Bitcoin

The Curious Case Of The Bitcoin Time Traveller

Published in

The Crypto Kiosk

9 min readJul 8, 2021

On August 31st, 2013, Bitcoin was experiencing exponential adoption as a new form of digital money and also enjoying a prolonged bull run with the price surpassing $120.

On that exact date, a Reddit account with the nickname “Luka_Magnotta” published its first post, containing a fictional story similar to other amazing mysteries frequently publicized on Reddit.

Right from the introduction, this message was apparently created by someone who had mysteriously time-travelled into 2013:

I am sending this message from the year 2025. Things are looking bleak here, and some of you will carry blood on your hands.

Of course this was a hoax and nobody took it seriously, however, during the years the predictions made in this post were remarkably close to the events that transpired in the Bitcoin space.

The internet tried to discover the logic behind this message, so the post became viral and stayed relevant for more than six years.

A Hypothetical “Transition” to Bitcoin (BTC) and its effects in 2025

The Reddit post describes a not-so-distant dystopian future, for the year 2025. It begins with the price of Bitcoin, and of course, this directly sets the stage. Bitcoin for 99% of its community is always just about the price.

On average, every year so far, the value of Bitcoin has increased by about a factor ten… From 0.1 dollar in 2010, to 1 dollar in 2011, to 10 dollar in 2012, to 100 dollar in 2013.

Bitcoin. in April 2013, was experiencing another one of its famous bull runs. Its price peaked temporarily at $200, starting from a low of $10 at the beginning of the year. Profit was 20 times higher in just four months.

An immediate correction phase lasted until about the date this Reddit post was published, with BTC’s price approximately at $120. The Reddit post begins immediately with an impressive price prediction:

From now on, there’s a slight slowdown, as the value increased by a factor ten every two years, to 1,000 dollar in 2015, to 10,000 in 2017, 100,000 in 2019, and 1,000,000 in 2021.

The prediction was accurate for a few years. The author correctly predicted the price of $10k for BTC to occur in 2017.

This correct prediction prompted a renewed interest in this article in 2017, and many popular crypto YouTubers started investigating and adding the Bitcoin Time-Traveler to their content.

But the article wasn’t just about price. It presented a grim future for humankind, with cryptocurrency partially responsible for it.

The Bitcoin Citadels

“Earlies” (our term for early adapters), as well as those rich whose wealth survived the “transition” live in isolated gated cities called Citadels.

This was the first mention of a Bitcoin Citadel ever. We can find lengthy discussions on the topic of Citadel afterward, as for some Bitcoiners they have become a dream to achieve. They expect the rise of the price of Bitcoin above one million dollars and for them to become important and wealthy enough that would be too dangerous to live anywhere outside of the Citadel.

The “Bitcoin time-traveler” describes the Bitcoin Citadels as a safe-house for Bitcoinners in 2025. (An interesting article discrediting the possibility of Bitcoin Citadels can be found in this link).

It gets more interesting since events this Reddit user predicted are particularly relevant in recent days.

Governments holding BTC

Governments tried to stay relevant in my society by buying Bitcoin, which just made the problem worse, by increasing the value of Bitcoin. Governments did so in secret of course.

We already know about El Salvador, however, this example is the only one we have for a government that tries to adopt BTC as a currency. Most in the crypto community still believe this will be a failure, however, many Bitcoin narratives are built on top of stories like this one.

ASICminer — 50,000 Bitcoin
The IMF’s “currency stabilization fund” — 70,000 Bitcoin
Government of Saudi Arabia — 110,000 Bitcoin
The North Korean government — 180,000 Bitcoin

“Bitcoin Time-Traveller” mentions the top BTC holders, and the reality is not very different. There is no valid information about the North Korean or Saudi governments, yet presently some of the top economies maintain immense BTC holdings. However, there have been signs North Korea has been hoarding cryptocurrencies all this time (source).

It is also worth mentioning that China holds about 195,000 BTC seized from the PlusToken Ponzi in 2020 ( source). There was no news of these BTC being liquidated or sold by China.

Meanwhile, the US government also holds 80.000 BTC from a seized Silk Road wallet ( source), and the Bulgarian government also seems to own more than 200,000 BTC after the arrest of Bulgarian criminals in 2017 ( source).

GDP and inflation/deflation

Economic growth today is about -2% per year. Why is this? If you own more than 0.01 Bitcoin, chances are you don’t do anything with your money. There is no inflation, and thus no incentive to invest your money.

The author explains his hypothetical 2025 scenario. While this is also a valid argument, still it is a very simplistic one holding low significance. Declaring there is no inflation, doesn’t suggest there is no deflation either. And in the scenario described, there would be extremely high deflation in the world economy, with prices of goods valued in BTC possibly dropping more than 2% yearly.

Besides GDP, there are more important indicators economists examine. These indicators are the “Real Gross Domestic Product”, or “Real GDP”, or “Constant-Price GDP”, which is GDP inflation-adjusted. For this case where prices of goods would certainly be moving lower, the “Real GDP” will be a deflation-adjusted GDP, thus if deflation is higher than 2% (minus 2% inflation) then the Real GDP will be positive.

Anti-Bitcoin Terrorism & Bitcoin Thefts

Surprisingly the author’s creativity went this far to suggest many of the Bitcoin millionaires (such as the Winklevoss Twins) were murdered by terrorists in his timeline.

The article describes anti-Bitcoin terrorist groups emerging due to the damage caused to our societies by the transition to a Bitcoin-currency system.

Most people who own any significant amount of Bitcoin no longer speak to their families and lost their friends, because they had to change their identities
Many people were taken hostage, and thus, it is suspected that 25% percent of “Bitcoin rich” actually physically tortured someone to get him to spill his password.
In Africa, surveys show that an estimated 70% of people believe that Bitcoin was invented by the devil himself. It’s a very sensitive issue that today is generally referred to as “the tragedy”.

At this point, the imagination of the writer runs wild, as it expresses he/she is also part of a terrorist group trying to avenge the destruction and warn us (the 2013 present) about what is coming.

I am part of an underground network, who seek to launch a coordinated attack against the very infrastructure of the Internet itself. We have at our disposal about 20 nuclear submarines, which we will use to cut all underwater cables between different continents.

It resembles a typical time-traveler scenario, possibly influenced by the movie 12-Monkeys, which also has some similarities with a group of people trying to visit the past and stop the spread of a virus. Bitcoin replaced the virus, in this case.

Governments pushed Bitcoin’s adoption!

It gets even more interesting and relevant to today’s events in El Salvador.

Governments gave their own citizens cell phones for free, tied to their government ID, and thus government sought to integrate Bitcoin into their economy. All went well, until “the tragedy” that is. A criminal organization, believed to be located in Russia, exploited a hardware fault in the government issued cell phones.

We all understand the issues that can arise with centralized custodial wallets. “Not your keys, not your Crypto”. The fictional future expressed by the Bitcoin Time Traveler is not far from reality. Even if a government does not adopt cryptocurrency, the point of ownership is the private keys. The concept is economic freedom, and governments are still trying to understand it in its entirety.

Ending:

It ends like this:

It doesn’t have to be like this. You do not have to share our fate. I don’t know how, but you must find a way to destroy this godforsaken project in its infancy. I know this is a difficult thing to ask of you. You believed you were helping the world by eliminating the central banking cartel that governs your economies.
However, I have seen where it ends.

It was a futile attempt since nobody listened. The Reddit post ends like this, and in fact, it is considered a precursor to the second part of the Bitcoin bull run of 2013. When it was published Bitcoin started rising again after four months of consolidation. (A BTC price movement that resembles the current one).

By August, 31st, 2013, Bitcoin regained strength and pushed towards the $1,000 mark, which it accomplished four months later.

Failed prediction — Explanation and criticism of BTC by the author

In 2018, the price predictions failed, and in the next year, the same user edited the post mentioning environmental concerns.

While some facts this author mentioned were validated, he still missed the point completely and was looking like just another speculator from 2013, a “hodler” that cared more for the short-term price gains than the bigger picture.

Perhaps it would have been better if the author understood that Bitcoin failed to scale and evolved into a speculative instrument for a few wealthy individuals, and later some institutions that joined. However, some are just there for the riches and don’t look into it too much.

The real reason Bitcoin (BTC) failed was not the energy consumption and not the Chinese ban, or the environmental impact. The inaction in scaling Bitcoin damaged it irreperably. If BTC followed the few minor changes required to increase the blocksize, adoption today would be completely different.

The username controversy (“Luka_Magnotta”)

Another interesting fact outside the scope of time travel or cryptocurrency is the username the author selected for this Reddit account.

This name is famous, for very wrong reasons. I do not want to go into details about that, I will just say this is the name of a murderer currently serving jail time and possibly never to be released.

Someone selecting to use it as a nickname on any platform is on a very different level of trolling. Maybe this name was selected intending anyone would immediately understand this article wasn’t going to contain something valid but anyway, it is surprising the least.

Closing Thoughts

Even though the article has been dismissed by its author, who also denounced Bitcoin later, we can’t deny the fact this writer has given some predictions that not only sounded logical but also a few of these are similar to events unfolding today.

Bitcoin has failed to scale on-chain, yet the Bitcoin community has supported the custodial wallet “Strike” in the case of El Salvador. There were almost no remarks and no reaction from any part of the BTC community about that. Moreover, all Bitcoin maximalists supported and promoted the idea of Bitcoin being forced as a currency option for El Salvador.

With Blockstream currently trying to enter negotiations, by putting its Liquid network on the table, it becomes even more complicated than initially expected.

Also worth noting that the Bitcoin Time-Traveller (in the 2019 edit of the Reddit post) discussed the stagnation in Bitcoin (BTC) developments and expressed environmental concerns.

A future not that far from what the Bitcoin time traveller described is possible.

References: I am a time-traveler from the future…

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