Dream Re-Enactment: Blockchain of Future-Past! [Story]
What you are about to read...
This is a true story that came to the attention of @creativetruth in a dream. No, a nightmare. A vision of the future, perhaps? The past coming back to haunt us.
Expect some salty satire surely sprinkled along the way. Enjoy!
The former fashionista millionare heiress was in pretty deep. She filed for bankruptcy, the repo man took away her Audi, and the debt collectors had been harassing Wanda non-stop.
"All I need is some quick money making idea, and I am sure all of my former associates will return to work for me as soon as they see how fabulously rich I am."
After doing some research online, she learns about bitcoin and crypto currencies.
"Wow! Anyone can make their own crytpocurrency out of nothing? That's amazing! I should do that for my company! It'll be great. I already have the brand name recognition everyone trusts."
Wanda finds a free website to create her own crytpo currency. She calls it Pretty Points, and chooses an icon that resembles a hot pink lipstick kiss. She inserts the last working credit card she owns, and submits a form to make 1 billion coins worth a total of 7,500 American Dollars.
She puts a video up on youtube, showing staged clips of her various fashionable girl friends buying expensive cars, spa treatments, plastic surgery, and jewelry. Happier than a Mentos commercial. After hashtagging the crap out of it on twitter, the comments alone cause the video to go viral. Thousands of leads find her website and decide to invest in her currency for the pre-sale.
Emails start flooding in. Most of them are asking her where the whitepaper is. They want to know what they are supposed to do with the coin. Wanda does a little bit more research.
"Making a blockchain is hard. I think I can whip up something easier people will like, and it will do the same thing."
Within minutes, Wanda posts a whitepaper with details on a release date for a new blogging platform that will integrate with all social media, including facebook, youtube, twitter, instagram, and google+. She includes fancy charts with optimistic data about how wildly popular her new Pretty Points are, and how enormously valuable they will become.
Then, it finally arrives... the final release!
Technically it is a forum, but it does oh so much more...
Users, whether or not they bought Pretty Points can sign up and start earning. Users can create their own forum groups, their own comments, cool portraits and signatures. You can edit your own comments, and post links on other social media sites so others can find your comments and upvote them. Genius!
Best of all, she was able to search through the forums for the comments with the most views and the highest ratings, and she could reward them with a comment to notify the author that they had posted a "hot comment" deserving of reward points. Users would be able to view their current reward points by visiting the google spreadsheet Wanda shared on the forums.
At first people really enjoyed the platform. They were basically earning free reward money for posting photos of cats and babies. More questions were coming up about why some posts were receiving rewards, and others were not.
"Hate speech will not be rewarded with Pretty Points, but users are free to upvote anything they like. We are a fully decentralized platform. Flagged comments will be penalized with reduced earnings and visibility to the author, and their objectionable comment threads will be moved to a hidden forum where they cannot bother anyone."
After a while, the supply of Pretty Points were starting to run low. So to remedy this, Wanda decided to continue rewarding people at the same rate. She could mark their expected rewards on the spreadsheet even though she didn't quite have enough Pretty Points to back up the listed rewards. Since she was running political ads on the the forums and also selling everyone's personal information, she could expect to earn fast money that way to pay for her daily needs. Then she had another brilliant idea.
"I know! I'll just create more Pretty Points. By increasing the supply in circulation, I can give out more rewards! It's free money, and I can be as generous as I want! The more we have in circulation, the more people will stop using other currencies, and instead they will come to me. I'll be rich, and so will everyone who takes advantage of this opportunity I am giving them."
Things went downhill very quickly. Sometimes the website wasn't working. Wanda wasn't very good with technical things, and she often had trouble updating the forums, so it was easier to just re-install the old version that was working. Top users were getting upset when their comments permanently disappeared. The forum has some bandwidth problems, so glitches like this were an expected side effect. One time someone even hacked the site, and so she had to re-install the forum from scratch, and start clean again for all users. The unannounced downtimes for maintenance were necessary evils she decided, and people would have to be understanding.
After a few of these events over the past month, owners of the actual crypto, and forum users who thought they were also earning Pretty Points even though they never actually created a crypto account, they were all growing suspicious. Oh sure, there were always a few posts from people claiming her system was a sham, but they were easy enough to list as hate speech, to hide in the nether regions of the forum. The most loyal fanbase probably never even look elsewhere for official news about Pretty Points. By continuing to reward the top users, Wanda could always expect her closest friends to remain her staunchest supporters.
Soon, even her closest friends turned on her.
@Everyone says, "Where's my money? Why can't I trade these stupid points anywhere?!"
She decided to delegate more free points to a team of her most trusted users, to help her flag the worst of them. Users were abandoning the forums in droves. Activity was down. The bills were overdue on all of her credit cards.
So Wanda did some more research, and she located an exchange willing to list her currency. It would be traded with Bifcoin. The exchange was in Laos, but that shouldn't matter to people, because everyone around the world can find her currency by looking at the symbol, and trade it by looking at the numbers.
She traded some of her own Pretty Points just to make sure it worked. First she made a million more Pretty Points just to be safe, and then sold the million points on the excange for Four Safoshis.
"How much money is 0.00000004 Bifcoin worth? Oh! To withdraw cash, I need to enter my bank account information first, and send my personal identification to them before I can make a withdrawal. Since my sister is passed out drunk from last night's party, she kind of owes me. She won't mind if I look in her purse and use the information listed on her checkbook. She even has her passport and social security card here, so I'll send photos of those too. The stock photo of her holding a white card we used in the ad campaign, I can doctor that up and us it as her current portrait image."
And that was the nightmare dream that ran through the mind of @creativetruth last night while Steemit was undergoing the woes of the recent hardfork 20.
I know everybody today is very low on voting power, because of the hardfork. Instead, just leave a comment, and banter away. Share a meme or a joke.
How do you think the story ends? Have you ever heard of anything like this happening before? How badly can a person truly foul up a blockchain in the foreseeable future?
Hope you enjoyed this bit of #fiction and #humor. Let us pray I do not have any divination abilities to witness the future. If so, somebody please help me to erase this terrible fate on humanity.
Sources:
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Bonsai!
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Haha! this was a good one; and part of why i have no 'real' money in this game... I have 'invested' some other alt coins I managed to mine fairly cheaply, but that is about it. The whole 'crypto' market is so scam-able, its ridiculous.
Same here. There's a scam hidden around every corner. A forked tongue inside every smile.