The Legend of Cryptic Currency

Even other wizards and financers railed against it initially. But customer demand convinced them to look again.

This is the origin story of Wizard Theia's legendary alchemical currency.

One Friday evening, as she saw her breath billow out in fluffy white clouds in her workroom, Theia, the local wizard decided she had to find a way to increase the value of her clients' aurum coins. Her ultimate aim; to raise her status as well as her working conditions. So she set to work on finding a suitable solution for both.

First, like aurum, this new currency had to be scarce.

Second, it had to be more valuable, not for its immediate use, but in the future. It wouldn't work unless one person after another person after another believed in its power to be of far greater value to them in the years to come.

It is easy to believe in aurum because it is solid, but how do I make people believe in something they cannot see? Wizard Theia asked herself this question over and over again. 

One day, she struck upon an option where the owners of the currency could see it with special glass filters, yet their treasure would be concealed to the naked eye. Yes, this might work. Each client would receive a set of filters arranged in an order unique to them.

Third, the wizard knew her clients would adopt a new currency with zeal. Especially one as novel and sworn to secrecy as this. They were bored with aurum, the day of the precious yellow metal was done.

The time was ripe for a new currency bubble to be launched. Her clients would invest, they'd tell their friends and the value of the cryptic currency would soar. Even become an occult membership. Its mystic powers promoting unwavering desire to purchase more.

The fourth part of the plan involved the magician knowing, through her talent for prediction, when people were disillusioned or lost interest. The sale of cryptic investments for profit in the future is crucial for her clients and their friends.

For those who jumped on the riches wagon late in the day, if they held on too long when the price dropped, they would lose out. However, if they were brave and resilient they would weather the downturn and reap the profits of the next peak in value.

Her plan for her more courageous clients is for them to keep some or all of their cryptic currency in place and ride out the lows until the next wave of interest spurred prices to rocket.

The final and crucial part of the plan is to develop a magical object to keep the cryptic currency safe and secure. Some kind of container that only her clients and their friends would know the identity of.

An individual item of jewellery or magical pocket inside a boot - anything was possible. A page in a book or hanging invisible on an invisible hook on the wall.

Wizard Theia wrote spells, assembled ingredients, and practised her magical and alchemical arts. Weeks passed.

Clients started to drop by, interrupting her work, keen to learn more about when their new great riches would be available. They left, disappointed, but eager to return with an item with which they had an emotional attachment.

Her major client, Lord Argute, was the first to send a trusted manservant with a small unremarkable landscape painting. Theia nodded with respect, the owner of most of the land and property for miles around had chosen wisely. Anything of obvious value could easily be lost to thieves. She requested the manservant to return in three days time.

The lord would have the finest royal blue filter, the size and shape of a monocle which might be worn on a chain under or over clothing as an adornment. He could use it at any time to admire his framed landscape yet only see shimmering hiddenites.

The wizard had yet to address the urgent problem of how many hiddenites to secrete in a damp cavern deep underground. She had the perfect cave in mind. It could only be reached and revealed by her incantation of the spell she used to disguise the opening halfway up the mountain.

She arranged for a band of gnomes to extract the super rare gems with great care - for the hiddenites were fragile - and make available 144 blocks per day.

The grand total of hiddenites which Theia created and magicked into the cavern's roof, ceiling and walls numbered 21 million. A thousand for every century she had been in existence. 

She knew a finite number of gems brought into the market would make hiddenite scarcer than gold when they were all sold in decades to come.

Working in shifts, the six gnomes would earn a daily fee of 50 gems for mining 144 blocks or 6 per hour. 

After four years, the daily fee for mining the 144 blocks would be halved. The gnomes had to ensure they used the best technology or magic to reduce their costs.

Transporting the daily haul was a simple matter of magical teleportation from the mine to Theia's cellar. From there she would disguise the exquisite stones with a cloak of invisibility, each parcel assigned a unique coloured-glass filter and to a client who had preordered. Their chosen and appropriate personal item would then be filled with the microscopic invisible gems.

Clients could buy as many hiddenite gems as they could afford and were available to be bought at any one time.

Lord Argute knew a potential path to riches when he saw one. He hung his landscape on the wall of his chamber facing his bed. Every morning and evening he looked through his monocle and checked on his investment. It shimmered and grew every day. “Wizard Theia is indeed a fine magician,” he told his close friends. And they told their friends.

Soon, a waiting list formed and business boomed. Hiddenite was the most popular, best invisible investment available on the market. Its value doubled and quadrupled.

Meanwhile, the original band of gnomes were subcontracting the mining to their relatives and were enjoying their cashed in hiddenite gem profits. Splurging on pungent truffles, the best honey mead, and exquisite gin infused with exotic botanicals such as dragon eye and lotus leaves, they knew how to live life to the full.

Theia warned the gnomes at the start of their contract to save their mining rewards because their earnings would be halved after 210,000 blocks had been mined. Not only did they save most of their rewards, but the gnomes also discovered novel and innovative means of saving energy and time.

They negotiated a fair deal with miniature unicorns to carry the blocks in cushioned saddlebags from the depths of the cavern up to the surface where free elves worked for food, lodgings and broken gems (hiddenite is brittle) which they mended with an invisible fixative and sold to local speculators at a low low price.

During the first four years, exchanges, franchised to other wizards by Theia, opened all over the kingdom. 

They duplicated Theia's set up with her agreement and instructions for them to follow. Some were greedy and charged exorbitant fees for their services but clients were willing or foolish enough to pay. 

When the original mine failed to meet demand, wizard Theia removed almost all the hiddenite from the cavern. She selected the most obscure and the most obvious places to secrete varying amounts of the gem blocks to be mined by willing entrepreneurs. 

The new mines did have to be discovered, though. So she created various challenges and transactions that when met in the correct manner by a miner, a cavern would be revealed to them.

Following clues and translating the treasure maps provided by Theia, the entrepreneurs first had to locate the nodes where Theia had stored tens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of blocks of gems. Once they were in, they could start mining to rake in their 50 hiddenites per day.

In the fourth year since its inception Theia could see interest and demand waning, so advised Lord Argute to sell his profits and keep his original investment in the currency. She also recommended he stand firm because the value was about to plummet. Of course, the Lord told his close friends and they told theirs.

Some heeded the tip, others panicked and sold all their hiddenite. The price behaved as per Theia's prediction and the value reduced to only two pieces of aurum. The early speculators could still double their money as they had originally bought one piece of cryptic currency with one aurum coin.

The wise Lord and his friends made a killing on their profits and they then sat back to enjoy the ride through to the next bubble. They watched as new speculators from far and wide bought low, pushing the value up until Theia again predicted the profit bubble would burst.

In the fourth year, when interest was in the lowest of troughs, the mining payment was halved. Many miners were not prepared and lost their income. Those who were, streamlined their enterprise cutting costs with machinery and employing willing magical creatures looking to make a quick gem before wandering off to enjoy their lives elsewhere.

This cycle continued for three decades until the very last hiddenite had been mined. Along the way, investors and miners got rich or not. Wizards with great customer service delighted the clients who wanted to buy invisible gems and admire them in their favourite trinket or prized possession. Others failed because their service stank and their trust ratings tanked. 

Lord Argute continued to profit from his investments year on year. As a generous benefactor to the people in his kingdom he ensured everyone had food in their tummies, clothes on their bodies, and hope for future generations.

The exchange wizards branched out to cover more visible commodities.

The gnomes, unicorns, and elves were all delighted with their fortunes and returned to their natural habitats of sunshine and rainbows and cushion soft grass to laze in and watch clouds waft across the sky.

Wizard Theia sold her 5% ownership cut for an astronomical sum and retired to an eco-friendly mansion in a temperate land with plenty of warming sunbeams in the mild winters.

If you are lucky, you might catch sight of her on her balcony sipping from a steaming mug of coffee with her feet up and planning her next venture.