Bitcoin Citadels
This is a reference to the post “Bitcoin Time Traveler” on Reddit in 2013 (copy on Wayback machine). He painted a bleak picture of a future world in which Bitcoin is mainstreaming and essentially destroying the consumer-driven economy. As a result, many of the early adopters of Bitcoin are robbed or lynched; those who survive take shelter in fortified citadels. Some Bitcoiners are already preparing … Here I am going to put the translation is Spanish. This is part of the history of Bitcoin.
I am a time traveler from the future and I am here to beg you to stop what you are doing
I am sending this message from the year 2025. Things are looking bleak here, and some of you will have blood on your hands.
If you don’t believe me, go ahead, as I have no way of showing you that I really am who I say I am.
I don’t want to waste your time, so I’ll just explain what happened.
On average, every year so far, the value of Bitcoin has increased by about a factor of ten. From $ 0.1 in 2010, to $ 1 in 2011, to $ 10 in 2012, to $ 100 in 2013. From now on, there is a slight slowdown, as the value is multiplied by ten every two years, up to 1,000 dollars in 2015., to 10,000 in 2017, 100,000 in 2019 and 1,000,000 in 2021. From here on, there is no good way to express its value in dollars, since the dollar is no longer used, nor is any currency issued by the central bank for that matter. There are two main forms of wealth in today’s world. Earth and cryptocurrency.
Just over 19 million Bitcoin is known to be used in the world today, as well as a few hundred thousand that were permanently lost, and we are still dealing with a population of just over 7 billion people today. On average, this means that the average person owns just under 0.003 bitcoins. However, due to the uneven distribution of wealth in my world, the average person owns only 0.001 bitcoins. That’s right, most of you reading this today are rich. I personally live alongside 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 in 2013 for calling someone a “fag” when he was 16 years old. Upon making this discovery, he bought a plane ticket, left his house without saying anything to anyone, and headed for a Citadel.
“What is a Citadel?” you will ask yourself. Well, when Bitcoin reached a value of $ 1,000, services began to emerge for the “Bitcoin rich” to protect themselves and their wealth. It started with expensive safes, then began to include bodyguards, and today the “firsts” (our term for early adapters), as well as the wealthy whose wealth survived the “transition” live in isolated cities called Citadels, where you will find most of the work. automated. Most of these citadels are born from the fortification used to protect the places where the Bitcoin mining machines are located. The company you know as ASICminer is known to me as a city where Mr. Friedman rules as king.
In my world, which will soon be your world, most governments no longer exist, as Bitcoin transactions are conducted anonymously and therefore most governments are unable to tax their citizens. Most of Bitcoin’s success is due to the fact that Bitcoin turned out to be an effective method of hiding your wealth from the government. While people entering “rogue states” such as Luxembourg, Monaco, and Liechtenstein were followed by unmanned drones to ensure governments knew who was hiding the wealth, there was no such option to prevent people from hiding their money in Bitcoin.
Governments tried to stay relevant in my society by buying Bitcoin, which only made the problem worse by increasing the value of Bitcoin. Governments did it in secret, of course, but the “Snowdens” of my generation 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 spend some money. money.
The four institutions with the largest Bitcoin balance still accessible are believed to be as follows:
ASICminer – 50,000 Bitcoin
The IMF’s “currency stabilization fund” – 70,000 Bitcoin
Government of Saudi Arabia – 110,000 Bitcoin
The Government of North Korea – 180,000 Bitcoin
Current economic growth is approximately -2% per year. Why is this? If you own more than 0.01 Bitcoin, you probably won’t do anything with your money. There is no inflation and therefore no incentive to invest your money. Just as the medieval age did not have significant economic growth, since wealth was measured in gold, our society also does not have economic growth, since people know that their 0.01 Bitcoin will be enough for a lifetime. The fact that new Bitcoin has yet to be launched is what keeps our world from collapsing so far, but people fear that the decline in inflation that will occur during the upcoming block halving could further ruin 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 Bitcoin balance, or believed to be responsible in some way for the development of the cryptocurrency. Ironically, these terrorist movements use Bitcoin to fund their operations anonymously.
Most of the people who own a significant amount of Bitcoin no longer speak to their families and lost their friends because they had to change their identities. There have also been some suicides of people who couldn’t handle the blame after seeing what happened to bag carriers, the kind of skeptical people who continued to believe that it would eventually collapse, even after hearing rumors that governments would buy Bitcoin. Many people were taken hostage and therefore it is suspected that 25% of the “rich in Bitcoin” actually physically tortured someone into revealing their password.
Why don’t we abandon Bitcoin and move on to another system? Well, we tried of course. We tried to move to an inflationary cryptocurrency, but no one with an IQ above 70 was willing to take the step first and volunteer. After all, why would you voluntarily invest so much of your money in a currency in which you know your wealth will continually decline? What made Bitcoin so dangerous to society was also what made it so successful. Bitcoin allows us to give in to our greed.
In Africa, surveys show that about 70% of people believe that Bitcoin was invented by the devil himself. There is a reason for this. It is a very sensitive subject that today is generally known as “the tragedy”. The African Union had ambitious plans to help its citizens get ready to move to Bitcoin. Governments gave their own citizens cell phones for free, linked to their government ID, and thus the government tried to integrate Bitcoin into their economy. Everything went well, even “the tragedy”, that is. A criminal organization, believed to be based in Russia, took advantage of a hardware failure in government-issued cell phones. The entire African continent is believed to have lost approximately 60% of its wealth in a 48 hour period. What followed was a period of chaos and civil war, until the governments of Saudi Arabia and North Korea, two of the world’s major superpowers due to the unique ability of their authoritarian political system to adapt to the “Bitcoin challenge”, they divided most of the African land between them and were praised as heroes by the local African population for it.
You may be wondering, what is our plan now? It is clear that the current situation cannot be sustained without ending in a nuclear holocaust. I am part of a clandestine network, which seeks to launch a coordinated attack against the Internet’s own infrastructure. We have about 20 nuclear submarines at our disposal, which we will use to cut all submarine cables between different continents. Once this has been successfully accomplished, we will launch a simultaneous nuclear pulse attack on every densely populated area of the world. We believe that the resulting chaos will allow the world’s population to rebel and destroy as many computers as possible, until we reach the point where Bitcoin loses relevance.
Of course, this result will likely lead to billions of deaths. This is a price that we are forced to pay to avoid humanity’s eternal slavery to a small elite.
This is also the reason we contacted you.
It does not have to be this way. You don’t have to share our destiny. I don’t know how, but you must find a way to destroy this project abandoned in its infancy. I know this is difficult to ask of you. You thought you were helping the world by eliminating the central banking cartel that governs your economies.
However, I have seen where it ends.
Update, October 27, 2019:
Well, this exploded.
Bitcoin should not be treated as an investment, it should be recognized as a negative sum speculative game. The Bitcoin system currently consumes an estimated $ 3.6 billion in electricity on an annual 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 continually “leaks” from the system.
As a Bitcoin investor, you are paying for Chinese companies to waste electricity by solving an abstract mathematical problem that is designed to get increasingly difficult. In addition to ensuring that many people lose large sums of money while enriching a small minority of early adapters, Bitcoin causes tremendous ecological damage in an era when we should as a society focus on reducing our carbon emissions.
The Bitcoin developers responsible for updating the protocol seem to have no genuine intention of introducing changes to the code that will reduce the ecological damage caused by mining Bitcoin, so my suggestion has to be to sell their Bitcoins, which indirectly has the effect of reducing the ecological damage caused. for Bitcoin mining.
Coin theft and loss are also huge issues affecting Bitcoin, so while it is theoretically possible to store your coins safely, history has shown that many 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 (wasted resources, no protection against theft or loss, vulnerable to market manipulation, etc.), but more importantly, what differentiates cryptocurrencies from proper investments is that these coins do not produce anything. If you invest in a business, that business can use the money to deliver more products. If you buy silver, gold, bitcoins or hats, you hope someone else will come along and pay more money for them. History has shown that people who invest money in the stock market will generally end up getting 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 were ever to witness a widespread adaptation of Bitcoin or similar digital currencies.