Author

Topic: How BTC changed my life (Read 1734 times)

legendary
Activity: 1918
Merit: 1570
Bitcoin: An Idea Worth Spending
January 19, 2012, 09:59:42 AM
#17
This thread shouldn't die.

What the heck is this? There is something fishy going on here... Wink Is this thread going to be re-titled: How BTC changed my life and starting today, while eating a bacon wrapped-hotdog-hotdogs, I'm going to resurrect old threads, then request that they should die.

ImPoRtAnT EdIt: WARNING!!! Never post before your first cup of coffee. Randy "Fat Ass" Folds posted, "This thread shouldn't die." I thought it read "should". My bad! I will make sure that this sort of thing never happens again. (the thing I speak of is making sure I have that first cup of coffee prior to posting)


sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
January 19, 2012, 02:24:34 AM
#16
This thread shouldn't die.
hero member
Activity: 504
Merit: 500
September 05, 2011, 05:12:22 PM
#15
Did you even bother to read this fine piece?

No.

Well, atleast you're honest. And for that some more insight,
 http://io9.com/5673855/why-doc-brown-is-the-real-villain-of-back-to-the-future

Can we then conclude that Doc Brown is Bitconformist's father?
sr. member
Activity: 504
Merit: 252
Elder Crypto God
September 05, 2011, 05:07:09 PM
#14
Did you even bother to read this fine piece?

No.
hero member
Activity: 504
Merit: 500
September 05, 2011, 05:05:53 PM
#13
I still lived with my parents.

Get a job or get better parents.

Did you even bother to read this fine piece?  At 17 he found Bitcoin, the rest is in the future, as it were.

http://www.optionmonster.com/news/article.php?page=commentary/in_the_news/fast_money_ipos_back_to_the_future_57076.html

sr. member
Activity: 504
Merit: 252
Elder Crypto God
September 05, 2011, 08:37:17 AM
#12
I still lived with my parents.

Get a job or get better parents.
member
Activity: 70
Merit: 10
September 05, 2011, 08:15:46 AM
#11
It all started when I was 17. I remember that it was a hot summer; the crickets were chirping and dad hadn’t beaten me for a few days. He did that sometimes, when he was drunk and I’d been a worthless parasite. I tried hard in school but even so I was still leeching off him. Knowing that made me feel worthless, because it is the strong man who provides for the weak and I was weak. His fists were not violent, it was my impotent sloth that was violent, my lack of industry that forced my father to pay the bills. Such violence is not compassion.

I hope one day to be the man that my father is, the man that he dreamed that I could be. I’ll show him my strength and then he will love me.

It was almost time for the robot championships - we’d placed in the top 50th percentile last year - and I’d spent weeks sketching designs. Tall robots; squat robots; robots to catch and robots to throw; robots with a thousand dongs, each hanging from a hundred other dongs, each dong whirling like a throbbing dervish. The latter was to give the coup de grâce to my demoralised enemies, an android teabagging if you will.

Clem came round that morning. I clearly remember the excitement in her face as she opened his laptop - bought for her by her parents, the leech - and started a strange program. She was shaking a little, and since father blocked the air conditioning vents in my room, she was sweating slightly from the heat.

One day I will marry Clem, if she remains pure and finds a suitable job with good benefits. I could never marry a lesser creature, one of the unclean. “What Would Ayn Do?” was my motto and I strove to meet her expectations, at least so far as I understood them. We’d never touched, for she was not of that type, but I knew we had a quiet, unvoiced connection. She could be mine if I truly asked.

Confused by her awkward excitement, I stammered my bewilderment. “What is it?”

“It’s amazing! My brother showed me. You run this program and it makes Chuck E. Cheese coupons or something.” Still excited, her face was tinged with uncertainty. Was it: will he like it? Or perhaps: do I even know what I am talking about? That had never stopped us before, not when we started the Objectivist Lunch Table, nor when we threw those rocks at old Mr. Gillard when he put that Local 602 sticker on his car. His VFW buddies had chased us but we knew we were in the right. We knew.

I showed her my teeth as mother had taught me, trying to calm Clem from her agitation. The program beeped a successful note and something popped onscreen about blocks. My father had never given me any blocks as a child. I’d resorted to carving some from the cheddar that the government had given me after my emancipation. My father had been so proud to emancipate me: he’d called it my 10th birthday present, a coming of age and the beginning of my long road to manhood. I was no longer dependent upon him, for he’d passed me off to society at large.

“What happened?”
“We just mined a bitcoin!”
“A what?”
“It’s really cool! It’s like money except on a computer. You can’t buy anything with it, of course, because no one gives a shit and it’s completely pointless but my brother says that it will change the world.”

I spent the next week frantically searching online. On the third day I made a fantastic discovery: a program called Google that lets me look for things. It was like going to the library and bugging Mrs. Rudd to show me where the von Mises biographies were but without the blank look and the awkward shuffling away. It found things! I found things! Bitcoin was a revolution and I was going to be at the forefront, blasting aside the old order of tax violence and oppression and replacing it with a new world of poorly regulated currency, volatility, child pornography, poverty, fraud, and smug ignorance! Bitcoin was the answer!

My heart raced and I blacked out. An hour? Two hours? When I awoke, I was naked from the waist down and my thighs were sticky. Someone had drawn my secret dongbot design on the floorboards and my mouth tasted of garlic. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet - I had to stop wasting time, for a new day was dawning.
Wait, if you were emancipated from your dad when you were 10, why were you still hanging out with him when you were 17?
Emancipated meaning he was no longer required to pay for my schooling or healthcare. I still lived with my parents.
newbie
Activity: 26
Merit: 0
September 05, 2011, 05:49:12 AM
#10
Wait, if you were emancipated from your dad when you were 10, why were you still hanging out with him when you were 17?

That is clearly the biggest issue with that post.
newbie
Activity: 56
Merit: 0
September 05, 2011, 02:00:15 AM
#9
It all started when I was 17. I remember that it was a hot summer; the crickets were chirping and dad hadn’t beaten me for a few days. He did that sometimes, when he was drunk and I’d been a worthless parasite. I tried hard in school but even so I was still leeching off him. Knowing that made me feel worthless, because it is the strong man who provides for the weak and I was weak. His fists were not violent, it was my impotent sloth that was violent, my lack of industry that forced my father to pay the bills. Such violence is not compassion.

I hope one day to be the man that my father is, the man that he dreamed that I could be. I’ll show him my strength and then he will love me.

It was almost time for the robot championships - we’d placed in the top 50th percentile last year - and I’d spent weeks sketching designs. Tall robots; squat robots; robots to catch and robots to throw; robots with a thousand dongs, each hanging from a hundred other dongs, each dong whirling like a throbbing dervish. The latter was to give the coup de grâce to my demoralised enemies, an android teabagging if you will.

Clem came round that morning. I clearly remember the excitement in her face as she opened his laptop - bought for her by her parents, the leech - and started a strange program. She was shaking a little, and since father blocked the air conditioning vents in my room, she was sweating slightly from the heat.

One day I will marry Clem, if she remains pure and finds a suitable job with good benefits. I could never marry a lesser creature, one of the unclean. “What Would Ayn Do?” was my motto and I strove to meet her expectations, at least so far as I understood them. We’d never touched, for she was not of that type, but I knew we had a quiet, unvoiced connection. She could be mine if I truly asked.

Confused by her awkward excitement, I stammered my bewilderment. “What is it?”

“It’s amazing! My brother showed me. You run this program and it makes Chuck E. Cheese coupons or something.” Still excited, her face was tinged with uncertainty. Was it: will he like it? Or perhaps: do I even know what I am talking about? That had never stopped us before, not when we started the Objectivist Lunch Table, nor when we threw those rocks at old Mr. Gillard when he put that Local 602 sticker on his car. His VFW buddies had chased us but we knew we were in the right. We knew.

I showed her my teeth as mother had taught me, trying to calm Clem from her agitation. The program beeped a successful note and something popped onscreen about blocks. My father had never given me any blocks as a child. I’d resorted to carving some from the cheddar that the government had given me after my emancipation. My father had been so proud to emancipate me: he’d called it my 10th birthday present, a coming of age and the beginning of my long road to manhood. I was no longer dependent upon him, for he’d passed me off to society at large.

“What happened?”
“We just mined a bitcoin!”
“A what?”
“It’s really cool! It’s like money except on a computer. You can’t buy anything with it, of course, because no one gives a shit and it’s completely pointless but my brother says that it will change the world.”

I spent the next week frantically searching online. On the third day I made a fantastic discovery: a program called Google that lets me look for things. It was like going to the library and bugging Mrs. Rudd to show me where the von Mises biographies were but without the blank look and the awkward shuffling away. It found things! I found things! Bitcoin was a revolution and I was going to be at the forefront, blasting aside the old order of tax violence and oppression and replacing it with a new world of poorly regulated currency, volatility, child pornography, poverty, fraud, and smug ignorance! Bitcoin was the answer!

My heart raced and I blacked out. An hour? Two hours? When I awoke, I was naked from the waist down and my thighs were sticky. Someone had drawn my secret dongbot design on the floorboards and my mouth tasted of garlic. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet - I had to stop wasting time, for a new day was dawning.
Wait, if you were emancipated from your dad when you were 10, why were you still hanging out with him when you were 17?
full member
Activity: 126
Merit: 100
September 05, 2011, 01:04:27 AM
#8
It all started when I was 17. I remember that it was a hot summer; the crickets were chirping and dad hadn’t beaten me for a few days. He did that sometimes, when he was drunk and I’d been a worthless parasite. I tried hard in school but even so I was still leeching off him. Knowing that made me feel worthless, because it is the strong man who provides for the weak and I was weak. His fists were not violent, it was my impotent sloth that was violent, my lack of industry that forced my father to pay the bills. Such violence is not compassion.

I hope one day to be the man that my father is, the man that he dreamed that I could be. I’ll show him my strength and then he will love me.

It was almost time for the robot championships - we’d placed in the top 50th percentile last year - and I’d spent weeks sketching designs. Tall robots; squat robots; robots to catch and robots to throw; robots with a thousand dongs, each hanging from a hundred other dongs, each dong whirling like a throbbing dervish. The latter was to give the coup de grâce to my demoralised enemies, an android teabagging if you will.

Clem came round that morning. I clearly remember the excitement in her face as she opened his laptop - bought for her by her parents, the leech - and started a strange program. She was shaking a little, and since father blocked the air conditioning vents in my room, she was sweating slightly from the heat.

One day I will marry Clem, if she remains pure and finds a suitable job with good benefits. I could never marry a lesser creature, one of the unclean. “What Would Ayn Do?” was my motto and I strove to meet her expectations, at least so far as I understood them. We’d never touched, for she was not of that type, but I knew we had a quiet, unvoiced connection. She could be mine if I truly asked.

Confused by her awkward excitement, I stammered my bewilderment. “What is it?”

“It’s amazing! My brother showed me. You run this program and it makes Chuck E. Cheese coupons or something.” Still excited, her face was tinged with uncertainty. Was it: will he like it? Or perhaps: do I even know what I am talking about? That had never stopped us before, not when we started the Objectivist Lunch Table, nor when we threw those rocks at old Mr. Gillard when he put that Local 602 sticker on his car. His VFW buddies had chased us but we knew we were in the right. We knew.

I showed her my teeth as mother had taught me, trying to calm Clem from her agitation. The program beeped a successful note and something popped onscreen about blocks. My father had never given me any blocks as a child. I’d resorted to carving some from the cheddar that the government had given me after my emancipation. My father had been so proud to emancipate me: he’d called it my 10th birthday present, a coming of age and the beginning of my long road to manhood. I was no longer dependent upon him, for he’d passed me off to society at large.

“What happened?”
“We just mined a bitcoin!”
“A what?”
“It’s really cool! It’s like money except on a computer. You can’t buy anything with it, of course, because no one gives a shit and it’s completely pointless but my brother says that it will change the world.”

I spent the next week frantically searching online. On the third day I made a fantastic discovery: a program called Google that lets me look for things. It was like going to the library and bugging Mrs. Rudd to show me where the von Mises biographies were but without the blank look and the awkward shuffling away. It found things! I found things! Bitcoin was a revolution and I was going to be at the forefront, blasting aside the old order of tax violence and oppression and replacing it with a new world of poorly regulated currency, volatility, child pornography, poverty, fraud, and smug ignorance! Bitcoin was the answer!

My heart raced and I blacked out. An hour? Two hours? When I awoke, I was naked from the waist down and my thighs were sticky. Someone had drawn my secret dongbot design on the floorboards and my mouth tasted of garlic. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet - I had to stop wasting time, for a new day was dawning.

Such a long story, LOL
member
Activity: 70
Merit: 10
September 04, 2011, 01:46:06 PM
#7
It all started when I was 17. I remember that it was a hot summer; the crickets were chirping and dad hadn’t beaten me for a few days. He did that sometimes, when he was drunk and I’d been a worthless parasite. I tried hard in school but even so I was still leeching off him. Knowing that made me feel worthless, because it is the strong man who provides for the weak and I was weak. His fists were not violent, it was my impotent sloth that was violent, my lack of industry that forced my father to pay the bills. Such violence is not compassion.

I hope one day to be the man that my father is, the man that he dreamed that I could be. I’ll show him my strength and then he will love me.

It was almost time for the robot championships - we’d placed in the top 50th percentile last year - and I’d spent weeks sketching designs. Tall robots; squat robots; robots to catch and robots to throw; robots with a thousand dongs, each hanging from a hundred other dongs, each dong whirling like a throbbing dervish. The latter was to give the coup de grâce to my demoralised enemies, an android teabagging if you will.

Clem came round that morning. I clearly remember the excitement in her face as she opened his laptop - bought for her by her parents, the leech - and started a strange program. She was shaking a little, and since father blocked the air conditioning vents in my room, she was sweating slightly from the heat.

One day I will marry Clem, if she remains pure and finds a suitable job with good benefits. I could never marry a lesser creature, one of the unclean. “What Would Ayn Do?” was my motto and I strove to meet her expectations, at least so far as I understood them. We’d never touched, for she was not of that type, but I knew we had a quiet, unvoiced connection. She could be mine if I truly asked.

Confused by her awkward excitement, I stammered my bewilderment. “What is it?”

“It’s amazing! My brother showed me. You run this program and it makes Chuck E. Cheese coupons or something.” Still excited, her face was tinged with uncertainty. Was it: will he like it? Or perhaps: do I even know what I am talking about? That had never stopped us before, not when we started the Objectivist Lunch Table, nor when we threw those rocks at old Mr. Gillard when he put that Local 602 sticker on his car. His VFW buddies had chased us but we knew we were in the right. We knew.

I showed her my teeth as mother had taught me, trying to calm Clem from her agitation. The program beeped a successful note and something popped onscreen about blocks. My father had never given me any blocks as a child. I’d resorted to carving some from the cheddar that the government had given me after my emancipation. My father had been so proud to emancipate me: he’d called it my 10th birthday present, a coming of age and the beginning of my long road to manhood. I was no longer dependent upon him, for he’d passed me off to society at large.

“What happened?”
“We just mined a bitcoin!”
“A what?”
“It’s really cool! It’s like money except on a computer. You can’t buy anything with it, of course, because no one gives a shit and it’s completely pointless but my brother says that it will change the world.”

I spent the next week frantically searching online. On the third day I made a fantastic discovery: a program called Google that lets me look for things. It was like going to the library and bugging Mrs. Rudd to show me where the von Mises biographies were but without the blank look and the awkward shuffling away. It found things! I found things! Bitcoin was a revolution and I was going to be at the forefront, blasting aside the old order of tax violence and oppression and replacing it with a new world of poorly regulated currency, volatility, child pornography, poverty, fraud, and smug ignorance! Bitcoin was the answer!

My heart raced and I blacked out. An hour? Two hours? When I awoke, I was naked from the waist down and my thighs were sticky. Someone had drawn my secret dongbot design on the floorboards and my mouth tasted of garlic. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet - I had to stop wasting time, for a new day was dawning.

*clap clap clap* BRAVO!

Bitconformist, will you have my baby, and then beat it for being such a sloth?

Seriously though.. This is great stuff. What would it cost (in Bitcoin, of course!) to give you a topic and have you write in this style, a 1-2 page article?


You, my good sir, are clearly no lover of bitcoin. What could possibly make you think that I would help you to destroy the play money that I hold so dear?
donator
Activity: 392
Merit: 252
September 04, 2011, 12:49:17 PM
#6
It all started when I was 17. I remember that it was a hot summer; the crickets were chirping and dad hadn’t beaten me for a few days. He did that sometimes, when he was drunk and I’d been a worthless parasite. I tried hard in school but even so I was still leeching off him. Knowing that made me feel worthless, because it is the strong man who provides for the weak and I was weak. His fists were not violent, it was my impotent sloth that was violent, my lack of industry that forced my father to pay the bills. Such violence is not compassion.

I hope one day to be the man that my father is, the man that he dreamed that I could be. I’ll show him my strength and then he will love me.

It was almost time for the robot championships - we’d placed in the top 50th percentile last year - and I’d spent weeks sketching designs. Tall robots; squat robots; robots to catch and robots to throw; robots with a thousand dongs, each hanging from a hundred other dongs, each dong whirling like a throbbing dervish. The latter was to give the coup de grâce to my demoralised enemies, an android teabagging if you will.

Clem came round that morning. I clearly remember the excitement in her face as she opened his laptop - bought for her by her parents, the leech - and started a strange program. She was shaking a little, and since father blocked the air conditioning vents in my room, she was sweating slightly from the heat.

One day I will marry Clem, if she remains pure and finds a suitable job with good benefits. I could never marry a lesser creature, one of the unclean. “What Would Ayn Do?” was my motto and I strove to meet her expectations, at least so far as I understood them. We’d never touched, for she was not of that type, but I knew we had a quiet, unvoiced connection. She could be mine if I truly asked.

Confused by her awkward excitement, I stammered my bewilderment. “What is it?”

“It’s amazing! My brother showed me. You run this program and it makes Chuck E. Cheese coupons or something.” Still excited, her face was tinged with uncertainty. Was it: will he like it? Or perhaps: do I even know what I am talking about? That had never stopped us before, not when we started the Objectivist Lunch Table, nor when we threw those rocks at old Mr. Gillard when he put that Local 602 sticker on his car. His VFW buddies had chased us but we knew we were in the right. We knew.

I showed her my teeth as mother had taught me, trying to calm Clem from her agitation. The program beeped a successful note and something popped onscreen about blocks. My father had never given me any blocks as a child. I’d resorted to carving some from the cheddar that the government had given me after my emancipation. My father had been so proud to emancipate me: he’d called it my 10th birthday present, a coming of age and the beginning of my long road to manhood. I was no longer dependent upon him, for he’d passed me off to society at large.

“What happened?”
“We just mined a bitcoin!”
“A what?”
“It’s really cool! It’s like money except on a computer. You can’t buy anything with it, of course, because no one gives a shit and it’s completely pointless but my brother says that it will change the world.”

I spent the next week frantically searching online. On the third day I made a fantastic discovery: a program called Google that lets me look for things. It was like going to the library and bugging Mrs. Rudd to show me where the von Mises biographies were but without the blank look and the awkward shuffling away. It found things! I found things! Bitcoin was a revolution and I was going to be at the forefront, blasting aside the old order of tax violence and oppression and replacing it with a new world of poorly regulated currency, volatility, child pornography, poverty, fraud, and smug ignorance! Bitcoin was the answer!

My heart raced and I blacked out. An hour? Two hours? When I awoke, I was naked from the waist down and my thighs were sticky. Someone had drawn my secret dongbot design on the floorboards and my mouth tasted of garlic. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet - I had to stop wasting time, for a new day was dawning.

*clap clap clap* BRAVO!

Bitconformist, will you have my baby, and then beat it for being such a sloth?

Seriously though.. This is great stuff. What would it cost (in Bitcoin, of course!) to give you a topic and have you write in this style, a 1-2 page article?

member
Activity: 70
Merit: 10
September 04, 2011, 11:59:42 AM
#5
I'm going to find you OP.


Because after this, the world needs justice.
There is no justice in a world where governments steal the sweat of a man's brow.
full member
Activity: 210
Merit: 100
September 03, 2011, 02:28:28 PM
#4
Here is how it changed mine.  This is not copypasta.

I started Bitcoin mining quite a while ago. I already had a decent build with 2 5850s in crossfire that I used for gaming. After mining for a while, I earned enough money to buy more mining hardware from Newegg and Amazon. In the end, I had a total of 4 PCs with 2 5850s in each of them, except for 1 of them, which had 3 5850s. I won’t bother listing all the specs, since they’re nothing special aside from the 5850s.

I overclocked the core clocks of the 5850s to squeeze a little more performance out of them, and underclocked the video ram in order to reduce heat. I had them running at 100% fan speed to try and cool them off a little better, but they still got pretty hot anyway.

I’m a freshman in college and unfortunately still live with my parents (living in a dorm is too expensive), so I don’t really have any other place to put my PCs except in my own room. So I kept all 4 machines in my bedroom, which is not very big. So they were pretty close to my bed.

My parents’ house doesn’t have central heating/AC, but instead we have window AC units that we install in the summer, and space heaters for the winter. However, I procrastinated and didn’t install the AC unit in my room because it wasn’t too hot yet. They are big, bulky, and heavy, so I didn’t want to do it until I absolutely had to. But, being the summer, it did eventually get hotter. Faster than I had anticipated.

One day, when I was sleeping (yes, I sometimes sleep in the day due to being up very late at night/early in the morning), it got very hot. And I still didn’t have the AC unit installed in my room, and my 4 mining rigs were still mining bitcoins (I left them on 24/7), generating lots of heat. It was extremely hot. I eventually woke up due to the heat, but it was already too late.

I had a terrible heat stroke, and it was quite frightening and disorienting. I not only felt physically terrible, having trouble breathing and terrible nausea, but I was also mentally and emotionally confused and saw all sorts of unpleasant hallucinations (but after doing some googling, apparently that’s normal for people who have heat strokes). I eventually staggered out of my room, which took quite a lot of effort, and my parents saw that I wasn’t doing too well and then realized I needed medical attention.

They rushed me to the ER, and at this point I was barely conscious so I don’t remember everything, but they put bags of ice on me and made me drink tons of liquids. I have no idea how long it lasted, because every second felt like an hour. It was terrible.

After I was in a stable condition, they did some general check-up stuff to make sure that I didn’t have any organ damage or something, and I told them that my head felt awful, so they did either a CT scan or MRI scan (I forget which is which, but it was some scan or another of my head), and said I basically had minor brain damage (they used a fancier term for it, but I forgot exactly what it was… but it was basically just minor permanent brain damage). I don’t notice much of a difference in my ability to think… it’s not as if I’m mentally retarded or anything now, but even so, no brain damage is good.

I eventually went back home and rested up for a while. My parents installed the AC unit in my room before I went back in. I just slept and drank lots of water for a couple days. I had mostly recovered from the heat stroke, but my body was still dehydrated, so I needed to rest and drink more fluids. And during this time, I turned off all of my PCs. Only the AC was running in my room.

I am aware that this was all my fault and that it could have prevented it, but it’s too late to change anything now. And after all this, I am no longer going to do any bitcoin mining. I will probably sell my mining rigs, or maybe find some other purpose for them. But they definitely won’t be on at full load 24/7 like I used to have them, even though I have a good AC unit in my room.

And despite this whole situation being rather shitty, I still feel pretty damn lucky. Heat strokes can be fatal if they aren’t treated quickly enough. But fortunately for me, I was able to get treated in time. A little brain damage is still better than death, after all. It still sucks, but it also could’ve been worse.

In conclusion, if you are mining bitcoins, or plan on mining bitcoins, make sure that your hardware doesn’t get too hot, and if you’re like me and have your hardware in your bedroom, definitely make sure you have AC! Don’t repeat the same mistakes I made. Even if it only feels a little more warm than usual, you never know if the weather will get worse.

newbie
Activity: 42
Merit: 0
September 03, 2011, 01:21:43 PM
#3
I'm going to find you OP.


Because after this, the world needs justice.
hero member
Activity: 952
Merit: 1009
September 03, 2011, 09:56:09 AM
#2
You're no Hakan.
member
Activity: 70
Merit: 10
September 03, 2011, 09:32:17 AM
#1
It all started when I was 17. I remember that it was a hot summer; the crickets were chirping and dad hadn’t beaten me for a few days. He did that sometimes, when he was drunk and I’d been a worthless parasite. I tried hard in school but even so I was still leeching off him. Knowing that made me feel worthless, because it is the strong man who provides for the weak and I was weak. His fists were not violent, it was my impotent sloth that was violent, my lack of industry that forced my father to pay the bills. Such violence is not compassion.

I hope one day to be the man that my father is, the man that he dreamed that I could be. I’ll show him my strength and then he will love me.

It was almost time for the robot championships - we’d placed in the top 50th percentile last year - and I’d spent weeks sketching designs. Tall robots; squat robots; robots to catch and robots to throw; robots with a thousand dongs, each hanging from a hundred other dongs, each dong whirling like a throbbing dervish. The latter was to give the coup de grâce to my demoralised enemies, an android teabagging if you will.

Clem came round that morning. I clearly remember the excitement in her face as she opened his laptop - bought for her by her parents, the leech - and started a strange program. She was shaking a little, and since father blocked the air conditioning vents in my room, she was sweating slightly from the heat.

One day I will marry Clem, if she remains pure and finds a suitable job with good benefits. I could never marry a lesser creature, one of the unclean. “What Would Ayn Do?” was my motto and I strove to meet her expectations, at least so far as I understood them. We’d never touched, for she was not of that type, but I knew we had a quiet, unvoiced connection. She could be mine if I truly asked.

Confused by her awkward excitement, I stammered my bewilderment. “What is it?”

“It’s amazing! My brother showed me. You run this program and it makes Chuck E. Cheese coupons or something.” Still excited, her face was tinged with uncertainty. Was it: will he like it? Or perhaps: do I even know what I am talking about? That had never stopped us before, not when we started the Objectivist Lunch Table, nor when we threw those rocks at old Mr. Gillard when he put that Local 602 sticker on his car. His VFW buddies had chased us but we knew we were in the right. We knew.

I showed her my teeth as mother had taught me, trying to calm Clem from her agitation. The program beeped a successful note and something popped onscreen about blocks. My father had never given me any blocks as a child. I’d resorted to carving some from the cheddar that the government had given me after my emancipation. My father had been so proud to emancipate me: he’d called it my 10th birthday present, a coming of age and the beginning of my long road to manhood. I was no longer dependent upon him, for he’d passed me off to society at large.

“What happened?”
“We just mined a bitcoin!”
“A what?”
“It’s really cool! It’s like money except on a computer. You can’t buy anything with it, of course, because no one gives a shit and it’s completely pointless but my brother says that it will change the world.”

I spent the next week frantically searching online. On the third day I made a fantastic discovery: a program called Google that lets me look for things. It was like going to the library and bugging Mrs. Rudd to show me where the von Mises biographies were but without the blank look and the awkward shuffling away. It found things! I found things! Bitcoin was a revolution and I was going to be at the forefront, blasting aside the old order of tax violence and oppression and replacing it with a new world of poorly regulated currency, volatility, child pornography, poverty, fraud, and smug ignorance! Bitcoin was the answer!

My heart raced and I blacked out. An hour? Two hours? When I awoke, I was naked from the waist down and my thighs were sticky. Someone had drawn my secret dongbot design on the floorboards and my mouth tasted of garlic. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet - I had to stop wasting time, for a new day was dawning.
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