Maxim Burkov - The Book about Cryptocurrency № 1

Editor Irina Nikolaeva

Proofreader Valentina Korionova

© Viacheslav Nosko, 2019

© Maxim Burkov, 2019

ISBN 978-5-4496-2518-2

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

On Reddit.com a text appeared in 2013:

I am a time-traveler from the future, 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 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.