Chapter Thirty-Two: A Sentence in the Future Tense

Then Bitcoin 2.0, and this is where he stopped being a fraudster who told lies and became something rarer.

The ATMs were a lie about an object.

Land banking was a lie about a permission.

Bitcoin 2.0 was a lie about a category. It did not exist the way a rumour does not exist. No chain. No paper that survived contact with anyone who could read one. No listing, no contract address, no repository, no developer.

There was a domain, and a promotional page, and a photograph of a man in a good suit, and a claim that he had told his clients to buy Bitcoin at a hundred and twenty dollars and predicted ten thousand and possibly a hundred thousand, and a sentence describing Bitcoin 2.0 as a new cryptocurrency looking to innovate the global payment system.

That was the entire asset.

A sentence in the future tense.

And it did not need to be more, because the audience was not buying a cryptocurrency.

They were buying a position in a war.

He worked it out in the second month, on a livestream, irritated, twenty minutes into the technical pitch, watching the concurrent count slide from nine hundred to four hundred. He gave up on it and said, off the cuff, half to the camera and half to nobody:

"You know what they're actually scared of? They're not scared of the technology. They're scared that for the first time in a thousand years the little bloke gets to hold his own money, and the banks can't touch it, and the government can't touch it, and the media can't touch it — and mate, they came after me. They put me in front of a Senate committee. They called me names in the paper. And do you know why? Because I said this out loud."

The count went to two thousand one hundred.

He sat in the blue light of the ring lamp and watched the number climb and felt the specific chemical joy of the rail leaning in.

That's the product. The product is being hated by the right people.

He never went back.

From that night there were no diagrams.

There were only enemies.