In Soviet Russia Bitcoin invents you

“I’d take my brilliance to grave”. Satoshi once said before cracking a loud laughter. Deep in the bowels of Irkurk technology research unit 34 we whiled our nights away dreaming of buxom California blondes and indoor heating that actually worked. That was the American dream for us.

The Russian reality was a cold, bitter outpost of the bureaucratic residue of the Soviet Union on mornings that were always too early. He joked like a memetic machine but he coded like a beast. “In code a new world is possible every day”, he used to say. And god knows he made that a reality on most days. Once I saw him code and upload a nifty looking app from scratch in nothing more than forty five minutes. It wasn’t fancy but it got the job done.

And the job? The job was collecting data. We made Trojans for the most part. Spyware that intruded on your personal digital space in the guise of cute little gamesies or browser updates that promised to find you the best deals on the internet or sometimes just even background images. Scale was not the objective. If we made something that was too good and got too successful that would attract exactly the kind of attention we didn’t want. That’s why we had to shut down angry birds. What? Did you really think it was that Indonesian kid?

Satoshi’s genius was not just limited to code. He had a joint degree in Physics and economics from Saint Petersburg. Our pathetic little largely ineffective “internet research unit” was his version of Wall Street. He’d ended up here just as Ivy league physics graduates ended up at Wall Street in America writing code for algorithmic trading and occasional flash crash. He was in it for the money. Or more accurately, he needed the money.

We started calling him Satoshi the day he showed up to work with an honest to god sword hanging by his waist belt. He said it was modeled after Hattori Hanzo swords. Nobody really knew what that meant and were referring to him as “hey Satori sword” by the end of the day. The next day he’d become Satoshi.

But we were not bullies and he was no chum. He quickly owned the name Satoshi when one evening he nonchalantly knocked Vlad’s thick metallic zippo out of his hands with a kick and before it could land on the ground, pulled his sword out and slashed right through it. The sword cut through what looked like steel as if it was wax.

I don’t know exactly when he got interested in virtual currency but one morning he came to me and said he wanted to show me something. When we got to his work station, we were welcomed by a black screen and a blank terminal. He’d just run a program. He sat down and punched in some commands and a number appeared on-screen. Then it started increasing.

Then he just smiled at me with pride and leaned back as if to say, look it’s working.

“What’s happening?” I asked him.

“It’s mining. It’s a virtual currency. You can mine it by solving puzzles. It works. It’s beautiful”.

Honestly at the time I had no idea what he was talking about, except that he’d taken the moniker Satoshi and had just run away with it. Apparently he’d been collaborating and interacting online under the name Satoshi Nakamoto with some virtual currency enthusiasts. Now he’d achieved some kind of breakthrough.

He explained it to me. The whole shebang. In hindsight I should have paid more attention because then I could have advised him not to take this to the higher-ups.

Never to take this to the higher-ups.

Instead of course that’s exactly what he did.

Diego immediately saw the potential in it and just like that Satoshi disappeared. He would drop by the office to shoot the shit once every two weeks or so but wouldn’t stay longer. He especially was not allowed to talk about what he was doing. Rumor had it that he was now reporting directly to Putin.

A week before his death he did try to tell me something though. I have to admit I still did not quite understand what he was saying. “They want to use it as an accelerator. To destroy the whole capitalist system using its own tool. They think it will spread like wildfire and once it’s on every financial server we’d be able to trigger any Trojan we may hide in it.” He’d said running his fingers through his hair. “And you know what’s crazy? It might actually work!” He started pacing around my cubicle. “I mean I have told them there’s no way you can credibly hide a Trojan in there. But I am not sure. They might find someone who might be able to do it. Just because I can’t doesn’t mean nobody can.” He seemed clearly distraught. “There goes my baby. Down the drain.”

“What are you gonna do about it?” I asked him.

“I have to destroy the hardware keys. They must not retain access to the Satoshi account.”

A week later at lunch time I heard some ruckus outside the window at the exit check-point. Two military police checked all of us physically every time we had to leave the premises. The whole protocol was a useless tribute to old ways of doing things.

Except of course when you had to steal a hardware key.

I heard the MPs yelling at someone trying to run away from the gate. Then I saw them chasing the guy with their guns out. They yelled a couple of warnings but he didn’t seem to care.

They fired.

The running man found himself flinging in the air from the jolt of the shot and whatever he was running away with escaped his grip and flew in the air.

There was another shot. But before the man and the metallic disk that looked like a small hard drive could hit the ground, in the split of a millisecond I saw a metallic sheen flash around the falling man in a swerve.

I realized it was a sword.

It cut right through the hardware key and both, Satoshi and the key, were dead.