$hitcoin: How to get your $hitcoin token listed on a cryptocurrency exchange
The following extract appears in the novel $hitcoin., available now from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and all other good booksellers. Read more information at deadbirdpress.com/shitcoin. [NOTE: These are Amazon affiliate links.]
Genoa, Italy.
“Hey, Giovanni.”
Paolo stands in the doorway & awaits a response; hunched over his computer, his flatmate says nothing. The only sound Paolo hears is the tapping of keys & low hum of server cooling fans.
“Hey, Giovanni,” Paolo says, louder. “Vaffafanculo! Coglione! Testa di cazzo! Figlio di putana!”
“WHAT?!” Giovanni snaps, turning from the computer to the doorway.
Paolo flicks the light switch & illuminates his housemate’s pallid face within the darkened digital-humming room.
“Manchester City versus Napoli,” Paolo says. “We can go to Santino’s bar to watch it. The Portuguese guys are going. And maybe Natalia will be there, huh?”
“I’m busy,” Giovanni grunts, returning to the computer.
“Hey, vaffanculo, you’ve been sat in front of that computer for days. Did you even eat?”
“I ate pizza.”
“That was last night. Coglione.”
Giovanni flips the greasy lid of a pizza box at the side of his computer monitor & removes a thin slice of room-temperature pepperoni: “There’s still some left.”
“Hey, putana, the fuck are you doing there anyway? Semester just started. We ain’t got any project due for, like, three months at least.”
“BitBucks,” Giovanni grunts, staring at the computer screen.
“Che due coglioni! I don’t understand you. Hey, testa di cazzo, what the fuck did you say?”
“BITBUCKS!!” Giovanni screams.
“The fucking crypto thing?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s it going?”
“Good.”
Paolo waits for a more elaborate response. When he doesn’t get one, he gives up: “Okay, then. Porca Guida! Fottiti!”
Paolo storms out of the apartment, slamming the door as he leaves. Giovanni barely notices, fully engrossed with the clicking of keys & reassuring hum of server fans. He’s clicking back & forth between support tickets & withdrawal approvals; he sends 15 ETH to a customer’s external wallet after a brief check that all seems legit, then does the same with 4 BTC; then he’s reading support tickets, wishing he could address these fucking morons with the same kind of language Paolo just used against him. There’s some idiot American asking why his 0.05 BTC deposit wasn’t approved yet: ‘We have no control over when miners confirm & sign Bitcoin transactions,’ Giovanni types. ‘Try paying a higher transaction fee next time.’
There are ID documents to verify from customers looking to increase their 0.5 BTC daily withdrawal limit; Giovanni clicks through these quickly, approving scanned passports from the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Venezuela, etc., etc., just checking if the country & name on the scanned passports matches the country & name the users signed-up with.
There are support tickets to deal with — endless support tickets — some days old, most probably resolved already, assuming the idiots sending them pulled their heads out of their asses long enough to google the most basic information about cryptocurrency trading.
And then there’s Giovanni’s main project of the evening, which everything else is simply distracting him from: adding three more coins to BitBucks’ 12-strong offering of Bitcoin & Ethereum trading pairs. There’s GUM, a global oral health blockchain solution from a team based out of Belarus; TRAP, a coin that seeks to celebrate the popular American hip-hop ‘trap’ sub-genre, created by two Iowa State University students; & GLUM, an ambitious project from some Argentinian researchers who aim to defeat depression by integrating blockchain-based psychoanalysis via yet-to-be-created decentralized Internet-of-Things connected apps which continuously monitor the user’s mental health.
Giovanni, like BitBucks’ customers, knows little about these projects, or the teams behind them; but he knows that most of these coins haven’t been listed anywhere else yet. The small exchange he runs out of this small shared apartment above a cheap pizzeria on a backstreet in Genoa is the first place these coins will ever be available to trade. While some coins will surely stall & falter & disappear, others will flourish & pump & rocket to the moon. For those lucky few, BitBucks will be the first step towards getting listed on major exchanges, & getting in early on those few rare coins will result in a 5 times, or 10x, or 20x, multiplying of the dollar value of BitBucks’ customers’ investments. And BitBucks — Giovanni — will take a big chunk of those price increases through fees for listing & trading & withdrawal.
So Giovanni remains slumped in front of his computer screen through the night, tapping away at the JavaScript console, integrating these three new coins. He works without stopping to drink water or piss or to eat more than a half-slice of stale pizza, until Paolo returns, drunk, from Santino’s. Giovanni works as Paolo sways in the doorway, retelling the story of his night, explaining the missed chances & misfortunes & amateur-league defending that led Napoli to lose 4–2 to Manchester City. And Giovanni continues as Paolo disappears into his bedroom. He continues as his phone vibrates upon the desk beside him, even though he can hear the phone’s rattling over the constant server hum, even though he correctly guesses that Natalia’s calling, & she’s one of the rare truly attractive girls on his & Paolo’s Computer Science course. He pauses & considers calling her back at just after 2am, maybe half an hour after the phone’s stopped vibrating, once GUM trading is active & TRAP is getting there, but then looks at the €12,465 in trading fees BitBucks has taken already this week, & quickly calculates that he might double the €18,962 BitBucks made the week before, & reminds himself that if he spends a year or two generating this kind of income, he’ll have a hundred girls a thousand times hotter than Natalia drunk calling him late at night.
So Giovanni works until dawn, a flurry of typing & clicking resolving around 50% of support tickets, approving numerous large withdrawal requests, verifying scores of ID documents, & activating trading on all three of BitBucks’ new coins.
Giovanni’s hunched over the keyboard, light beating against the curtains, the clock in the corner of the screen telling him it’s 5:07, but his work is done. He opens his Gmail tab, ignores the handful of new support tickets & large withdrawal requests, & opens an email with the subject: “Exciting new project seeks listing on BitBucks — FUTURE SYNERGY COIN.”
He scrolls through the usual blurb about how great & revolutionary this coin will be, & smiles when he reaches the end of the email & sees FSC has yet to be listed on any other exchanges. He checks the time again — now 5:09. He has class at 11, but he could skip it. He fires back a quick email in sleep-deprived broken English, promising that FSC trading will go live within the next four hours, as long as the team can send 0.25% of the total coin supply as a listing fee. He checks the FSC ICO website, runs a quick mental calculation, & laughs to himself deliriously over the server fans as another $11,250 is added to BitBucks’ weekly earnings.
More from $hitcoin:
$hitcoin: How to make millions with an ICO cooked up in a frat house
Why I Wrote $hitcoin: The First Novel to Fully Capture the Insanity of Cryptocurrency’s Gold Rush
The preceding extract appears in the novel $hitcoin., available now from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and all other good booksellers. Read more information at deadbirdpress.com/shitcoin. [NOTE: These are Amazon affiliate links.]
