BLOCK-CHAINS | Writing Contest initiated by @v4vapid | ONE-UPMANSHIP

BLOCK-CHAINS - Contest
In the latest edition of the 'Conspiracy Creative Writing Contest', I would like to hear your visions of dystopia on the blockchain, how cryptocurrencies could be used to imprison humanity or ways in which blockchain technology could be exploited to the benefit of a select few and to the detriment of the many.

Reading @v4vapid s post a story was forming. It wrote itself.
I guess, I bent the rules but can't help it.
Thank you for the inspiration!
Thank you @nobyeni for resteeming the contest.

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ONE-UPMANSHIP

The drummers take up their positions.

You can hear them breathing in silence. One takes his djembe between his knees, the other one balances a twin drum on his thighs. The audience in expectation. After another pause, the fingers play a soft drum roll, the djembe has spoken. Maybe five seconds. The input sequence. Another break. Looking at each other, the twin drum releases the same vertebrae, only a little louder. Break. The djembe now in the second round, whirling plus simple rhythm. Break. Repeat the second sequence from the twins. Adding another one.

The introduction is told. With the main part of the story, the listeners are confronted with a powerful first strike, accompanied by semi-complex rhythmic tones. Now all sequences follow, continuously and reliably, one after the other, with ever newer and longer variants of beats.

The drummers move in harmony, accelerate, the audience, listening with bated breath, whether one doesn't stumble and lose the rhythm.
Beating hearts, shining eyes. Weighing bodies, tapping feet, nodding heads.
Let go, tense. Hold on, call.

Acceleration achieves a quality to which one feels helplessly exposed. Oh, my God, who's going to be missing, who's going to screw it up? The tension is rising. And rising.
One-upmanship demonstrating. And again, still adding to it.
Afterward, when it's all over, most people will wonder how this is possible. The drummers smile, wrinkle their foreheads and spur each other on. The audience becomes aware that it can't go much further.

Before the feared can happen, everything stops. The drumfire ends abruptly.

Off.

The final is reached, higher, faster and further is impossible.
Silence.
Then they clap, louder and louder. Their sounds return what they received.
The drummer's smile and bow.
Applause is finally coming to an end.

Someone's setting a log on fire. It creaks and crackles. Not much to say.

In the bushes, the noises start again.
Feather rustles, small feet run, something gets caught in a net.
In the ground, beings circle in spirals. Vibrations everywhere.

Somewhere else at another time someone formulates a hypothesis.

He is the only one in the lab. Mice rummaging around in their cages. His screen shows DNA codes.

You zoom out, you see him sitting in a huge building, thousands of windows mirroring other huge constructions who mirror further constructions. Buildings filled with assumptions, problems, and solutions. Millions of hypothesis being typed and worked on. Audiences listening. Clapping or frowning, going in, coming out. Going back and formulate a new question arising from the given answer. You zoom out and see a planet from outer space, deep down the blinking lights of illuminated streets of that part which rotates into the shades.

Zooming in:

Someone thinks about someone who created computer code

which created the wide web which created something called a Block-chain. Server running sucking up electrical food from energy generating constructions which replaced something called nature.

Someone thinks that someone did that on purpose.
Purpose-driven thoughts enter the web, bubbles of opinions cover the clouds.
Laws, contracts, transportation, logistics.

New solutions, new problems. New problems, new solutions.

Audience frowns, audience claps. Another bit another bite.

Zooming in: one father and one brother want to save the earth. They got money in the bank. The brother invests in space traveling, the father trades fiat. Fiat as a solution to former problems for goods & services which created new goods & services for other goods & services.

Someone thinks of evil of this goods.

Democracies, plutocracies, ecologies, biologies, economies, isms and prisons.
Groups and percentages, cryptocurrencies.

Someone thinks of decentralization, gathers, invests.

Others come in and go out. Virtuality and Reality. One cannot decide. One commits suicide the other decides on immortality. Problems and solutions. The fiat guy thinks of good of him, so does the Elon guy. While mothers being cut open to deliver the world with a baby. One comes in, one gets out. One-upmanship, One-upmanship.

Somewhere in the Universe stars leaving their signature of spheres.

Everything is in order. No problems, no solutions. Vibrations. Life comes, life goes.

Thank you for reading.

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Photo by NASA on Unsplash