Monopoly Money: A Bitcoin Story

 

Alvin Gladly woke with a start, to the sound of screaming coming from next door: “No! No! I promise you!!” This was even more startling than when he had been woken up from his cryo-freeze back in 2112 (although that was not very surprising: he knew that he would be revived someday, once crypto had really taken off). It had been a strange experience to go from being dead to being alive but hey, the past 10 years of his new life had been nothing but peachy. He was triple-verified on cryptotwitter now (one to prove he was Alvin Gladly, one to prove his connection to his wallet, and one that he bought for 8 bucks back in 2022, and that he still had for sentimental reasons) so anyone could see his tremendous wealth every time he cryptotweeetted. In fact, he would probably send of a cryptotweet right now.

 

Alvin Glady 🪦💎🙌 @agladly ✔✔✔ [300 billion sat]

beautiful day to be alive, keep spending money world

 

Alvin hit send and watched the likes and replies roll in. 20 billion people on the planet, and only a million of them followed his cryptotwitter. He pondered that for a moment and wondered why he was feeling so distraught. Of course! The screaming coming from what sounded like his neighbors house. He had always gotten along with his neighbors, who were of course less fortunate than he was. Most cryptofreezers lived in lavish mansions or 500^th floor penthouses. Not Alvin. Before he died, he had taken the noble pursuit of helping the needy, getting the poor around the world to use Bitcoin. “In 100 years,” he had told them, “that tip I just gave you will be enough to buy a house. You’ll be living like me in no time at all!” Of course, none of them could afford to be cryptofrozen, but their money grew nevertheless.

He had also taken the pursuit of turning his parents’ wealth into even more money for himself. Over the course of his life, Alvin had amassed 3000 bitcoin, buying in early and increasing his hoard when the price dipped down. There were people with more bitcoin, certainly. But it was enough that he decided to get his body frozen after he died, with a company called “Nostalgia” that promised, on their sleekly designed website, to revive you once bitcoin got big. The details were fuzzy on what they would have done with their warehouse of cadavers if bitcoin hadn’t ever caught on, but there was no point in dwelling on the counterfactual now. All that mattered was that Alvin Gladly had woken up one day, with one ten thousandth of the total wealth of the world.

Alvin put on his clothes, to head over and check on his neighbor. He was still getting used to the way these future people dressed. He pulled on his gray sweatpants (with the padded bulge, as was fashionable). Everything had changed, yet nothing had changed.

 

After Alvin’s death, bitcoin had remained a popular speculative asset, and the price jumped around, but slowly trended upwards. The line went up, and people buzzed about it, but nobody wanted to spend their bitcoin, since they knew it would be worth more in the future.

In 2080, it all changed. Satoshi returned in the form of an anonymous forum post. Unlike the previous faketoshis, Satoshi signed this post with their private key. The post demanded that Bitcoin become the currency of the world, and offered a handsome reward in bitcoin to those who worked to implement that plan. Investors around the world started to dump money into bitcoin, hoping to get in early. In doing so, they drove the value of bitcoin up further, increasing Satoshi’s power.

Around the globe, several leaders tentatively took steps towards bitcoin. One country let its citizens pay taxes in bitcoin. The president of El Salvador tried once again to make bitcoin legal tender in the country. Soon, two historic transactions appeared in the ledger: generous gifts from Satoshi to both leaders. Satoshi was not bluffing.

The brightest minds of bitcoin stepped up to the newfound demand for bitcoin, and came up with lightning networks better than ever seen before. At last, people could reliably make transactions with bitcoin.

Major governments, however, were skeptical. The financial system before bitcoin had worked out quite well for them: the U.S. could settle its debts in dollars, which it could always print more of. This was not the case with bitcoin, which was capped at 21 million. Adding on to that, bitcoin had countless flaws. If the world used bitcoin, there was no way that everyone’s transactions in 10 minutes could fit on a block, even if a slightly larger blocksize was pushed through. (The blocksize war, which had been waged for the better part of a century, still had no end in sight.) Adding on to the issue was the environmental concern of mining new blocks: with everyone clamoring to get their transactions in on a block, the difficulty would skyrocket, and it would be worth it for miners to burn through inordinate amounts of energy to get the next block out. And finally, there was the ever-present risk of a 51% attack: if the world was running on bitcoin, a miner who could double-spend could wreak havoc financially, and also sow huge amounts of justified FUD, sending the world into chaos.

The craftier politicians, however, saw an opportunity. The world was starting to head towards a new Schelling point, but was still in the early, uncertain stages. It would still be easy enough to seed enough memes and FUD that would drive the value of bitcoin back down. Satoshi’s gifts wouldn’t last forever, and if the value of bitcoin crashed, Satoshi’s power would be weakened. In a series of back-room deals, encrypted phone calls, and confidential letters, a new idea emerged among the world’s leaders. What if we pushed the other way. What if we made this happen.

Bitcoin was not an anonymous currency. Any transaction made on the blockchain itself was visible to the world. The lightning networks had centralized hub-spoke architecture, meaning that transactions between individuals on the lightning network passed through its central core, which could track the transactions if it wanted to. If these sources of information were unified, he potential for surveillance and control was immense. All you would need to do would be to find a way to link a public key with a person’s real identity, and then you would know their life.

Surveillance and control was the main draw, but the potential gains were intoxicating too. If the rich bought into bitcoin now and then forced everyone to use it, they would cement their position of wealth in the world for years to come. They could fund the research teams to bring back cryptofrozen early adopters, keeping a cut of the money from themselves. There were some big whales cryptofrozen in warehouses around the world, from the big names like Michael Saynor down to smaller names like Alvin Gladly. Analysis suggested that about 1% of the 21 million was locked up in cryptofrozen early adopters around the world. If you got control over their bodies, and funded the last push to make reviving possible, you would be able to control a huge amount of money, and would be able to time exactly when you released it.

The cryptoheads would hate this. Decentralization was their entire goal, and the cypherpunks had gotten into crypto, so many years ago, to escape government surveillance. Once they got word of this plot, they would undoubtably try to stop it, taking to cryptotwitter and their blogchains and podcasts to demand a change of course.

However, their protests had little effect. As it became easier to use bitcoin and harder to use other currencies, more and more people switched over. What the cryptoheads never really understood was that most people in the world, it turns out, do not like to spend their time thinking about cryptocurrency as a hobby. Most people just want to go about their life, without having to think about the details of the currency system that they are using. Most people, it turns out, were also quite okay with surveillance. Between their phones and their cryptoglasses, the average person’s life was being watched. Everything that they saw, heard, or said, their exact coordinate, altitude, rotation and velocity, everything they search for, the darting movements of their eyes, was sent to various tech companies, who sold it to the highest bidders. Despite the frequent articles about how so-and-so just bought a bunch of user data to do such-and-such terrible thing, people keep using their phones and cryptoglasses. In part, this was because they had features that people needed. But more so, it was because of Schelling points once again. There was nothing else to do, if you wanted to be able to communicate.

Then came the bitcoin council. In the past, governments had tried to enforce the usage of a specific currency, and it had not succeeded. If the currency was less stable than another one, such as the dollar or even bitcoin, people would use the other currency illicitly, which would tank the nation’s currency even further. Adoption of bitcoin had also had issues in the past: everybody wanted other people to put more of their money into bitcoin, because that would drive up the price, but nobody wanted to spend their bitcoin, since they were all holding out for the price to go up. The bitcoin council enforced that people were using bitcoin. Almost every nation joined the council, and those that didn’t were small enough that their money didn’t really matter on a global scale. Every transaction— from the apple you buy at the store to your paycheck to your taxes to the vast swaths of money sent from one government to another— was now visible to the council, whether it took place on an official lightning network (which is run by the council) or on the blockchain itself. Everyone’s wallets are registered in a great big database matching public keys to identities, so the council knows who makes which transaction.

Of course, that system still wouldn’t be enough to keep everyone under surveillance. People could still set up an unauthorized lightning network, or even set up their own barter system, primitive currency, or even full-fledged cryptocurrency that the council would not be aware of. That’s where the second part of the bitcoin council came into play. The leaders behind the council made it illegal to use any currency besides bitcoin. It would be difficult to catch people who bartered, or who bought and sold stuff on the black market using one of the few non-bitcoin countries’ cash. Instead, the bitcoin council made use of the power of machine learning, using a tool called the Correlated Ongoing Real-time Ranking of Universal People’s Transactions, or CORRUPT. With the vast database of everyone’s transactions, connected to their identity, CORRUPT would determine if the amount of money a person was earning and spending was consistent with their demographics. If someone was underspending or underearning by too many significant figures, that was a good sign that they might be living their life off without connecting to bitcoin. Every day, CORRUPT would spit out several thousand names from around the world that were flagged as suspicious, and officers of the bitcoin council would head out to their houses and investigate further.

As with any black box AI, there was a potential that CORRUPT might be biased or inaccurate. The bitcoin council was always very vague on the training data and parameters that they put into CORRUPT to tune its results. CORRUPT had no way of seeing directly if somebody was using a currency other than bitcoin. All it could see were your transactions. (There were rumors that phone data was being used by CORRUPT, but nobody had any way of knowing.) The vagueness, many theorize, was actually part of the plan. Since people have no way of knowing exactly what behavior is going to tip off CORRUPT, but they generally know that what tips it off is if they don’t use bitcoin enough, then it will pit people in a race to make as much money and spend as much money as possible. Nobody wants the council officers to come knocking on their doors, so the intentionally vague algorithm manufactures FUD in the minds of anyone considering consuming less, or earning less money. The more people consume, and the more their consumption is driven by fear, the more money ends up in the pockets of the rich.

Although some cypherpunks were up in arms at this arrangement, others, quietly, were not. One of the reasons behind using bitcoin in the first place is the ability to buy things from across the globe on the black market, without being traced. This was still possible: you just created another wallet that wasn’t registered to your name, and bought your illegal goods that way. From the perspective of the bitcoin council, this was just fine: if you were active enough in your primary wallet to keep CORRUPT from getting suspicious, and you were doing more transactions in bitcoin on top of that, the bitcoin council had no reason to stop you. Sure, using bitcoin to purchase illegal goods was against the law in theory (why else would the goods be illegal), but in practice the bitcoin council didn’t enforce that law as heavily, since their ultimate goal was to get people using bitcoin as much as possible.

Other cypherpunks saw the bitcoin council as fulfilling the anarcho-capitalist role of government, of protecting personal property. If someone were to take their money out of bitcoin, the argument went, the value of bitcoin would drop a little, and everyone in the world would be losing their hard-earned money. “If you mug me, you’re a criminal,” went one famous tweet. “And if you mug the world? A criminal 20 billion times over.”

Since most transactions took place over lightning networks, there was not too much demand for transactions on the blockchain itself. Although the value of bitcoin has gone up, halving reduced the reward for miners to a negligible value— roughly the cost of a restaurant meal for a block mined. One would think that this would be a problem: with so reward for miners, and with people not wanting to pay high fees to get a transaction on the block when they could just use a lightning network instead, there would be little incentive to mine, resulting in a low difficulty, and leaving the blockchain vulnerable to a takeover. However, the bitcoin council has made this irrelevant. Like so much of bitcoin, the bitcoin council has centralized the power of mining, and has control of the majority of the hashrate. The council does put some budget into mining, and has the mining power to win an arms race if they wanted to. They don’t use the full force of their power, wanting to keep the difficulty affordable, and often fund mining to companies around the globe. There were a couple of times when groups briefly managed to pull off a 51% attack. But, the council was simply able to declare that their favored chain, although shorter than the chain created by the 51% attack, was the correct one. Like other forms of defiance against the council, it was generally considered pointless to treat a non-council-backed chain as the truth, so these attacks functionally had no effect. In yet another way, the council had slowly turned a decentralized currency into a completely centralized one.

 

Alvin Gladly had died in a hospital bed, surrounded by friends, family, and a guy named Bradley. Bradley worked for Nostalgia, the cryptofreezing service. As Alvin drew his final breath, Bradley fidgeted with the van keys, trying to keep his elbows and knees out of everyone’s way.

Alvin closed his eyes, and then he opened them.

He was lying on his back, inside of some kind of tube. He drew a breath, then coughed. His lungs were filled with goo. He heard a cheer from behind his head, and the stretcher he was on slid out of the tube. There were bright lights above him, and around him. His head hurt.

“Gooood afternoon, Alvin Gladly. It is currently 4:05 PM Pacific Standard Time, January 8, 2112, and you, my friend, are very much alive.”

Alvin blinked. A tablet swung in from the side, landing a couple feet above his face.

“Now, I’m sure you have a questions, but please, hold them for the end. Or ask them now, but that costs extra. Yes, death did claim you for a little while but, being an insecure biological process, we have found that unfortunate state transition to be quite reversible. You, my friend, were of particular interest to a number of parties, and you should count yourself lucky that our team acquired you before an all-out bidding war began. These things can get quite messy, you know.”

“I—” said Alvin. His brain felt like it was being ripped apart.

“Yes, Alvin, you have died, and you have been reborn. Why you are just like…. Oh it’s on the tip of my tongue…”

“Jesus? Are you really comparing me to Jesus?”

“No! You are just like the price of bitcoin in 2056— crashed all the way back to its 2017 value, but then it came back, of course. See here I go getting sidetracked already….

“This situation is particularly sensitive thanks to the unique and irreplaceable contents of your mind… what separates the wheat from the faketoshis.” The voice paced back and forth behind his head, panning left and right. “You do remember it, don’t you?”

“Remember what?”

“Your recovery phrase, Alvin! Your wallet! Bitcoin! Do you even realize how wealthy you are? Of course you don’t. Just look at this.”

The tablet, which until this point had displayed a soothing screen-saver of money stacks and rocket ships, sputtered to life. Alvin saw a bar graph. GDPs of countries, arranged in descending order. And there, nestled among the names of nations he had once traveled to as part of his human rights work, was a bar in a contrasting color.

The bar was labelled Alvin Gladly.

“Of course,” said the voice, “it’s still completely theoretical. Before the technology to revive the cryptofrozen was developed, your money was considered lost. But assuming you wish to remain alive, we can get you up to speed in no time, for a relatively small fee, coming out to about 1% of your total wealth.”

“So the— So bitcoin caught on?”

“I told you to save your questions. But I suppose I may as well tell you the story now.”

The voice told Alvin the story of how it all happened. The voice was careful to present the bitcoin council in a positive light; the voice was not about to criticize its own employer, as some higher-up was certainly listening in during this very important procedure.

Alvin Gladly mulled this over, in the hours and days that followed, as he recovered from his rebirth. This new world would take some getting used to, but it wasn’t all bad. As he recovered, people were so nice to him— bringing him cards and treats and decorating his room with plants to soak up the sunlight from the tall windows. Every morning he woke up with a start: Where am I? Is this real? He would remind himself that yes, it was real, he was alive, he was Alvin Gladly, and he was fabulously wealthy.

Once he was able to secure a connection to the internet that he trusted not to be tampered with, Alvin deciphered his private key, registered his wallet, paid his reviving bills, and did all the paperwork that one does after being brought back to life. He could finally rest, knowing that the council kept his wealth secure, and he would never had to back the fruit of his sweat with a dirty petrodollar again. Protecting people’s property from theft— that’s what you actually need a government for, not for helping the poor or anything like that. The mining market, coupled with the philanthropy of awesome people like Alvin Glady, would sort that out in no time.

 

Alvin’s neighbor was still screaming.

Alvin stepped out the door, and walked across the lawn to his neighbor’s house. “Good morning, Mr. Glady,” said a delivery driver, bowing deeply. Today was Takeout Thursday, a tradition in Alvin’s town where everyone would get takeout for dinner on Thursday night. You didn’t have to, but it was a good idea to do it anyway, so as not to give CORRUPT a reason to suspect you. Judging by the bag in the delivery driver’s hands, it looked like some neighbor was trying to curry CORRUPT’s favor even more, and get bunch delivery as well as dinner. Alvin nodded at the bowing delivery driver and waved absentmindedly.

The screams had stopped. Instead, he heard stern muffled talking coming from his neighbor’s house. The front door had been knocked clean off its hinges, and there were black armored cars on the street and in the driveway. Alvin stepped up to the porch, with the dignity of a man who has 300 billion satoshis to his name.

“What seems to be the problem, officers?” asked Alvin.

The lead officer, an imposing man of about 40 whose badge identified him as “Brayyden (he/they)”,  turned away from Alvin’s neighbor, who was sitting in a chair, sobbing quietly. Brayyden looked at Alvin, and blinked, causing Alvin’s bitkipedia page to flash onto their cryptoglasses, once the sensors recognized his face. “Hello Mr. Gladly,” said Brayyden. “It’s my humble pleasure to see you this morning. The algorithms have determined, with 99.5% confidence, that this urchin—” he kicked the chair, causing Alvin’s neighbor to make a sound “—has been conducting transactions outside of Bitcoin. I’m sure a person as intelligent as yourself will understand the importance of a swift… termination to this matter.”

“Don’t you see what he’s doing to me!?” yelled Alvin’s neighbor. “Please help me!”

“I haven’t done anything to you,” sneered Brayyden. “I am merely responding to the fair judgement made by CORRUPT. CORRUPT is a computer. It does not have human desires or grudges, and so cannot be bribed the way the unethical policepeople of yesteryear could. It merely responds to statistical anomalies. So no, CORRUPT is not ‘doing anything’ to you either.”

“I just haven’t been spending much money lately!” wailed Alvin’s neighbor. “Look, I do coding, and a lot of it is open-source stuff, so I don’t get paid for my work! And some friends gave me a big lasagna the other night so I haven’t had to go to the store yet this week!”

“Mr. Gladly, do you hear this pathetic creature?” said Brayyden. “All these excuses, just other words for bartering. If you desire to help with this investigation, Mr. Gladly, I’m sure the folx of the Council would allow you to have a hand in the method of termination, no cap.”

Thoughts raced through Alvin’s head. He had no idea that his neighbor (whose name he was still blanking on) was involved in such illicit activities. He felt scammed. This had been someone who’s company he had respected! He had fond memories of barbequeues and block parties together and good times swimming at the YMCA mempool with this neighbor, in the years since he’d been revived. And to know that this person was stealing from him— from everybody— this whole time. For a second, Alvin’s blood ran cold. But then he remembered who he was. He was a philanthropist. All his lives he had helped people. Even people who were doing harm, and didn’t realize it. Nobody was beyond saving, and he was the savior.

The wave of confidence was quickly followed by a wave of dread. Alvin Gladly had always prided himself as being an Effective Altruist. He tried to maximize the amount of good he could do with every dollar spent. This meant avoiding letting his emotions dictate what needed to be done: his strongest emotional response would be for those close to him, that’s basic psychology. But often the more pressing need was farther away, and provoked less of an emotional response. And yet, it had taken screams— literally from next door— to get him to realize the harm of this system that he had lived so comfortably in for the last decade. His tremendous wealth had made him so blind. It made him sick.

The wave of dread was followed by an even stronger wave of dread. Sure, he was wealthy. But the bitcoin council was larger and more powerful than anything he had ever seen before. It was bigger than the petrodollar. While our eyes were on the gate, the bankers and politicians had climbed inside of our Trojan horse through the rear entrance.

What could he do? The world Alvin lived in now was different than the one had lived in before. Yet much was still the same. People were still people. And Alvin could still do what he had done before. He could still help people. 

Without losing his cool, Alvin cleared his throat.

“This person is my neighbor, and is a good person deep down,” Alvin said. “I can vouch for that. As such, you officers are all free to go.”

Brayyden coughed loudly. “Mr. Glady, if you insist, but I hardly think—”

Alvin swallowed. He could still help people. It might take a long time, and it might turn out to be futile. But if everyone looked out for each other, the world would be a better place. He didn’t know what exactly what the world needed, but it didn’t need this.

“I can take care of this from here. Thank you all for your concern.” Alvin pulled out his cryptophone, and opened his cryptowallet. He sent his neighbor a few sats. His neighbor’s cryptophone pinged. Alvin looked at his neighbor and smiled, thinking of how great a cryptotweet this was going to be. “In 100 years, that money I just gave you will be enough to buy a house. You’ll be living like me in no time.”