Once upon a time there was a guy named Bob.......



Parts 1 & 2 here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=850267.msg9844477#msg9844477

Part 3 here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=850267.msg9850161#msg9850161





Intermezzo

Gentle reader.

The best Greek tragedies are the darkest ones. They take us deep into a world where we can see everything happen before it happens, and so our primary emotion as we watch the characters choose their actions is one of disbelief. Of horror. This is where the darkness comes from as we watch the tragedy unfold. We know it is completely unnecessary. That at each moment, any of the actors – so much larger than life as we watch them – could step back, choose differently, and avoid their fate.

In these tragedies the chorus is usually silent the first two acts. They are – like you gentle reader – facing the stage, watching things unfold. It is only when the protagonists start making inexplicable choices, the choices that will doom them, that one by one, the ragged and unkempt men of the chorus begin to turn towards the audience, raising their voices against the voices of the actors, bemoaning what is occurring, lashing out at hidden forces that the actors can apparently not see. As the third act thickens this becomes overwhelming, and the sea of voices from both stage and the chorus becomes a din of chaotic foreshadowing in real time as the actors plunge towards self-destruction.

This is where we are, isn’t it, dear reader?

Watching Bob, and David, and Paul, and the Salamander - and everyone they will drag with them - self-destruct, in real time?

And the riveting horror of it, that it does not need to be happening, but it is? Right before our eyes?

Gentle reader. I shall try to keep my voice low. But I have turned from the stage now. I am talking to  you.



Part 3: Schizophrenia (continued)

From the start, Bob said over and over again, never fall in love with a coin. Sell a little every day he would say. 40% profit is good. 60% is good. In the days when our pumps were working like a well-tuned Detroit diesel he would greet us foot soldiers as we arrived in the chat, howya doin today man. you selling a little today? Don’t be greedy man. Put some small sells up there.

In the early days he was full of wisdom like this. He was genuinely trying to teach us how to make money. Bob was an old school pumper, this was what he did. Of course, his words mainly fell on deaf ears. Few of us were there to learn how to trade. We were young jihadists looking for stacks of BTC. How do you not fall in love with a coin who has drawn you in with her smooth legs, has her hand around your stack and is stroking it to a size it has never been before? How do you pull yourself away from something like that?

The problem was, if you didn’t pull out, you were guaranteed to end up holding bags at the top. And that started happening in the plays. During the XST pump everyone could have been out with 200% profit but guys were still pushing, building support at more than 300%, and when the music stopped (those endless days of waiting for Mintpal to launch V2)  many in the group were left holding large bags at the top.  The BitSwift pump.  400% gains.  But again, bagholders at the top. During the four months between August and December, the one guy who made the most money in the group was the one guy who was never there. He simply entered and exited when Bob said so. When asked how much money he had made during those months, he responded with his laconic southern drawl, well, more money than most americans make in a year I suppose …


But we figured all of this out too late, didn’t we, my former brothers-in-arms?  
I know you are listening to me. You are out there in the darkness of this forum, all of you. Outcast ronin. Striking up alliances of convenience and revenge.
You remember those times.  200% profit in a couple days seemed like nothing. We were after stacks. We wanted to be like Paul and Bob. We wanted to prove ourselves to be ballers, so we left 300%  in our rear view mirrors and threw up high support walls and ate up bids to make new floors. We wanted that thumping, pulsing feeling in the chat of saying, i just put 2 btc right below you. i’ll take it to 890. gotta go out for a bit but I’m leaving support at 1750.  ok, I’m ready to push. who’s with me?


We were not playing it like Bob, selling on the way up. We were not playing it like Paul, who would quickly arbitrage his pushes on a different exchange to reload his stacks. We wanted to be like them. But we were not doing it like them.

We grew angry. We felt like we were being team players, putting up high support, getting dumped into. And then it seemed like ‘the plan’ – whatever that was  - would suddenly be over, and we were off to a new coin. And no one was telling us what ‘the plan’ was to get out of the last coin, how we were to get rid of those bags.

There was a schizophrenia growing in the group as well, and this was between the leadership styles of Bob and Paul. This – like everything else here – is only clear in hindsight. It started in XST, and ended in Amsterdam.

Paul was cerebral, and the group was taking on coins that had increasingly interesting tech possibilities behind them. Paul liked talking to the devs, meditating on the ideas and possibilities behind them. Bob on the other hand was only interested in the tech insofar as it gave us a marketing angle over other coins. Tech that could translate into stacks.

You dear reader – I know you. I know what just happened in your head. Paul is the good guy. And Jesus, that Bob, what a scumbag.

But are you so innocent, dear reader? You have never held a coin and were frustrated that the dev seemed unable or uninterested in communicating its tech to the world? A coin that could have, should have been worth two, three times as much?

You have, dear reader. I know you.

You are not Paul alone. You are Bob as well.

Know thyself.

Our pumps would take a few weeks to plan, take positions, establish PR, then move the coin up the charts with  all the normal tools -  forum hype, tweets, everything that would set the magic merry-go -round of hope and dreams in motion. And what ended up happening was this:  by that third or fourth week, in  XST or Swift, when 200% and 300% were far below us, out of memory, like an ugly girl we once dated, Paul and Bob  - our leaders – would be on completely different pages.

Psychologically, and financially, Bob would be on his way out of the coin. But Paul would be just getting started. He was, after all, a crypto idealist.

This proved to be fatal in BitSwift.

Paul fell in love with the coin.

Ahhh. Little Bitswift.

My apologies dear reader. I know you want to hear all about little BitSwift, and how she came to be. We are almost there.

But to understand how BitSwift was born, we had to first understand the world she was being born into. The bagholders. The growing schism within the group. The leaders. These are the people who created little BitSwift. These are the people who profited from her being born.

I must rest. I am not sure what the muses will speak of next, Amsterdam or little BitSwift. The death of the group. Or the glory of Paul.

Somewhere out there the ungodly, bastard child BitBay awaits her entrance. With Lin and David and Steve and Bob and the Salamander and Halo and thousands of fake BTC and Holly from Taiwan.
 
I must rest.

I must rest.

Once upon a time there was a guy named Bob.......



Parts 1 & 2 here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=850267.msg9844477#msg9844477



Intermezzo:

Everyone has their fatal flaws.

In our story, gentle reader, Bob is of course the largest figure, and perhaps the most flawed. And flaws are what lead to those tragic falls from grace.  Stay with me, gentle reader as the candle mutters low. We will see Bob fall. We will see others fall. Can you feel them here around us? Trying not to fall?

You are with me now on this journey, across the wine-dark sea that stretches from Cloak to Swift and BitBay. We have heard the scream in the darkness of little BitSwift being born. BitSwift’s ungodly sibling Bay lies still hidden in the womb. She will emerge in due course as our candle gutters low.

We spoke of flaws. And greatness, and how they are perhaps two sides of the same coin. The hustler Bob had one enormous greatness. He liked people. More than Bitcoin, more than rented powerboats and blow, he liked to talk with people, hear about their lives, draw out their stories. My former brothers-in-arms all know this. You, in Panama. You, in London. You who lived on pizza. It’s why we all liked Bob. He was our charismatic leader. And he genuinely liked us.

But charismatic leaders come in all different forms. In the darkest Greek tragedies, the best ones enter quietly, late in the second act. Unrecognized.

As darkness fell over the battlefield that night of Librex, little did we know who was about to enter our group, and change so much of what came next.  




Part 3: Schizophrenia

Prelude:
You who read this are innocent in varying degrees. You are here in crypto because you are playing the game, some for noble reasons, some for reasons of profit. Some of you think crypto is going to change the world. Some of you have been to bed with her and had the night of your lives. And want that night again. Most of you feel both of these things to some degree – but not one of us is innocent. When you type in your 2fa there is always that special plugging-in sensation, isn’t there?

But into what?

What part of yourself? What is that heroin flow that begins?

________________


If the newborn scream of BitSwift came in the darkest moment of Librex, it was also ultimately a fatal childbirth for Bob’s group.

The universe is fundamentally emergent. When deep conflicts exist, humans emerge to embody them and explore them, to play them out and resolve them on the human stage. This is how the universe discovers itself. This is why classic mythology is structured the way it is. Our world already had Bob. But to explore and ultimately resolve the inherent tension between profit and idealism in crypto – that same unresolved, unexamined tension within you, dear reader - Bob’s doppelganger would need to emerge.

None of us understood this at the time, awakening as we did to the smoldering ruins of Librex. We were young jihadists in a foul mood, ready to mutiny and doxx and do all the angry things that betrayed young men do. That a small, red Canadian maple leaf suddenly appearing in the group’s chat window could mean so much  -  well who could know that?

As Kierkegaard said, life can only be understood looking backwards, but it must be lived going forward.

________________

The day after the Librex fiasco Bob’s team was in tatters. Someone had opened a second, hidden chat channel where only foot soldiers had access, and here the air was thick with paranoia and revolt. Had Bob’s computer really crashed in the middle of the play? He had said something about having to run down to his office – these were his exact words in the Cloak thread just before he had dumped everything the month before. And what about the Salamander? Did any of us actually know who he was? Was there any way to be certain he was not Bob?

Librex was gasping at just above 4. The sell pressure was massive and most of the group’s members had lost all their BTC in support the night before and needed at least 7 or 8 to get out alive.  Bob had loaded support into the low twenties but it was going to take a massive push and some fat stacks to levitate the corpse of Librex and send her back towards 8. It was right about this time that the small red maple leaf appeared with the name Coinada and Bob’s words rolled across the screen, guys I want you to meet Paul. We go way back. He’s not really in the group but I want you to look on him like a leader, like me or the Salamander.

______________________________


Paul exploded into the group. He did not seem to sleep; he had massive stacks of BTC and deployed them ruthlessly. Over the next 48 hrs he singlehandedly transformed both the group’s energy and the charts of Librex. The foot soldiers were drawn to him and followed his lead, jumping at the chance to eat whatever smaller walls their stacks would allow. Paul’s attitude was ruthless and manic. If  some smaller group tried to dump into his support and stop his advance he would sight up the charts, find their five or ten btc encampment and attack it, saying fuck you man, you’re my bitch now. And Bob’s foot soldiers – now Paul’s foot soldiers - would pour through the breach after him, mopping up what was left from Paul’s assault. Within days Librex was comfortably in double digits, with Paul holding the fort seemingly without sleep.

This led into the best months the group would ever have. Coinada Paul and Bob working smoothly together, our leaders. The Salamander was always there in the background, strangely hidden.  XST was played. NHZ was played. But this cannot be a story about every coin Bob’s group played the last six months. It is not that story.

There is a baby crying for our attention. Little BitSwift.

Though that was not yet her name.

To be continued.



( .... 1FSoiJ2eLKw4Gso8M1uF9jSnAmogx8Xtnr .....)

Once upon a time there was a guy named Bob.

He really should have lived thirty years earlier. His true calling – and I told him this several times – was to be a pimp running mid level hookers in Detroit or Cleveland. That’s where his taste for impressive champagnes and black cars and large powerboats rented by the hour would have found its natural home, its natural pasture.
 
Unfortunately for Bob, and unfortunately for a lot coins with teenage names like XCloud, XST, BitSwift, Halo, and BitBay, he came of age some thirty five years later in a time when fortunes were out there to be made, and young men in their mothers basements the world over were intent on making them.

This proved to also be unfortunate for a number of these young men who had recently made it out of their mothers’ basements and into the world of making crypto coins. They were brave dreamers, with teenage names like Miu, David, Lin, Paul, Salamander, and Steven – but to Bob, they were just players in the game.

Bob and these starry eyed boys did what starry eyed boys do. They hatched plans and they scammed people and used the money for hookers and blow and weed and mortgage payments. But it never seemed to lead to fairy tale endings. In fact, it led to train wrecks. Massive train wrecks.
 
This is a satisfying way for stories to end – everyone gets what they deserve. And in this situation, everyone seems to be getting what they deserve. Perfect moral structure in the story.
 
But to understand a train wreck, we need to understand who was driving the train, who was shoveling coal, who was the monkey, and who built the tracks.  We have to go back to the beginning. We have to figure out how Bob and Steve and David and Paul and Lin and Salamander all know each other - if we want to understand why they now all hate each other, and are tearing each other apart in public. We have to choose a beginning for this story.  Luckily that is easy. It begins with a strange thing happening to a coin called Liberty coin.



Part 2: Liberty Coin

Call me Ishmael. Many months ago, having lost a fair amount of BTC on a coin with the  teenage name of Cloak I resolved to set off into the distant oceans of treachery to find for myself the source of my downfall.

The days of Cloak were heady – it was The Promised Coin. The lines on the chart seemed like they could only go up. In the bloodrush of my approaching wealth I remember the flushing feeling of reading these two lines in the forum from someone named Bob Surplus -  “I really like this coin. I’m gonna crack open a cold wallet when I get home and buy some more.”

That night was like deep crypto Viagra. Cloak doubled in price, the rest of the world simply ceased to exist. But like all good things  - sex, packets of cocaine, the Talking Heads  - the ending came. And it was brutal. Not only did I not sell at the top, I doubled down in the 20’s, thinking, what a steal.

Everyone reading this knows what happened next. Turns out a teenaged boy barely out of his  mother’s basement put one over on me and everyone like me. Except for one person it seems.

Bob Surplus.

And lo and behold, just by chance the next day I happened upon a thread called “Winning Altcoin Picks” started by – you guessed it, gentle reader. Bob Surplus. Cracker of cold wallets. Former Eternal Lover of Cloak.

I resolved to meet my situation with fortitude. I mustered my sense of greed and rapaciousness and moral indifference and immediately sent a pm requesting a BTC address that I might follow the Master, and enter the Way.

What happened next happened very fast. Not being a young virgin innocent to the ways of the world, I can only use the young virgin metaphor in a literary sense but it will do. My violation was immediate and complete. I was immediately asked to post approving comments on his recruitment thread, this I did without hesitation. There were other young men gathering;  it had the feeling of jihad. The smell of stacks was strong, like a Tunisian perfume.

We were ushered into a chat where talk of penises was routine. That and an immediate feeling of camaraderie. I do not know if these two things were connected. I suspect they were. I had no time to meditate on this; we were told that a play was about to happen; that we should get our coins onto two exchanges. What happened next happened so fast I will be able to cover it in two sentences. We were told the play was a coin called Xcloud, and to buy in slowly, up to 4 btc worth. Everyone did this, the coin exploded, and some few hours later I exited – coached by the group’s senior members  - with 8 btc. Up 4 btc in a couple hours.

Now this was exhausting work – drinking beer, making penis jokes, and padding order books – so I went right to bed afterwards. When I woke up and looked at the charts, xCloud looked like a sad and deflated penis. I apologize gentle reader. It is a sleazy world I am leading you into. But truth is an unvarnished thing. Ask David, and Paul, and Bob, and Steve and …. Oh wait a minute. Nevermind.

Later that afternoon the chat was jovial. The talk of stacks and hookers and penises ran like a deep and powerful river. But then the mood changed. Our beloved lieutenants withdrew from the brotherly conversation.   And when they returned, they had our marching orders. It seemed a coin had come to Bob’s restless attention. And it was time for us – Bob’s own Roman Crypto Legion – to gird our loins for battle again.



Intermezzo

Gentle Readers.

I realize I have committed the ultimate sin of storytelling: I have left you with less that a clear idea of where the narrative is going.

I will make amends.

One might ask, why talk of liberty coin? Is that not yesterday's news?

After all, six months is an eternity in crypto. And forgetfulness is the balm that we would all wish upon our deeds. Right David? Bob? Paul? Steve? Lin? Perhaps others who are listening closely?

But you see, this far back we must look. For it was it was in the belly of Liberty Coin that BitSwift was born.  

That midwifery is what I shall weave the tale of next. Perhaps Bob Surplus's darkest moment.  When his newly formed group, flush with victory from XCloud, nearly disintegrated on their very next play. But the newborn scream of the baby rescued the night.

I was just a foot soldier in Bob's legion. There are others angrier than I currently wandering the darkness of this forum, striking alliances of convenience, of revenge. You gentle brethren, you know the night I am talking about. When in that darkest moment, hammering furiously on the keyboard, Bob's words rolled across our screens. Guys. I have a plan.



Liberty Coin, part 2

People think the belly of the whale must be a place of darkness. One is swallowed from the world, never to return. But in reality it is not like this at all. It is a place of camaraderie and slowly built friendships bathed in cool keyboard lights and monitor glows in silent rooms across the world where girlfriends have gone to sleep, kids are off to bed, and men have drawn their chairs into a world of tabbed windows, darkened charts, multiple open threads, and blinking pencils moving endlessly across the screen.

The best of these nights are when everyone is there. The screen is crackling with the blustering joviality of International Rob. The long, neural wanderings of BitCoinada. The occasional and distant interjections from the Salamander, who seems to be communicating from a place deep in his psyche or perhaps from a different planet, it was always hard to tell which. Us foot soldiers all crowding in and clapping each hard on the shoulders and laughing loudly about who is smoking what, which bags are being held, who got hacked. It is all so convivial, deep in the belly of the whale.

Until the whale is slaughtered, and we are all dragged out into the light.

------------------------

The word came down that Bob had made a pick. We were to accumulate a coin called Librex slowly, over the next four or five days. When this word came down from above, it was trading at just above 15 and Bob said do not buy above 20. Go slowly.

This, of course, fell on deaf ears. After all, we were young crypto jihadists waiting for our marching orders and making endless jokes about hookers and penises and here was a beautiful virgin suddenly laid before us, unaware of our intentions. Within a few hours the price was at 25 and rising. By the time the whole group found out about the pick it was over 30.

Conditions became chaotic. The late arrivals and newest recruits to the group did not know whether or not to buy. Was it too late? The young jihadists who were first on the girl ignored Bob’s instructions about dinner and flowers and were balls deep in the coin. Nor did they pull out as he had instructed. The orgy gained speed and within hours Librex was above 5.

In the few days after the Xcloud play the group had doubled in number.  Now there were so many foot soldiers crowding into the chat that it was impossible to know who was who. The air was full of dust and confusion and people posting support levels and others arguing for suppression to let latecomers in and terse interjections from the Salamander and the din of endless giddy shouting  from the young jihadists. Through it all like some connecting strand ran the endless ranting of Bob about letting his dogs out and be right back I gotta roll another joint and the moon baby the moon! all thickening into a heavy battle fog of pillage and victory covering the world around us as Librex pushed above 8.

And then - from somewhere deep in that thick, intoxicating cloud - the Salamander spoke three  words: there’s a problem.

In any drunken bus crash, there are usually one or two who are the first to notice that the bus has suddenly gone through the guard rail and is in mid-air. This was the Salamander’s gift. He had an ability to see what others could not, or would not. I came to understand this about him.

In this case, the rabid frenzy that Bob’s pump had whipped up in the forums had suddenly taken a violent turn. It had suddenly been revealed? Fabricated? – gentle reader, it matters not – that this young virgin Librex was not the virgin she had pretended to be, but apparently a clone of Liberty Coin.

Librex began to fall, not some kind of graceful fall, but like a dead body on its way to some pavement far below. She plunged through the thick support walls that the foot soldiers had all built around 7, past where the latecomers had grudgingly entered at 6.  And she kept falling.

Chaos reigned in the chat. No one knew if the fud was real. Bob was suddenly, suspiciously gone, something about how his computer had crashed. Foot soldiers who did not cancel their support fast enough suddenly owned massive amounts of Librex. The Salamander had also disappeared, after typing the mysterious words, hold on. I am talking to a guy.
 
And Librex continued her ugly fall.

By the time Bob retuned to the chat, Librex had lost 50% and was falling towards 4. He was met with a barrage of confused and angry questions from his young jihadists and it seemed he had no answers. His bluster was gone. Then, out from the army of angry pencils flying across the screen emerged a single sentence from the Salamander: I have been talking to my guy inside. The fud is real.

All the little pencils on the screen stopped. I was new and stupid to the game. I thought, everyone is letting the Salamander speak. But no. Half the group had immediately tabbed open their exchange windows and begun to sell. Librex gained speed towards the pavement, plunging through 30 and into the 20’s. Bobs pencil began to move across the screen.

Guys, I know this isn’t turning out like we planned.

It was clear Bob was off balance.

You gotta make your own decisions. I don’t know what’s really going on here.

His words were strange, full of uncertainty.

If you gotta sell you gotta sell. I can’t make that decision for you.

For someone so cocksure, so full of himself, it was a dark, unfamiliar moment.

His pencil began to move across the screen again.

Guys I know some of you have lost a lot of money here. imana make it up to you, i promise. I got a plan. i gotta new thing we are gonna do together, it’s not like this. imana  get you guys in on it. we make a coin see? and it’s our coin, none of this bullshit. it’s our coin. you guys are gonna buy in and get all your money back.

it’s an ico.



To be continued.

Gentle Readers.

I realize I have committed the ultimate sin of storytelling: I have left you with less that a clear idea of where the narrative is going.

I will make amends.

One might ask, why talk of liberty coin? Is that not yesterday's news?

After all, six months is an eternity in crypto. And forgetfulness is the balm that we would all wish upon our deeds. Right David? Bob? Paul? Steve? Lin? Perhaps others who are listening closely?

But you see, this far back we must look. For it was it was in the belly of Liberty Coin that BitSwift was born.  

That midwifery is what I shall weave the tale of next. Perhaps Bob Surplus's darkest moment.  When his newly formed group, flush with victory from XCloud, nearly disintegrated on their very next play. But the newborn scream of the baby rescued the night.

I was just a foot soldier in Bob's legion. There are others angrier than I currently wandering the darkness of this forum, striking alliances of convenience, of revenge. You gentle brethren, you know the night I am talking about. When in that darkest moment, hammering furiously on the keyboard, Bob's words rolled across our screens. Guys. I have a plan.

Gentle readers.

You see? They are all here.

All the players.

Suddenly.

As if this is all choreographed.

Perhaps it is?

It matters not. We shall meet them all.

To be continued.

Once upon a time there was a guy named Bob.

He really should have lived thirty years earlier. His true calling – and I told him this several times – was to be a pimp running mid level hookers in Detroit or Cleveland. That’s where his taste for impressive champagnes and black cars and large powerboats rented by the hour would have found its natural home, its natural pasture.
 
Unfortunately for Bob, and unfortunately for a lot coins with teenage names like XCloud, XST, BitSwift, Halo, and BitBay, he came of age some thirty five years later in a time when fortunes were out there to be made, and young men in their mothers basements the world over were intent on making them.

This proved to also be unfortunate for a number of these young men who had recently made it out of their mothers’ basements and into the world of making crypto coins. They were brave dreamers, with teenage names like Miu, David, Lin, Paul, Salamander, and Steven – but to Bob, they were just players in the game.

Bob and these starry eyed boys did what starry eyed boys do. They hatched plans and they scammed people and used the money for hookers and blow and weed and mortgage payments. But it never seemed to lead to fairy tale endings. In fact, it led to train wrecks. Massive train wrecks.
 
This is a satisfying way for stories to end – everyone gets what they deserve. And in this situation, everyone seems to be getting what they deserve. Perfect moral structure in the story.
 
But to understand a train wreck, we need to understand who was driving the train, who was shoveling coal, who was the monkey, and who built the tracks.  We have to go back to the beginning. We have to figure out how Bob and Steve and David and Paul and Lin and Salamander all know each other - if we want to understand why they now all hate each other, and are tearing each other apart in public. We have to choose a beginning for this story.  Luckily that is easy. It begins with a strange thing happening to a coin called Liberty coin.

To be continued.

Part 2: Liberty Coin

Call me Ishmael. Many months ago, having lost a fair amount of BTC on a coin with the  teenage name of Cloak I resolved to set off into the distant oceans of treachery to find for myself the source of my downfall.

The days of Cloak were heady – it was The Promised Coin. The lines on the chart seemed like they could only go up. In the bloodrush of my approaching wealth I remember the flushing feeling of reading these two lines in the forum from someone named Bob Surplus -  “I really like this coin. I’m gonna crack open a cold wallet when I get home and buy some more.”

That night was like deep crypto Viagra. Cloak doubled in price, the rest of the world simply ceased to exist. But like all good things  - sex, packets of cocaine, the Talking Heads  - the ending came. And it was brutal. Not only did I not sell at the top, I doubled down in the 20’s, thinking, what a steal.

Everyone reading this knows what happened next. Turns out a teenaged boy barely out of his  mother’s basement put one over on me and everyone like me. Except for one person it seems.

Bob Surplus.

And lo and behold, just by chance the next day I happened upon a thread called “Winning Altcoin Picks” started by – you guessed it, gentle reader. Bob Surplus. Cracker of cold wallets. Former Eternal Lover of Cloak.

I resolved to meet my situation with fortitude. I mustered my sense of greed and rapaciousness and moral indifference and immediately sent a pm requesting a BTC address that I might follow the Master, and enter the Way.

What happened next happened very fast. Not being a young virgin innocent to the ways of the world, I can only use the young virgin metaphor in a literary sense but it will do. My violation was immediate and complete. I was immediately asked to post approving comments on his recruitment thread, this I did without hesitation. There were other young men gathering;  it had the feeling of jihad. The smell of stacks was strong, like a Tunisian perfume.

We were ushered into a chat where talk of penises was routine. That and an immediate feeling of camaraderie. I do not know if these two things were connected. I suspect they were. I had no time to meditate on this; we were told that a play was about to happen; that we should get our coins onto two exchanges. What happened next happened so fast I will be able to cover it in two sentences. We were told the play was a coin called Xcloud, and to buy in slowly, up to 4 btc worth. Everyone did this, the coin exploded, and some few hours later I exited – coached by the group’s senior members  - with 8 btc. Up 4 btc in a couple hours.

Now this was exhausting work – drinking beer, making penis jokes, and padding order books – so I went right to bed afterwards. When I woke up and looked at the charts, xCloud looked like a sad and deflated penis. I apologize gentle reader. It is a sleazy world I am leading you into. But truth is an unvarnished thing. Ask David, and Paul, and Bob, and Steve and …. Oh wait a minute. Nevermind.

Later that afternoon the chat was jovial. The talk of stacks and hookers and penises ran like a deep and powerful river. But then the mood changed. Our beloved lieutenants withdrew from the brotherly conversation.   And when they returned, they had our marching orders. It seemed a coin had come to Bob’s restless attention. And it was time for us – Bob’s own Roman Crypto Legion – to gird our loins for battle again.

To be continued.

Once upon a time there was a guy named Bob.

He really should have lived thirty years earlier. His true calling – and I told him this several times – was to be a pimp running mid level hookers in Detroit or Cleveland. That’s where his taste for impressive champagnes and black cars and large powerboats rented by the hour would have found its natural home, its natural pasture.

Unfortunately for Bob, and unfortunately for a lot coins with teenage names like XCloud, XST, BitSwift, Halo, and BitBay, he came of age some thirty five years later in a time when fortunes were out there to be made, and young men in their mothers basements the world over were intent on making them.

This proved to also be unfortunate for a number of these young men who had recently made it out of their mothers’ basements and into the world of making crypto coins. They were brave dreamers, with teenage names like Umi, David, Lin, Paul, Salamander, and Steven – but to Bob, they were just players in the game.

Bob and these starry eyed boys did what starry eyed boys do. They hatched plans and they scammed people and used the money for hookers and blow and weed and mortgage payments. But it never seemed to lead to fairy tale endings. In fact, it led to train wrecks. Massive train wrecks.

This is a satisfying way for stories to end – everyone gets what they deserve. And in this situation, everyone seems to be getting what they deserve. Perfect moral structure in the story.

But to understand a train wreck, we need to understand who was driving the train, who was shoveling coal, who was the monkey, and who built the tracks.  We have to go back to the beginning. We have to figure out how Bob and Steve and David and Paul and Lin and Umi and Salamander all know each other - if we want to understand why they now all hate each other, and are tearing each other apart in public. We have to choose a beginning for this story.  Luckily that is easy. It begins with a strange thing happening to a coin called Liberty coin.

To be continued.