The True Story of Bitcoin

Actual author's note: parody, satire, fiction, call it what you like but all of the following is made-up!

The following has been compiled by me, a time traveler, in order to give you "past-ers" the real story regarding Satoshi Nakamoto.

My beginning with bitcoin was when I received our treasured family heirloom, the first 50 Bitcoins. Given to us by one of the Satoshi Nakamoto themselves, they accompanied the real final transmission of the Satoshi Nakamoto, preserved below:

Here we are, about to get stormed by the Federal Reserve agents outside, and I ask myself, how could things have gone so wrong? What was the point at which we messed up? But, let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). Yes, that beautiful summer day of August 16th, 2008...

Everything was going great until I had a disagreement with my boss at the Federal Reserve. Things got heated and I ended up losing my job. One thing led to another and eventually I decided to get revenge. I suppose that was really the problem.

I gathered together a group of fellow geniuses (we're quite modest) and we set out to revolutionize currency so nobody could mess with it.

There's a couple of coders (Zak Morris and Jackie Lara), a semi-reformed hacker (Kiran Dean), a cryptography expert (Connor Lewis), and, of course, me, an economics major (Duane Prelich). Oh, and who could forget "Shannon". He's the ex-para in charge of security that we picked up after being shadowed everywhere. He's also the one over there saying "you get a submachine gun, and you get a submachine gun, everyone gets a submachine gun!". Together we go by the nom de guerre Satoshi Nakamoto.

Well, this will go into a time capsule to be opened on November 5th, 2109 (100 years from now). That is, if this gets emailed to my "friend" in time and he succeeds in putting it there.

They're coming. I have to go and help with the defense. Maybe we'll buy enough time to get the research away and leave a legacy.

Duane Prelich, B.S. Economics, 1/21/1983-11/05/2009

Regrettably, it never made it into the time capsule. It had to be destroyed to prevent our family from being incriminated, but not before my great-great-great-great-grandfather committed the whole thing to memory. This story, along with the Bitcoins, was passed down to each generation orally before coming to me. We were always told that we had to wait until the seventh generation (me) before we could use those bitcoins or tell anybody from our period about it, and even then one Bitcoin must be kept.

That foresight was admirable and it's what has made us multi-trillionaires. I, however don't want to keep you all the way in the dark about Satoshi Nakamoto (♫and you aren't from my period♫) so I've honored their memory above and I'm giving you some information about what happened afterwards.

The following is an excerpt from Deathbed Confessions of a Federal Reserve Hitman. The copyright is from 2085 so I'll quote from it liberally. After all, you can't violate the copyright on something that hasn't been written yet, right?

The Bitcoin Incident

We'd had the group known as "Satoshi Nakamoto" under surveillance for about a year. I guess we should have moved faster than we did because they got wise and hired a mercenary. They all made a pretty good account of themselves and we incurred about 16 casualties. the only way we finally subdued them was when our sniper cleared the apartment above them and we cut a hole through the floor. It went pretty quick after that.

We were able to spare the computers from a lot of damage and I understand that our techs were able to figure out a lot before they transferred the program over to the FBI.

The following is the last thing recovered courtesy of the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) about Operation Red Cougar. The FBI's internal memorandum dated 3/16/2010 goes into some shocking detail on their attempted Bitcoin takeover. To whit:

We at the bureau have, at the request of the Federal Reserve, thus far gone to great lengths to attempt to guide the development of the dangerous alternative currency called "Bitcoin". As you know we at the bureau have attempted to limit the adoption of "Bitcoin". We unfortunately must report that our efforts have generally failed (due to the open-source nature of the currency) with the exception of placing hidden trackers on Bitcoin.org so that those interested in the currency may be monitored. Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell how long these trackers will be effective for. However, our colleagues at the NSA assure us that these will be helpful in monitoring suspicious activities for years to come.

We would thus like to suggest that the "Bitcoin" project be turned over to a private individual and merely monitored in the future for new alarming developments. We unfortunately must recommend this course of action due to diminishing returns in our attempts to control "Bitcoin"

Hopefully we can avoid having the "Satoshi Nakamoto" group turn into the object of a quasi-cult and cover-up our liquidation of this threatening group.

Never fear though, you "past-ers", eventually these trackers will be uncovered (I'm not going to tell you when. Yeesh, I can't tell you everything). In fact, in the future, Bitcoin is looking rosier than ever (we are trillionaires after all). I'd better conclude the article here and go back to the future though (lest I accidentally kill my grandfather).