LOL, couldn't sleep last night and this self-generated in my brain, so if anyone plans to do a remake of Total Recall, please do it about Satoshi...
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...because (obviously, duh) he erased his memory.
This is the only reliable way to truly quit something, to not being able to even accidentally disclose who you really are.
That's why he couldn't help Dorian. That's why he can't touch any of his coins. That's why he was silent during the XT split.
But how do you erase your own memory? Well, being a top-level NSA scientist helps. There was a new option available, indeed mandatory upon retirement for all top-level personnel at NSA. So exactly one year before the retirement day he started secretly working on a small cryptographic project of his own...
* * *
But that was not the end of it.
Satoshi was also in charge of the top-secret NSA project codenamed "Spacer", which handled encrypted telemetry and communications from the International Space Station, as well as a big black box up there; and even NASA didn't know what's inside. As one NSA official is rumored to put it: "We can't tell you that, you have one A too many, NASA".
* * *
"BREAKING NEWS! Satoshi moved his coins!"
These were the news headlines all over the world. By the time this happened, Bitcoin has grown to be a 400 billion dollar global phenomenon, so engraved in people's lives that it was impossible to imagine there was a time when it didn't exist.
But that's not all. Attached to the transaction was an encoded message, which nobody had any idea how to decode.
Did I mention that it was repeated in all the news articles and on TV? You see where this is going, don't you?
One old geezer eating his cereal one morning suddenly had a heart attack. It's not easy for the aging heart to swallow your life suddenly coming back to you, when you thought you were a janitor for 45 years in a local library.
Luckily, his wife was there, and thanks to the self-driving cars, the ambulance could get there in time and take him to the hospital.
* * *
A slightly younger old geezer was also surprised. He was the head scientist of the NSA's new "Wipeaway" program. And he remembered one of the people he "processed" repeating a strange sequence of numbers and holding a picture in front of his eyes (at the time he thought it was a picture of his grandkids, as many wanted to take the last look before going into their next life).
Suddenly, he knows how Satoshi Nakamoto looks! Wow, that's big, but he's more interested to know how the hell could that guy beat his wiping procedure?!!
He needs to find him, and soon, because there was a special secret trigger embedded, just in case, that would slowly kill the person in 72 hours if the memory block somehow gets broken...
* * *
But he is not the only one, who remembers a weird old guy mumbling a string of random numbers. A younger assistant was there too. He now moved to another department, in charge of psychological warfare and field work. And he acquired some quite, uhm... substantial gambling debts, thanks to the online gambling, which exploded thanks to Bitcoin. And if Bitcoin has ruined his life, it's only fair if it saves it too!
Of course, for him to find Nakamoto is a piece of cake. Once he gets his hands on the internal sealed records of the top-level retirees... No, they are not in an archive, they are in an unbreakable internal data center. He needs a partner. A hacker, who can do digital magic, while he breaches the air gap. No problem, the people he owes money to are just the right kind of people - crazy Russian new-age digital mafia, who lend bitcoins to online gamblers (among many other things).
Meanwhile the head wiper is much more limited in resources, but he's the only one who knows about the 72 hours deadline, so he's frantic.
* * *
Cryptonerds on some obscure Bitcoin forum soon reported that the original transaction was broadcast from the ISS IP address!
Holly cow, the Bitcoin community exploded with wild speculations! Is Satoshi a cosmonaut? Did he hack ISS and used it as a proxy? Aliens, anyone?
And, of course, there's a young hot ambitious Internal Affairs investigator at NSA. She goes by the affectionate nickname "The Ball Breaker", and now wants to know why suddenly the International Space Station is making Bitcoin transactions…
* * *
But Satoshi wasn't the only one writing secret messages on the blockchain.
During his visit to the CIA, Gavin was infected with a neuronanobot, delivered in a cup of coffee.
CIA wanted to know, who the hell is this Satoshi Nakamoto. But their neuro research program was not as big as NSA's, so the chip is rather simple, it slowly uncovers host's memories, so there is a delay of a few years.
The chip periodically takes control of Gavin and makes him send out transactions with encoded messages to CIA. This was chosen as the most logical way – Gavin was already interested in Bitcoin and messed with it every day, and the messages went on an indestructible public ledger, what could be better? Most of the time they were reading some boring memories from his previous job, but now the chip finally moved very close to the memories of Bitcoin's humble beginning...
And then something happened. The chip was causing interference with Gavin's brain and he developed a digital claustrophobia – a fear that his very important transactions that he absolutely must put on the blockchain won't get through!
Frustrated that he couldn't just make 2 Gb blocks on the main net, one day he took the genesis block and started building his own private blockchain by typing transactions in a hex editor. And being paranoid, he guarded that private blockchain with utmost security!
So now CIA couldn't read it. They didn't even know if the private blockchain had any valuable clues to Satoshi's identity. They needed to get their hands on it, and also switch Gavin back to the main chain. Through their agent of many years Eric Schmidt, they found a young and ambitious candidate to suddenly quit his job at Google and start pushing for bigger blocks...
* * *
But what about Satoshi? Surely he had a plan to follow after waking himself up? He is still fuzzy from the consequences of the heart attack and the treatment.
And his money was moved to an old MtGox deposit address (who knew, right?), suddenly paying off all the creditors x100 times and incidentally getting a fat frenchman out of a cruel Japanese jail...
So Satoshi needs to get his old wallet back, not for iTunes, he already has a nice NSA-provided pension, but to be able to act quickly and follow his original plan...
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Mail me a check, Hollywood