My kitty has a microchip in him, of which variety I do not know.

Help me brainstorm using my cat as a cold storage bitcoin wallet solution.

[Step 1.]

Here's a fun little scenario I came up with the other day. Below I describe the most profitable business model for an ASIC hardware company to follow if they are looking to solely maximize profit without regard to protecting the Bitcoin network.

I sincerely hope for the sake of Bitcoin that no company decides to go this route - but where there is massive profit potential with no legal repercussions, there's fire:

Step 1. Recruit the team needed to make a legitimate ASIC offering

Step 2. Get in bed with SEC/FBI/[whatever three-letter agency that wants to see Bitcoin fail while painlessly hiding their involvement in it's failure]

Step 3. Start taking pre-orders and begin furnishing all pre-order information (full names, addresses, payment info) to the given Three Letter Agency. Three Letter Agency now has a dataset containing a very large portion of the United States population that could be considered a legitimate threat to national economic activities. To make it into this list of pre-orders, it implies the following about you:

a.) you have a significant interest in anonymous, decentralized cryptocurrency (this could be argued as an interest in "anti-economic activities" depending on which Three Letter Agency and their interests)
b.) you have the resources to invest significant sums of cash into these "anti-economic activities"
c.) you possess a higher-than-average intelligence and capacity for critical thinking, and further
d.) you have taken definitive and documented action to utilize the above resources to further your interests in these activities (placing a pre-order for a mining device)

Step 4. Continue collecting large pre-order USD/BTC sums, assemble first batch of ASICs

Step 5. Slowly bring ASIC units online in different pools (maybe even your OWN mining pool for maximum control!) as well as solo-mining, and begin funneling your mined BTC to a central location

Step 6. Delay, delay, delay as long as possible to maximize mined BTC profits and lure in any stragglers for pre-orders

Step 7. At some point - the "tipping point" as I will refer to it - you announce that you are on the verge of delivering on all pre-orders. Several important things now happen:

a.) Take your substantial USD assets and artificially inflate the exchange rate (the "pump")
b.) Hold this exchange rate long enough to create a massive bid wall at a desirable USD rate
c.) Execute the "dump" at this favorable exchange rate, turning your pile of BTC into a monolithic pile of USD

Step 8. Congratulations! You've devalued BTC massively, walked away with pre-order profits + mining profits, all amplified by massive and controlled speculation, and to top it all off you got some extra cash from Three Letter Agency and a Get out of Jail Free card for playing ball with them. Now all you have to do is deliver on the (now essentially worthless) hardware, and you have mitigated all your civil suit liability as well!

BONUS ROUND: Do a 51% attack right before delivering to really upset folks' confidence in the market
BONUS ROUND 2: Cancel orders and return BTC to their owners (although they're hardly worth anything now). Continue 51% attacks to keep Bitcoin from recuperating!


I hope you all have enjoyed my theoretical scenario, and I'll look forward to your comments and speculations. Oh, I am so totally not writing this to implicate any specific company either, in case anyone was drawing correlations that I did not intend.

I have been proselytizing Bitcoin since 2010 and wanted to ask the community to critique and help me fine-tune what is essentially my sales technique for selling folks on Bitcoin.

When I discuss Bitcoin, people tend to get a little perturbed and start saying "well how is it worth anything!?". At this point I begin using the analogy that Bitcoin's value comes from utility, adoption, and scarcity. Utility is obvious - you can buy almost anything with BTC that you can with USD (and in some cases more). Adoption is also not difficult to convey. Scarcity has always been the sticking point.

I started using an analogy (in combination with describing the halving blocks and "designed scarcity" of the system) that Bitcoin does in fact have a gold standard: energy. This "gold standard" is superior to actual allegedly-gold-backed currencies in that it cannot be divorced from utilizing energy for production. Because mining is required to find blocks/solve equations, you are also implementing scarce man-made tools (GPUs/ASICs) to mine bitcoin from the scarce inputs (electricity).

I have taken it further at times and described that Bitcoin is truly a modern currency due to using the collective knowledge of all of mankind (the microprocessor, etc) to create a store of value. People tend to like this angle - it sounds epic and intriguing

Hack away! I want to have as close to an unindictable spiel as possible when talking to people who really know their stuff regarding currency/forex/economics.