Crypto-cacotopia and the perfect self-fulfilling doomsday device

“Vires en numeris” they had led us to believe, strength in numbers, the idea that a new financial system could be built on maths alone. Its elegant simplicity was appealing to many at first, but behind the numbers and the technology there were people, and as always it was the people who were the problem.

The lights flickered as the battery backups kicked in. Carl sighed. It must be another electricity outage. This was becoming the new normal.

Much of the world’s electricity supply was now consumed by the new currency networks. They had been programmed to increase energy consumption as their popularity increased, performing pointless calculations of ever escalating difficulty. And they had been designed to increase in popularity, with each new layer of adopters incentivised to draw in more layers below them to sustain the system and elevate their position within it. That combination made it the perfect self-fulfilling doomsday device. Such a simple and senseless method of self-destruction.

His working day was nearly finished, so he logged out, shut down, grabbed his hardware wallet, and walked over to his apartment door. There might still be enough daylight to get to the market and back before dark, and there was still a chance that some more food could have been delivered since he last went out. He checked all was clear, deactivated the locks, stepped outside, and confirmed that the locks had clunked shut behind him.

The local market was a shabby affair, made more gloomy by the overcast sky and approaching twilight. Makeshift stalls had been set up on the pavements and some spilled onto the roads. Most of the shops behind the stalls were boarded up now, save for a few with garish signs advertising the currency terminals inside. The main business of those was not the currency terminals, but the narcotics which they now sold fairly openly. Strangely enough these seemed to be among the most readily available products nowadays. It was rumoured that they were actually distributed by some of the leaders of this new world, as a literal rather than metaphorical opiate for the masses. Certainly there was a steady stream of customers floating in and out, looking for temporary relief from the grim new reality. But Carl was not here for that. He wanted to retain a clear head. He had his own means of escape anyway. It was food he was after now.

Most of the stalls were still empty. The ones which were trading were offering various bric-a-brac and well-worn second-hand clothing rather than food. Carl walked past a stall selling various forms of weaponry, including guns. He was sure they had been illegal before, but legal was such an ambiguous term now.

Supply chains began breaking down soon after the introduction of the allegedly tamperproof blockchain-based automation systems. The temptation to subvert the systems, bribing people to enter false data onto an immutable ledger, had proven too much for some.

“Potatoes”, Carl heard a stallholder cry from further down the street. He headed that way. He had a small stock of potatoes at home, but didn’t want to miss any chance to buy more food.

“Potatoes, all crypto”, the stallholder cried again. There was no need for him to continue calling because by now a crowd was starting to gather.

Carl joined the huddle. He could see two large sacks of potatoes at the back, a couple of burly characters guarding them, along with scales and the payment terminal at the front. It was a slow process serving each customer. It seemed slower when waiting in a crowd, hoping that there would be some left by the time he got to the front.

The first sack ran out. Carl was still edging forwards. People who had successfully purchased small bags of potatoes pushed to get to the back as he was pushing forwards, adding to the sense of confusion and urgency.

When it was finally his turn, there were still some muddy and slightly bashed looking potatoes towards the end of the last sack.

“I’ll take all you’ve got left” Carl said, and the few remaining people around him mumbled and began to drift off. The stallholder’s assistant weighed and bagged the potatoes, and the stallholder entered the weight into his payment terminal. After a moment he pointed to the terminal’s screen, which showed a long list of currencies and the latest price for the potatoes with each. Carl pointed to the currency he wanted to pay with today, the stallholder pressed another button to display the payment code for that currency, and Carl confirmed payment with his mobile device. After what seemed like an interminable pause, confirmation came through, and the stallholder’s assistant handed him the potatoes.

“Have a nice day”, the assistant said.

“Thanks, and you”, Carl replied. He did not know if the assistant was being sarcastic given how difficult it was to have a nice day nowadays, but best assume not. You never know if you might need to buy something from these people again. Carl turned around to leave, expecting to have to push through a crowd, before remembering the others had gone.

Hesitantly, Carl turned back to the stallholder again, leaned forward, and whispered “You haven’t got any fruit have you?” The stallholder shook his head. Carl added furtively “I’ve got fiat”. The stallholder’s eyes lit up at the mention of “fiat”. The stallholder nodded towards his assistant. Carl looked hopefully at the assistant, who motioned for Carl to step to the side. Carl’s dream was to eat fresh melon or cherries, which he had not tasted in what seemed like years, although he knew that was probably hoping for a bit much.

Old hard cash from the pre-cryptocurrency era had taken on a special status now. On the surface it would seem odd given that there was no conventional government backing it any more, but perhaps it was because it still worked when the networks were down, or simply because it was a more stable store of value.

“‘fraid we don’t have any fruit now”, the assistant said, deflating Carl somewhat, “but if you come back here first thing tomorrow, ask for me, Rick, and I’ll see what we can do - we might just be able to get you a few apples.”

“That would be awesome”, smiling to try to hide his disappointment, “bye, see you tomorrow”. Carl gave a wave, turned and left.

Darkness was descending now. Carl did not want to be out after it was fully dark. He hurried back along the street.

“Business?” a scrawny woman asked as he walked past. She looked like a heavy user, trying to raise money for her next hit. “All crypto” she added, presumably hoping that the possibility of being able to pay with one of the anonymous currencies would tempt him. There was something about her dishevelled, wasted demeanour and sallow complexion that suggested disease, and Carl found the idea of intimacy with someone like her particularly repulsive. “You’d have to pay me” Carl thought to himself as he walked on trying to ignore her.

He reached his block, checked that no-one was behind him, unlocked the outer gate, went through, and made sure the main gate was closed and locked behind him.

In the inner stairwell, he pressed on the buzzer by the door of one of his neighbours. An elderly woman lived there. She had been particularly hard hit by the transition. She was getting old and absent minded, sometimes losing or forgetting her private keys. In the old days she would have been able to go to her bank for support, but now there was no-one. He had tried to help her out a few times, but once a key is lost there is nothing anyone can do. She had lost a lot of the new currencies that way.

In the new decentralised currency world everyone had to “be their own bank”. Irreversible transactions were promoted as a good thing. But people aren’t infallible, they sometimes make mistakes, and some people are also more vulnerable than others, like the elderly and the disabled. This didn’t seem to trouble its proponents though, whether they had been blinded by greed, or whether they believed in a society based on survival of the fittest, or even whether they genuinely believed there was no such thing as society.

Carl was going to give his neighbour some of his potatoes in an act of rebellious altruism. He buzzed again. There was no reply. Hopefully she was okay.

He continued on up the stairwell. When he reached his door he checked all was clear behind him, and swiped to open the door. “Insufficient credit” the display on the door said. He had run out of the door security provider’s tokens.

Thanks to the trend to “tokenise everything”, no-one seemed to own anything anymore, apart from the new technology robber barons.

He got his mobile device out, and exchanged some sewage tokens for door security tokens. After a short while the transaction registered, and the door unlocked. He stepped inside, closed the door, and made sure everything was properly locked again. He had made it home safely. He switched on the lights, and noticed the electricity was back. All was good for now.

The new potatoes went in the cupboard, and he took out some older ones. At the sink he scrubbed them clean, carefully scraping off blemishes, but trying to avoid wasting too much skin. He boiled up some water in a pan, and put the potatoes in. Soon the familiar, but not entirely enticing, aroma of boiling potatoes began to permeate the apartment. When they were done he took them out, and ate with a very old tin of canned meat he had been saving for a special occasion.

Like a great many disasters, it started small, almost unnoticed. At first it piqued the interest of a small number of specialists curious about the theory and technical details. They soon began to dismiss the experiment as a failure though. They saw that it was not, nor could become, the electronic cash system as it was first described, nor did it fulfil any of the other promises which were retrospectively made to try to justify its existence. They saw it for what it was, a new-fangled pyramid scheme, and they left it at that. But what these technically minded people failed to consider was one of the tragic flaws in human nature, the power of wanton avarice. It was like dismissing casinos as serving no practical purpose, and failing to appreciate the human desire to use them even against the odds. And so they failed to realise that it would become the most successful pyramid scheme in world history, sustained by a new joiner born every minute.

He’d had a good night at work the previous night. Not his paid employment, but his passion, his means of escape. Carl was a computer expert. And he was working with a growing group of other technical specialists who had become increasingly disillusioned with the new financial technology, or rather how it had been abused by people.

The new second wave of followers were driven at first by simple greed. Buy, hold, and encourage others to do the same. As the prices rose from all the buying and holding, and fear of missing out intensified, more and more people were drawn in. Ever larger numbers began to proselytise cryptocurrency with a cult-like fanaticism, spreading its tentacles around the planet more successfully than any organised religion had throughout history.

Carl was part of a group using their intimate knowledge of the networks and protocols to trace transactions and data back to the source, trying to determine the true identities and locations of the cryptocurrency oligarchs. That was his life’s mission now, helping unmask those responsible for what he saw as the grotesque subversion of the original aims of the new financial system. It was also partly to atone for his involvement in its creation.

It had a philosophy, and that is what made it so dangerous. It was anti-establishment, and fed off a growing sense of disenfranchisement, exacerbated by a series of social and economic crises. It sold itself as a trustless system, removing the need to trust democratically elected governments and public facing banking experts, who, for all their flaws, had at least attempted to provide forms of representation and accountability. The reality was that it simply shifted the trust to the less trustworthy, to anonymous developers, shady mining cartels, unregulated exchanges, and the shadowy cryptocurrency oligarchs.

The special occasion that warranted the tinned meat was the breakthrough he had made the night before in tracing one of the leaders. Carl logged on to his computer, and spun up the routing anonymiser to protect his real identity for the rest of the session. He had been unable to check the messages on his secure messaging service during the day without this. There were an unusually large number of messages waiting for him. His breakthrough seemed to have triggered a lot of activity while he was offline. He started to skim through his messages.

One particular message caught his eye. It actually appeared several times, forwarded to him by multiple associates from his group. The original message was from another group of which Carl was not a part. But he had heard of them. They were a large and increasingly popular group, known for their more radical stance on seeking redress. The message began “It is time to put the first phase of our plan into action. Watch on live-stream if you can. It begins at 06.00 UTC.” There was a live-stream address, and the message ended “Show your support, and join us for the next phase. Remember - vires en numeris, strength in numbers”. Carl did not get a good feeling, but he was curious about the live-stream. It was due to start tomorrow morning, before his normal working hours, so he could potentially watch it without interfering with his paid employment.

He continued with his other messages. It seemed the data he had gathered last night had indeed led to the successful doxxing of one of the cryptocurrency oligarchs, the one who called himself King Pugwash. One of the messages had a detailed profile of the real-world Pugwash, who was really called John Solomon. A very unlikely world leader indeed. A dropout and heavy narcotics user, of limited intelligence by any classic definition, who had got into cryptocurrencies in the early days in order to buy drugs on the darkweb. Given the difficulty in obtaining cryptocurrencies on the scale he needed to feed his habit before the online exchanges appeared, he had stockpiled some. He had then gone clean for a few years and forgot about his cryptocurrency stash, only to discover his accidental fortune as the new wave of supporters brought it into the news and sent the prices soaring. Convinced that he was actually a genius visionary, he used his new found wealth to launch and promote a series of his own coins and tokens. They were of no practical use whatsoever other than speculation, but the timing was such that it tapped into a speculative frenzy and earned him vast additional wealth in the process. Carl’s skin crawled when, at the end of the profile, he saw a recent picture of the squat balding man. It was pretty much the opposite of the strong and virile online persona he had constructed.

As a pyramid scheme, early adopters had an outsized influence. The wealth inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, was worse than that of any country in history. Almost all the wealth accumulated into the hands of a few cryptocurrency venture capitalists and cryptocurrency oligarchs, making a strange mix of plutocrats and kleptocrats. As their system began to cause energy shortages around the world, social and economic crises ensued, but they blamed the existing world order. They funded a pro-cryptocurrency press and media and pro-cryptocurrency government lobbyists to protect and extend their virtual wealth, and offered an apparent escape and ray of hope to the less fortunate. People believed them, wanted to join them or even become them, and their prophecies became self-fulfilling.

This was not helping Carl move forward though. He did not want to stop at exposing just one. That was just the beginning. Now that there was positive identification of one, the business and personal connections already identified could be verified and traced back to other real world identities. There was a lot of work to do. It was actually quite a thrilling prospect. This is what he and his group had been working towards for so long.

He set to work, tracing transactions, building social graphs, messaging his associates for updates and further information. It was exciting stuff. The time flew by.

Over time it emerged that there was perhaps one legitimate use case for cryptocurrencies. That was to move money out of failing states. First Venezuela, then Syria, were held up as shining use cases for cryptocurrency adoption. And so increasing numbers of people began to believe they had a vested financial interest in seeing their states fail. The third wave of followers were more akin to a doomsday cult. They worked tirelessly to bring about the fall of the existing world order, in the belief that it would make them rich, unaware that they would be worse off overall. It was a case of “be careful what you wish for, it might just come true”. So it was that, one by one, states began to fail, and along with them came the fall of fiat.

Then the lights flickered again. Another powercut. Carl looked at the time and was surprised at how late it was. He really should get some sleep, and now seemed an opportune moment. He wrapped up his current work, and then logged out and shut down. Exhausted and tired, he headed to bed.

With the privatisation of money creation and the proliferation of decentralised currency fiefdoms, it was in many ways like a return to feudalism. In this new twist on the old world, the cryptocurrency venture capitalists and cryptocurrency oligarchs were the feudal lords, and the holders of the cryptocurrencies were the vassals. The holders were turned into fanatical commission-based sales people pushing their wares on anyone and everyone, supporting their crypto-lords with a cult-like fervour, and spreading what they saw as their gospel of fast personal wealth like a virus. With this perverse incentive mechanism, the crypto-lords succeeded in breaking down the social contract, the model for the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual, which so many of them despised. It wasn’t quite clear whether they were fully aware of the repercussions on ordinary people, how life without effective government was indeed “nasty, brutish and short”, but even if they were aware they were unlikely to care. There were even rumours that many had banded together and created their own new society somewhere, where they lived in safety and luxury, presumably looking down on what they saw as the “legacy” society they had left behind.

His alarm went off at the usual time, 06.00 UTC. In a hazy half-sleep, Carl remembered seeing that time in a message last night. Yes, that was when the live-stream was to begin. He was curious. But also hungry, so he shaved, showered, and made his breakfast, which consisted of potatoes mashed with a handful of valuable oats to make it seem more like porridge.

“Okay, why not”, Carl thought, as he logged in and went to the live-stream address.

There was no sound, just a shaky video feed from a presumably helmet-mounted camera. It was slightly grainy, and seemed to be in night vision mode. The camera was looking at a row of seated, helmeted and masked people. A door to the side slid open, and the person with the camera jumped out, followed by several others. Carl was surprised to see they had come from a helicopter. There was another helicopter too. Around two dozen people must have come out of the two helicopters in total, most heavily armed. They seemed very well equipped. This did not look like an amateur operation. Carl wondered who was really behind this. Could it be a rival crypto-lord? Or even the remnants of a formerly government-led military operation?

It was oddly transfixing, if uneasy watching. He wanted to see what they were doing, even though he didn’t think it was going to end well. Maybe they had said something at the start, which he had missed earlier, but maybe they had not. It was still largely silent.

Someone who looked like the group leader motioned everyone forward. The people seemed to know exactly what they were doing and where they were going. They were at the walls of a compound. One of the group unscrewed the front of the security panel by the gate, plugged in a device, pressed some buttons, and the gate opened. Perhaps they were exploiting some vulnerability in the decentralised and tokenised security system, an unfixable bug in an immutable smart contract. They streamed inside the large courtyard. There was a Lamborghini and other expensive cars parked there.

The person with the camera was staying close to the group leader, who seemed to know where he was heading. Some smaller groups disappeared off screen, presumably to different parts of the compound, but the main group leader headed towards what looked like the front door. Again there seemed to be some well planned hack for the door’s security device, and the door opened, revealing a lavish interior with a sweeping marble stairwell. The group leader and a few others quickly headed upstairs, ran along a corridor, and burst into a large bedroom. There lay the gaunt ageing figure of John Solomon, crumpled up in a large bed, with two attractive young ladies either side, quite possibly high class escorts given his reputation.

Masked men either side of the bed pulled the women off roughly, waking John with a start. He looked groggy and confused at first. It must have still been dark in the room, given the way his pupils glowed in the night vision camera, so he wouldn’t have been able to see very well. But within a split second he seemed to come to his senses, and shuffled back. It wasn’t clear if he was raising his hands to surrender, or to reach for something between the mattress and the headboard, but the leader and some of the other masked men already had their weapons trained at John’s head. There was a dark splash on the sheets, and another and another, and John’s face disintegrated, his lifeless body slumping back into bed.

The leader turned to the camera, and audio crackled in for the first time as a microphone was activated. He spoke:

“We got him. But this is just the beginning. We will find all of those who are responsible for plunging our world into this crypto-cacotopia. Their time of reckoning has come, have no doubt. They are few, we are many. Our strength is in our numbers.”

• crypto-cacotopia