-million-blockchain-city-facing-challenges
https://www.satoshishores.com/

https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1446491969207869467
https://twitter.com/haggishodl/status/1447182929604628488
https://twitter.com/de3CODE/status/1448141628699467781
https://twitter.com/KenobiNakamoto/status/1447861584999690249
https://twitter.com/BitcoinMemeHub/status/1448797963665305639
https://twitter.com/hashtag/SatsGame


I am a time-traveler from the future, here to beg you to stop what you
are doing.

2013/08/31 Luka Magnotta

I am sending this message from the year 2025. Things are looking bleak
here, and some of you will carry blood on your hands.

If you don't believe me, please move on, as I have no way of proving
to you I'm really who I claim to be.

I don't want to waste any of your time, so I'm merely going to explain
what happened.

On average, every year so far, the value of Bitcoin has increased by
about a factor ten. From 0.1 dollar in 2010, to 1 dollar in 2011, to
10 dollar in 2012, to 100 dollar in 2013. From now on, there's a
slight slowdown, as the value increased by a factor ten every two
years, to 1,000 dollar in 2015, to 10,000 in 2017, 100,000 in 2019,
and 1,000,000 in 2021. From here onwards, there's no good way of
expressing its value in dollars, as the dollar is no longer used, nor
is any central bank issued currency for that matter. There are two
main forms of wealth in today's world. Land and cryptocurrency.

There are just over 19 million Bitcoin known to be used in the world
today, as well as a few hundred thousand that were permanently lost,
and we're still dealing with a population of just over 7 billion
people today. On average, this means the average person owns just
under 0.003 bitcoin. However, due to the unequal distribution of
wealth in my world, the mean person owns just 0.001 bitcoin. That's
right, most of you reading this today are rich. I personally live next
to an annoying young man who logged into his old Reddit account two
years ago and discovered that he received a tip of 0.01 Bitcoin back
in 2013 for calling someone a "faggot" when he was a 16 year old boy.
Upon making this discovery he bought an airline ticket, left his house
without telling anyone anything and went to a Citadel.

"What is a Citadel?" you might wonder. Well, by the time Bitcoin
became worth 1,000 dollar, services began to emerge for the "Bitcoin
rich" to protect themselves as well as their wealth. It started with
expensive safes, then began to include bodyguards, and today,
"earlies" (our term for early adapters), as well as those rich whose
wealth survived the "transition" live in isolated gated cities called
Citadels, where most work is automated. Most such Citadels are born
out of the fortification used to protect places where Bitcoin mining
machines are located. The company known as ASICminer to you is known
to me as a city where Mr. Friedman rules as a king.

In my world, soon to be your world, most governments no longer exist,
as Bitcoin transactions are done anonymously and thus most governments
can enforce no taxation on their citizens. Most of the success of
Bitcoin is due to the fact that Bitcoin turned out to be an effective
method to hide your wealth from the government. Whereas people
entering "rogue states" like Luxemberg, Monaco and Liechtenstein were
followed by unmanned drones to ensure that governments know who is
hiding wealth, no such option was available to stop people from hiding
their money in Bitcoin.

Governments tried to stay relevant in my society by buying Bitcoin,
which just made the problem worse, by increasing the value of Bitcoin.
Governments did so in secret of course, but my generation's "Snowdens"
are in fact greedy government employees who transferred Bitcoin to
their own private account, and escaped to anarchic places where no
questions are asked as long as you can cough up some money.

The four institutions with the largest still accessible Bitcoin
balance are believed to be as following:

-ASICminer - 50,000 Bitcoin

-The IMF's "currency stabilization fund" - 70,000 Bitcoin

-Government of Saudi Arabia - 110,000 Bitcoin

-The North Korean government - 180,000 Bitcoin

Economic growth today is about -2% per year. Why is this? If you own
more than 0.01 Bitcoin, chances are you don't do anything with your
money. There is no inflation, and thus no incentive to invest your
money. Just like the medieval ages had no significant economic growth,
as wealth was measured in gold, our society has no economic growth
either, as people know their 0.01 Bitcoin will be enough to last them
a lifetime. The fact that there are still new Bitcoin released is what
prevents our world from collapse so far it seems, but people fear that
the decline in inflation that will occur during the next block halving
may further wreck our economy.

What happened to the Winklevoss twins? The Winklevoss twins were among
the first to die. After seeing the enormous damage done to the fabric
of society, terrorist movements emerged that sought to hunt down and
murder anyone known to have a large balance of Bitcoin, or believed to
be responsible in any way for the development of cryptocurrency.
Ironically, these terrorist movements use Bitcoin to anonymously fund
their operations.

Most people who own any significant amount of Bitcoin no longer speak
to their families and lost their friends, because they had to change
their identities. There have been also been a few suicides of people
who could not handle the guilt after seeing what happened to the
bag-holders, the type of skeptical people who continued to believe it
would eventually collapse, even after hearing the rumors of
governments buying Bitcoin. Many people were taken hostage, and thus,
it is suspected that 25% percent of "Bitcoin rich" actually physically
tortured someone to get him to spill his password.

Why didn't we abandon Bitcoin, and move to another system? Well, we
tried of course. We tried to step over to an inflationary
cryptocurrency, but nobody with an IQ above 70 was willing to step up
first and volunteer. After all, why would you voluntarily invest a lot
of your money into a currency where you know your wealth will
continually decline? The thing that made Bitcoin so dangerous to
society was also what made it so successful. Bitcoin allows us to give
into our greed.

In Africa, surveys show that an estimated 70% of people believe that
Bitcoin was invented by the devil himself. There's a reason for this.
It's a very sensitive issue that today is generally referred to as
"the tragedy". The African Union had ambitious plans to help its
citizens be ready to step over to Bitcoin. Governments gave their own
citizens cell phones for free, tied to their government ID, and thus
government sought to integrate Bitcoin into their economy. All went
well, until "the tragedy" that is. A criminal organization, believed
to be located in Russia, exploited a hardware fault in the government
issued cell phones. It's believed that the entire continent of Africa
lost an estimated 60% of its wealth in a period of 48 hours. What
followed was a period of chaos and civil war, until the Saudi Arabian
and North Korean governments, two of the world's major superpowers due
to their authoritarian political system's unique ability to adapt to
the "Bitcoin challenge", divided most African land between themselves
and were praised as heroes by the local African population for it.

You might wonder, what is our plan now? It's clear that the current
situation can not be sustained, without ending in a nuclear holocaust.
I am part of an underground network, who seek to launch a coordinated
attack against the very infrastructure of the Internet itself. We have
at our disposal about 20 nuclear submarines, which we will use to cut
all underwater cables between different continents. After this has
been successfully achieved, we will launch a simultaneous nuclear
pulse attack on every densely population area of the world. We believe
that the resulting chaos will allow the world's population to rise up
in revolt, and destroy as many computers out there as possible, until
we reach the point where Bitcoin loses any relevance.

Of course, this outcome will likely lead to billions of deaths. This
is a price we are forced to pay, to avoid the eternal enslavement of
humanity to a tiny elite.

This is also the reason we contacted you.

It doesn't have to be like this. You do not have to share our fate. I
don't know how, but you must find a way to destroy this godforsaken
project in its infancy. I know this is a difficult thing to ask of
you. You believed you were helping the world by eliminating the
central banking cartel that governs your economies.

However, I have seen where it ends.






Update, 27 oktober 2019:

Well gee, this blew up.

Bitcoin should not be treated as an investment, it should be
recognized as a speculative negative-sum game. The Bitcoin system
currently consumes an estimated 3.6 billion dollar worth of
electricity on an annualized basis, just to update the ledger that
contains a record of everyone's transactions. This enormous
consumption of electricity is indirectly paid for by people who invest
their savings in Bitcoin, as a consequence, money is continually
"leaking" from the system.

As a Bitcoin investor, you're paying for Chinese businesses to waste
electricity by solving an abstract math problem that is designed to
get continually more difficult. Besides ensuring that many people lose
vast sums of money while a small minority of early adapters is
enriched, Bitcoin causes tremendous ecological damage in an era when
we should be focusing as a society on reducing our carbon emissions.

The Bitcoin developers responsible for updating the protocol appear to
have no genuine intention to introduce code changes that reduce the
ecological damage caused by Bitcoin mining, so my suggestion has to be
to sell your Bitcoins, which indirectly has the effect of reducing the
ecological damage caused by Bitcoin mining.

Theft and loss of coins are also enormous problems affecting Bitcoin,
so although it is theoretically possible to store your coins in a safe
manner, history has shown that a lot of people will simply lose their
coins, further illustrating why Bitcoin is not a good investment
option.

The other cryptocurrencies share most of Bitcoin's flaws (resource
waste, no protection against theft or loss, vulnerable to market
manipulation, etc), but most importantly, what sets cryptocurrencies
apart from proper investments is that these coins don't produce
anything. If you invest in a company, that company can use the money
to deliver more products. If you buy, silver, gold, bitcoin or beanie
babies, you're hoping someone else will come along one day and pay
more money for it. History has shown that people who invest money in
the stock market will generally end up witnessing much higher returns
than people who buy gold.

With that said, I hope this story has entertained you and helped you
recognize some of the problems our society would face if we ever
witnessed widespread adaption of Bitcoin or similar digital
currencies.