I am Arthur Stoor. I am a “stoorie fit”, or “dusty foot”, a dust stained traveller arriving in an unfamiliar place after a long trek, a stranger seeking solace. I’m not really from anywhere in particular. I had a peripatetic family, and a widely dispersed extended family, so never quite felt at home in any one specific place. I never quite adopted one accent before I had to start on the next.

“Crypto-cacotopia and the perfect self-fulfilling doomsday device” is a short story about a possible future world in which cryptocurrencies and their proselytizers have brought about the fall of fiat and the collapse of the social contract. A lot has been written about cryptocurrencies in terms of their technical and practical shortcomings, and an increasing amount is being written about their environmental dangers, but not much about their potential impact on human relations and society.

“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.