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.
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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.
