$hitcoin: How to make millions with an ICO cooked up in a frat house
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.]
Groningen, Netherlands.
01.
“NEO?”
“It’s like the Chinese Ethereum. Except it isn’t really anything like Ethereum.”
Wesley enters & interrupts: “What the fuck, guys?”
Guus & Aart are sitting together on the middle of the huge quad sofas in the kitchen/living room’s corner-nook, Guus on his laptop & Aart tapping at his phone screen. A Honey Badger music video is playing on the 60-plus inch plasma screen affixed to the nook’s dark green wall.
Aart: “Then how is it the Chinese Ethereum?”
Guus: “It’s a Chinese dApps platform.”
Aart: “What’s the price at?”
“Guys!” Guus & Aart turn from the ever-fluctuating prices on CoinMarketCap to look at Wesley, who’s standing beside the huge table that takes up half of the spacious room’s kitchen area. “Look at this place.”
Aart scans a room decorated with clusters of bottles & cans — debris from the previous night’s party: “What’s wrong with it?”
“The girl is gonna be here in, like, twenty minutes,” Wesley says, sweeping bottles from the table into a black plastic bin liner. “You said you’d clean up.”
“We did clean up,” Aart protests. “This place was really fucked up when you left us.”
“What girl?” Guus asks.
“The girl who’s here to take on Rick’s room,” Wesley says, moving about the room and hurrying bottles & cans into the bin liner.
Guus: “No girl’s gonna wanna live in a frat house. I don’t know why you don’t just get a guy in.”
“Nah, man,” Aart says, standing up & moving to the kitchen area, “he can’t join the fraternity, and you know he’ll want to.”
“But what kind of girl’s gonna wanna live in this place?” Guus says, returning his attention to the laptop.
“Where’s Federico?” Wesley asks, bin liner fully loaded.
“I don’t know,” Guus says. “I think he’s still in bed. Yo, Aart, the price is at twenty dollars right now. It was, like, thirty dollars less than a week ago.”
Wesley: “He’s sleeping? It’s almost 15:00.”
Aart unrolls a bin liner: “He’s Italian, what do you expect? Guus, what price did you buy at?”
Wesley moves to the hallway: “Federico!”
Guus: “I got in before it rebranded from AntShares. It’s up about 600% on then. But now’s the time to get in, man, this dip won’t last. A year from now, it’ll be two hundred dollars, minimum.”
Wesley: “FREDDY!”
Federico groans inside his bedroom: “What?”
“I don’t know, man,” Aart says, slowly picking up & crushing Hertog Jan cans & placing them in his bin liner. “I think Bitcoin’s about done dropping. It’ll probably be worth like six thousand dollars in a couple of months.”
“It’ll be back to zero before the semester’s finished,” Wesley snaps, returning to the room. “Guus! Get the fuck off the sofa and grab a bin liner.”
Guus sighs dramatically & closes his laptop.
“I thought you said Bitcoin was already six thousand dollars,” Wesley says, unrolling another bin liner.
Aart casually smooths out the crinkles in a Hertog Jan can before bagging it: “I said I had six thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin. But that’s before the price dropped.”
Wesley side-steps Guus to tackle an accumulation of bottles surrounding the quad sofa: “So how many Bitcoin do you have now?”
Aart: “I’ve still got 1.5 bitcoins, but the price dropped.”
Wesley: “So what’s that in real money?”
Guus stops at the door to the hallway, intrigued by the sound of Federico conversing with a female: “Is that the girl you’re talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Aart says, picking up an ash-covered Hertog Jan bottle that’s stuffed half-full of cigarettes, contemplating whether such a thing is fit to be thrown in with the recycling. “Today, it’s a little less than five thousand.”
Wesley: “Five thousand Euros?”
Aart: “Five thousand dollars.”
Guus: “Wes, I think the girl’s here.”
“Fuck.” Wesley drops the bin liner at the side of the sofa & moves to the doorway, turning back briefly to admonish Aart: “Why do you measure everything in dollars? You’re not fucking American.” Wesley stares down the hallway, where Federico has just turned away from a closed front door: “Did she leave?”
Federico: “Yeah.”
Wesley: “What the fuck?! Why?”
Federico stares at Wesley, Federico’s handsome Italian features as befuddled as his tousled just-out-of-bed black hair. “She had to go home.”
They stare at each other for a moment before Wesley speaks: “Ciara?”
Federico: “Who’s Ciara?”
Wesley: “The girl.”
Federico: “What girl?”
Wesley: “The girl who’s looking at Rick’s room.”
There’s a long pause before Federico makes sense of things: “Oh, that girl. No, that was Lina.”
Wesley: “Who’s Lina?”
Federico: “The German girl.”
Wesley: “What German girl?”
“The German girl I fucked last night.” Federico opens the bathroom door & flicks a light switch; Honey Badger’s hit ‘Fuck Me (Like a Badger in Heat)’ plays automatically as the cupboard-small bathroom’s walls covered with pics of big-titted blonde models are illuminated.
02.
Ciara locks her bicycle among the scores of similar bicycles lining the pavement outside the JUMBO supermarket on Oosterstraat, a bustling single-lane street lined with bars, shops, & restaurants running up to the medieval Dutch city’s Grote Markt central square. She looks up at the apartments above the street’s businesses, wondering which is the place, & whether she has enough time to smoke a cigarette before heading inside. She takes her phone from her pocket: 14:57. She taps at Google Maps and then starts walking towards her destination.
03.
“Hey,” Wesley says, smiling as he opens the door to her. “You must be Ciara.”
She’s as pretty as he’d hoped: fair hair, pale freckled complexion, a very London beige overcoat underscoring her Britishness.
Ciara smiles back at Wesley: he’s equally all that she’d expected of a Dutch frat bro — tall, blonde, with a baggy Rijksuniversiteit Groningen sweatshirt hanging off his sports-honed frame.
Introductions are exchanged and Wesley leads Ciara through the hallway, pointing out the bathroom door & hoping that Federico doesn’t open it & potentially scare her away with the garish array of big tits inside. He stops along the hallway at Rick’s room: she looks at the cosy desk & double-bed & nods approvingly: “Yeah, this looks alright.”
It would have to be pretty bad to stop her accepting the place. She’s spent the summer travelling the continent — Munich, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb, Split, Sarajevo — & returned to Groningen just a day before the semester started, expecting no problem finding a place to stay in a city that must be 50% short-term student accommodation. But she hadn’t reckoned on the scores of students doing the same as her, and with a few perfect places being snatched away when on the cusp of signing a contract, and having spent the past two weeks on her friend Jurate’s sofa, she’s more than willing to take on the wild novelty of a year as the sole girl in a frat house.
The tour continues through to the kitchen/living room, Wesley explaining that Rick’s spending a year’s exchange in Pittsburgh, & stopping to introduce Ciara to Guus & Aart: “Ciara, this is Guus — ” — a slightly-pimpled and awkwardly skinny guy with an oddly intense demeanour & almost-shaved short hair that protrudes into a ridiculous ‘90s-style gelled spiked fringe — “and Aart.” — a far more attractive though equally odd frat member, with hair matted into dreadlocks along the centre of an otherwise completely shaved head.
Aart: “Nice to meet you.”
Ciara looks around approvingly at the bar-style central living space, with dartboards & beer advertisements & basketball hoops & other paraphernalia covering almost every inch of wall space, more than a dozen framed photographs of past iterations of the fraternity being the most intriguing item.
“And this is the patio,” Wesley says, leading Ciara outside.
“What do you think of her?” Aart asks Guus in hushed conspiratorial tones upon the sofa.
“Yeah, she seems okay,” Guus says, fully engrossed by his laptop. “This project sounds really interesting. They want to create a bridge between blockchains, a kind of go-between interface for interconnecting pre-existing cryptocurrencies. It’s $3.51, down from $4.10 yesterday, with a four-hundred-million-dollar market cap. It might be worth buying a few hundred bucks worth.”
Aart: “I don’t know why you screw around with all these alt-coins, man. You know Bitcoin is gonna outperform all of them.”
“How much money do you think I made on Ethereum?”
“Yeah, but there’s a limit, man. No way all these coins can survive long-term.”
“They don’t have to. They just need to survive long enough for me to make Lamborghini money.”
“If you want a Lambo, bro, buy more Bitcoin. It’ll be ten thousand dollars by next spring, man, I’m telling you.”
“Yeah, which is like a 350% return on investment. The stuff I’m looking at is like a 10,000% return on investment.”
“But anyone can make a coin, man. Slap some code together, get it listed on an exchange — boom. Make a quick buck off idiots looking to get rich quick, and disappear forever to an island somewhere.”
“That’s why you’ve gotta do your own research.”
“But, like, me and you could probably make a coin.”
“I probably could. You couldn’t even set your own wallet up.”
“Well why don’t you then?”
“Maybe I should.”
Aart stares at the television screen. Honey Badger is in some tropical island paradise, dancing at the poolside in a suit, surrounded by big-titted bikini babes and chimpanzee butlers. Still a little stoned from his hangover-staving wake-up spliff, Aart is mesmerised by the jiggling girl bits and chimps in bowties for a few moments before speaking: “How much money do you think Honey Badger’s worth?”
“Probably a few million dollars.”
“A few million dollars,” Aart mutters, a thought forming. “And how much did you say that coin you’re looking at’s market cap is?”
“Four hundred million dollars.”
“Four hundred million dollars…” Honey Badger is on the deck of a yacht now, at night, pouring what looks like an extremely expensive bottle of alcohol over some woman’s cleavage. “And the people who made that coin probably kept a couple for themselves, right?”
“Probably.”
“They probably kept a lot for themselves, right?”
“Probably.”
“And right now they don’t even have a working product or anything, do they?”
“This one does… I think. But a lot of them don’t.”
“And you think you could probably code your own cryptocurrency?”
“Probably.” Guus looks up from the laptop at the television; Honey Badger is in the yacht’s master bedroom, fanning himself with a wad of hundred-dollar bills as two girls in lingerie dry-hump his legs.
“We should do it, man.”
Honey Badger is now in the yacht’s dining hall, using diamond-encrusted platinum chopsticks to delicately remove a piece of sushi from the crotch of a fully-naked big-titted blonde who lays splayed upon the tablecloth.
“Maybe we should, man. Maybe we should.”
Wesley leads Ciara back into the kitchen area: “What do you think?”
She struggles not to gush too much enthusiasm: “Yeah, it’s great.”
04.
The cycle back to Jurate’s place is blissful, the beauty of canal-bisected Groningen’s centuries-old buildings & crispness of Dutch autumn overwhelming all Ciara’s earlier fear, uncertainty & doubt. As her bike flows with the thousands of other cyclists traversing the city’s narrow streets, she knows that all is right & well in her life, & that this year will be even better than the last.
When she enters Jurate’s house, Jurate is drinking coffee at the kitchen table with her housemate Vallya, who is considerably less blissful: “…and so I cannot work without the Dutch citizen number, this BSN, and they cannot process this without the official document from the university in Moscow, and the university in Moscow only can give this in Russian, and the City Hall here will only accept this in Dutch or in English, unless that I get a legalised translation, which it has to be legalised by the Russian Consulate, which is wanting to charge maybe one hundred Euros, and maybe taking more than three weeks, which is time I cannot do working during…”
Jurate briefly disengages to greet Ciara: “Hey.”
“Hey.”
The interlude leads a frustrated Vallya to bring her story to its end: “…and it’s just nyet, nyet, nyet from every direction, and my parents say it is now too much to send me more money, and I do not even know what in the fuck I should do about everything.”
Hearing Vallya’s bureaucratically-inflicted agony, & being reminded similar pain may yet await her whenever Britain finally leaves the European Union, Ciara again dampens her enthusiasm when Jurate asks her how the place was: “Yeah, it was great — well, the best I’ll get at this point,” & she answers Jurate’s follow-up question about how the guys were with an emphasis on Wesley’s tall Dutch jockishness, & Jurate says, “You’ll have to invite us to one of their frat parties,” & asks Ciara what she’s doing tonight, with Vallya & Jurate having plans to go out; “I’m working at Mountain at nine.”
Vallya: “Oy! All I want is to work while I study. I do not know why must it be so difficult.”
05.
The overnight shift at Mountain Bar isn’t something Ciara would recommend to anyone, though €7 per hour & free alcohol through the night is enough to make it bearable. She parks her bicycle among the ever-expanding sea of bicycles beside the Grote Markt, the streets beginning to fill up with the first of the student-city’s night-time revellers. Ciara walks the narrow bar-lined side street to Mountain. Inside, Ibrahim is at the counter & a few young Dutch guys are knocking back 1 Euro Heinekens. A few others trickle in to order 1 Euro beers & shots during the first hour, European EDM blaring & echoing off the walls of the almost-empty room. The population swells at 10pm & gets bigger as the night progresses, Ciara becoming busier & busier behind the bar. By 11, she’s in constant movement, racking up beers & Jaeger Bombs & tequila shots, knocking back the few that are bought for her by drunk guys trying to hit on her. Every hour, she slips into the crowded smoking room at the back of the bar to roll & smoke a cigarette. As the time creeps closer to midnight, more & more groups are asking for NOS-filled balloons to huff, falling into dizzy drunken laughing fits after each bout of inhalation. When Ciara next enters the smoking area, a clearly-underaged guy is stumbling about, annoying everyone. Ciara ignores his presence, a stance she regrets fifteen minutes later when an irritated German student comes to the bar and says: “Somebody has been sicked up all over in the smoking area.”
Ibrahim is conveniently dealing with a large drinks order: “Do you mind cleaning it up?”
With a sigh & a shrug, Ciara takes a mop to the smoking area, where the idiot teenager is slumped in a chair. “Where are your friends?” she asks him, sloshing his vomit over the floor with the mop.
“I think they left already,” says a Dutch guy smoking a joint. “You want some of this?”
She accepts the spliff & after a few tokes continues mopping, the strong Dutch high-grade inoculating her to the grossness of her task.
And then the lads from the frat enter.
Wesley: “Oh, hey, Ciara!”
Fuck.
She laughs & talks with them, fully preoccupied with trying to overcome her stoned inoculation & the embarrassment of her puke-mopping predicament.
Ciara then returns to the bar, FMLing, as Wesley, Guus, & Aart re-join Federico & their other friends Jako, Wander, & Max on the packed dancefloor.
The Honey Badger & Cheap Ho song ‘All Fucked Up from Fucking You’ hits & the lads spill Heineken as they raise their glasses & shout along to the lyrics. Guus is deep in the throes of inebriation, having huffed a NOS balloon just before the song hit. He closes his eyes as he sings & sways & spills beer, picturing Honey Badger in the dining hall of the yacht in his music video, eating sushi off the genitals of a beautiful big-titted blonde with diamond-encrusted platinum chopsticks.
“We gotta make the coin, man,” Guus says, spilling beer onto Aart’s shirt as he leans toward him.
“WHAT?!”
“We gotta make the coin,” Guus shouts over the booming music. “We can be richer than Honey Badger.”
Aart: “Fucking A!”
The ratio of guys to girls on the dancefloor at Mountain Bar is decidedly harming the lads’ chances, so after bidding adieu to Ciara & having a final Jaeger Bomb for the road, they’re out onto narrow student-swarmed streets, weaving between Wednesday-night revellers, Wesley & Federico & Jako arguing over whether they should go to Twister or Kokomo or Ocean 41. Wesley wins the debate & the gang take a right at De Negende Cirkel & enter the small bar-rammed square containing Twister.
“That’s Nguyen!” Guus shouts, the Vietnamese name sounding garbled & incomprehensible to Aart, who follows Guus to the bemused Asian guy standing in the street swigging from a bottle of premium Belgian beer, as the rest of the gang continue on into Twister.
“This man’s a genius,” Guus gushes. “Nguyen, I was telling you about the coin, right? We have to make the coin, man. We can be richer than Honey Badger, man. Yachts and boats and chimpanzees and eating sushi from model’s pussies with fucking diamond-encrusted chopsticks, man. Helicopters and big piles of cocaine and fucking everything, man. Lamborghinis. Two Lamborghinis, man.” Guus is rambling & swaying, eyes focused on nothing, the intensity of his slurred speech being met with a confused & slightly nervous smile from his Asian classmate. “Hey, Nguyen, where are you going tonight?”
Nguyen: “I don’t know, I was just — ”
Guus: “Come to Twister with us!”
Minutes later they’re inside, the trio shoving their way through the densely packed crowd in search of the rest of the frat lads.
Jurate & Vallya are at the bar awaiting service. Federico leads Jako & Welsey toward them: “Hey.” Federico leans in to Jurate, talking quickly, his Italian charm producing schoolgirl giggles, as Wesley & Jako stand either side of Vallya, trying & failing to say something to bring a smile to her unmoved Russian face.
Once drinks have been served, all five move into the swell of the dancefloor. Federico’s hands are at Jurate’s waist as ‘Despacito’ blasts through the club, the many Spanish students dotted throughout the crowd belting the lyrics out. As the second chorus hits, Federico leans his face towards Jurate, who closes her eyes and thrusts her lips at his, & their tongues cascade in & out of each other’s mouths while Wesley & Jako jerk their bodies to the song at either side of Vallya, who’s looking alternately at the floor & ceiling & rest of the crowd, trying to focus her eyes anywhere but on her potential Dutch suitors.
Guus, Aart & Nguyen push their way past another group to reach Wesley, shouting something about having been looking for him, creating a distraction that Jako seizes upon to offer a hand to Vallya, which she reluctantly accepts.
When Wesley turns back to face them, Jako & Vallya are dancing an awkward semi-tango. He turns to Guus & Aart, irritated, though he smiles on seeing two girls approach who were at the previous night’s party — a German & a Spanish girl, Lina & something — Lina — and as Wesley greets them both, he realises Lina is the girl Federico fucked, & when Federico pulls his lips free of Jurate’s & gazes dreamily into her eyes, Lina spots him, & her mouth drops open, & Federico glances at her, & instinctively thrusts his hands away from Jurate’s waist, &
06.
Sometime later, Guus, Aart, Nguyen, & Wesley are in the smoke-filled Dees coffee shop, on a narrow alleyway running between the bar-filled backstreets and Oosterstraat.
“I don’t know how he does it, man,” Aart says, forming his words slowly, bloodshot eyes staring into the middle-distance.
“He’s Italian,” Guus says, the words bubbling up from his throat in a way that renders them incomprehensible.
Aart: “What?”
“He’s Italian,” Guus repeats, with force; the force tickles his cannabinoid-coated respiratory tract & sends him into a coughing fit.
Wesley’s watching Nguyen toke on the spliff with great interest. Their short & unthreatening Asian companion sucks deeply upon the spliff for as long as ten seconds at a time, filling his lungs completely with smoke. Nguyen then half-chokes on the smoke & half-swallows it, turning his head to the side & lifting his right arm across his mouth to block the cough. Then he returns the spliff to his mouth with his left hand & repeats the entire process.
“Hey, Bogart,” Wesley says, “you wanna share some of that joint?”
Nguyen stares at Wesley for a few moments, face completely red, understanding none of what was just said to him. The silence & stares of Guus & Aart fill Nguyen with dread. Smoke rises from the joint & wafts across his field of vision, & it suddenly clicks. He hands Wesley the spliff, then turns his head & returns his right arm to his mouth & coughs & coughs & coughs.
“Bogart,” Guus repeats, toying with a frayed piece of roach material on the tobacco-strewn tabletop. “That’s an old reference.”
“It’s a classic,” Wesley says, before inhaling deeply.
All are silent for a moment. Then Aart speaks: “Do you think Federico’s fucking that girl right now?”
Wesley: “Of course.”
Guus: “Which girl even went home with him?”
Wesley: “The German one, I think.”
Guus: “Which was the German one?”
Wesley: “The one from last night.”
Guus: “Where was the other girl from?”
Aart carefully ponders all the memories & knowledge of Federico he can summon as Guus & Wesley speak. He thinks of the shape of Federico’s nose — prominent, Romanesque; the tan complexion of his skin; his height — reasonable, but unremarkable, particularly here in the Netherlands; his easy-going personality, which is surely a factor in Federico’s seeming irresistibility to women. Aart then begins wondering how he could be more like Federico. Each point seems an impossibility: a nose job is possible, but might make him uglier than before; fake tan and sunbeds exist, but they might make him look ridiculous; Aart’s tall enough already — he might even have a few centimetres over Federico; and the personality… he ponders for a moment, & concludes he’s already reasonably easy-going…
Aart: “Do you think I should try a different hairstyle?”
Guus & Wesley stop speaking and stare at Aart. They’re struck first by the question’s weirdness, then they both take the time to really examine his odd shaved-sides & dreads-on-top look.
“I think it looks cool,” Wesley concludes.
Guus: “It’s distinctive.”
“Thanks,” Aart says, accepting the spliff from Guus.
Wesley: “I think your friend’s passed out.”
Guus looks at Nguyen, who’s hunched over the table, resting his heads on top of folded arms.
Guus: “Hey, Nguyen, you okay man?”
“…yeah…”
“You want a Coke or something?”
“…imalright…”
Nguyen’s condition is quickly forgotten as the others fall back into conversation about Federico’s effectiveness with women.
“He talks to girls,” Wesley says, sweeping aside Guus & Aart’s focus on the superficial. “It’s that simple.”
“You talk to girls,” Guus says. “I don’t see you fucking anyone.”
Wesley: “I got a phone number.”
Guus: “You think it’s a real one?”
“Yeah,” Wesley says, tapping at his phone & thrusting it in front of Guus’s face. “I got her on WhatsApp.”
Guus looks at the profile pic of the smiling brunette: “She looks okay.”
“But Nguyen was approaching everyone,” Aart says, confident Nguyen’s too inebriated to hear him. “He must’ve talked to six different girls, and every time they just laughed at him, or told him to go away.”
“That’s because they’re racist,” Guus says, scowling. “Dutch bitches are the worst for that.”
“You’re Dutch,” Wesley laughs.
“I’m Friesian,” Guus says. “And that’s all the more reason to know what Dutch bitches are like. They’re the most superficial cunts in Europe.”
“Woah,” Aart laughs. “Fucking chill on the red pill, man.”
“I’m just being serious,” Guus says. “Real talk. They want a tall man first, a white man second, maybe a black dude if they think no-one’s watching. Asian guys fall pretty far down their list. Unless they’re rich. If you’re rich, you can be a 90 year-old Chinese midget, and every 20 year-old blonde in Twister’s gonna suck your cock.”
“Fuck, man,” Aart says, choking on smoke as he falls into a laughing fit.
“See, this is why you don’t get women,” Wesley says, taking the spliff off Aart.
Guus: “Because I’m honest?”
Wesley: “Because you’re a fucking sociopath.”
It takes Aart a while to calm down, while Guus sits & stews over Wesley’s appraisal of him. Once Aart’s stopped laughing, Wesley holds the nub of a spliff that remains up for the group: “Anyone want BLTs?”
Guus snatches the nub of spliff from him & sucks on its scorching end.
“Come on, let’s wake Nguyen up and go to Warhol,” Wesley says, standing up.
“Hey, Nguyen,” Aart says, shaking Nguyen’s arm.
Nguyen doesn’t respond.
Aart shakes his arm harder.
“Come on, wake up.”
Nguyen meekly raises his reddened face, eyes lolling in their sockets: “Ithinkimgonnathrowup.”
“You’re alright, man,” Aart says, almost at the exact moment Nguyen throws his head to the side & cascades vomit all over himself.
07.
“Goodnight.”
Ciara lights her rollie as she walks away from Ibrahim & Mountain Bar, the previously busy bar-lined streets eerily quiet in the gently rising early morning light. The only person in the street is some junky in a tracksuit, who immediately stops fiddling with some random bicycle & eyes Ciara suspiciously as she passes. The scent of long-roasting meat hits Ciara as she passes a kebab shop at the end of the street. She thinks of ending her night/starting her day with some greasy sustenance. She pauses & watches the hacked-at lamb spin slowly against the grill through the window & decides to hold on for home & something healthier. She drops her rollie to the floor & continues on to the huge bike parking area at the edge of the Grote Markt, with about a dozen bikes now dotted around it. She heads to the spot she left her bike at, but doesn’t see it. She walks slowly around the parking area, scanning each bicycle carefully. When she’s finished, she circles around back to the start. She does this three times, each time suppressing a growing fear, a developing sinking feeling in her stomach. After the third search, she admits defeat.
“FUCK’S SAKE!” Ciara yells, startling a bumbling old bloke & some pigeons.
Her bike’s been stolen.
08.
Statistical modelling that should be second nature to him is somehow leaving Nguyen completely confused; he checks variables, consults Google, but still keeps returning results that make no sense whatsoever.
“Why in shit isn’t this result significant?” Nguyen moans, the effort of pushing the words out in English making him aware of the thick-cloud of the-night-before cloaking his every thought & action.
Guus takes a quick look at Nguyen’s screen & tuts loudly: “You are mixing the European and English decimals.”
“What?”
“Here.” Guus highlights an entire column of data on Nguyen’s computer, opens Excel, copies & pastes the offending digits into a new spreadsheet, then performs a quick search & replace, changing every ‘.’ English-style decimal into a ‘,’ European one. “We use commas for decimals,” Guus says, copying the altered data & pasting it back into the SPSS data modelling software. “Now try.”
With a few quick button presses, Nguyen returns the statistically-significant result he was looking for. “Damn,” Nguyen mumbles. “I knew that.”
“You’re still fucked up from last night, huh?”
“Mmm.”
“You remember puking all over that coffee shop?”
“No.”
“I don’t think you can go back to there.”
“Ugh.”
They sit in silence for a few moments, each working their way through their data analysis homework, as Guus thinks of more ways to annoy Nguyen. He thinks of teasing Nguyen about the many Dutch girls Nguyen threw himself at, but then remembers the hope-filled conversations he had with Aart about the potential of making their own cryptocurrency: “Hey, remember I told you that me and Aart are thinking about making our own coin?”
Nguyen doesn’t answer, frowning in concentration at some difficult-to-decipher English-language sentence on his problem sheet.
“Do you know how to make one?” Guus continues. “You’re usually pretty good with that stuff.”
“What, making a cryptocurrency?” Nguyen asks. “What makes you think I’m good at that?”
Guus: “I don’t know, just making things in general. You made your own phone apps, right? iOS and Android. And computer software.”
Nguyen: “Yeah, but I never set up an entire blockchain.”
“I don’t know if you need to create an entire blockchain. I thought you can make it like an app on Ethereum? Same as making an app for a phone or something.”
“What, you mean like setting up an ERC-20 token?”
“Uh… yeah…”
“Sure. That’s easy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ve set a few up on testnet just to play around with it. It takes like twenty minutes.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You’ve just got to copy and paste a pre-existing smart contract and swap the variables out to meet your specifications.”
“…yeah?”
“It’s super easy. It couldn’t be easier.” The fog of the previous night is lifting, Nguyen’s spirits rising now he’s found something pure to distract himself from the garbled English grammar of his data analysis problem sheet. “What do you want your token to do?”
“I don’t know… it doesn’t really need to do anything. We just thought we could maybe make a lot of money.”
“Well then it’s super easy. Incredibly easy. A baby could do it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Look, watch this…”
09.
It’s already passed 4pm when Ciara’s dragged her tired self from the university to the Grote Markt & on to the bar-filled streets beyond, and the bike hire shop at the far end of the boozing district, facing the canal.
She’s at the counter, rummaging through her pockets, in a panic: “What happens if I can’t find the key?”
The women at the counter’s previously-friendly face grows suddenly serious: “Then you must pay us for the cost of the bicycle.”
The repairman at her side, fiddling with some disc-shaped bike part, adds gravely: “We’ll take it from the bank account you registered with.”
Ciara: “And I still have to keep paying the rental fee each month?”
The woman: “Of course. You signed a contract.”
Fuck’s sake.
Back out on the square, stumbling in a half-awake sleep-deprived daze. Ciara’s thoughts tumble over themselves, until she stops outside a bar & takes her phone from her pocket & connects to wifi.
“Hiya, Mam,” Ciara says, once her Facebook Messenger call’s connected. “I’ve got a bit of a problem.”
“Oh, you don’t need to borrow more money, do you?” Ciara’s Mam asks, sounding worried.
“Well… last night I went to work at that bar I’m working at, and I was working until early in the morning, nine til six, then when I got out, I went to where I’d parked my bike, and…”
“…because I just lent your brother two hundred quid, and we’ve just had to get the double-glazing done on the windows, and I’m down to my last pennies now…”
“Yeah, it’s just that I can’t find the bike key, and they say without it, I have to keep paying every month, and I still need to get a new bike for getting around, and it’s a few weeks until I get paid again…”
“Can’t you ask your father?”
Ciara sighs: “You know what’s he like. And he’s already lending me the money for the deposit on the house, he’s not gonna give me any more than that.”
“And I thought you were working?”
“I am, but I’m only making, like, six hundred Euros a month, which after rent is barely fifty Euros a week to live off…”
“…and I thought you were getting money back off the Dutch government?”
“I am, but like one-hundred sixty Euros a month…”
“So can’t you buy a bike with that? It doesn’t have to be a fancy one, does it?”
“…no, yeah, but… I mean…” She sighs, defeated, deciding to steel her mind for the final ordeal of the long walk back to Jurate’s, & the long walks from there to & from university until a new bike’s sorted. “Alright… I’ll figure something out.”
10.
“Hey, Aart, check this out,” Guus says, bringing his laptop into Aart’s room, cold autumn rain lashing the streets outside the frat house.
“What’re you doing?” Aart asks, as Guus sits upon his bed and starts tapping at the laptop.
“Here.” Guus places the laptop beside him on the bed & motions for Aart to use it.
Aart sits & stares at a line of zeroes on the laptop screen: “What’s this?”
“Move the mouse around.”
Aart drags his finger across the laptop’s touchpad; the zeroes are replaced with a string of random letters and numbers.
“Write the number down.”
“What is it?”
“Your private key.”
“For what?”
“For Pussy Sushi.”
Aart stares at Guus in confusion; Guus stares back, bearing yellowed teeth with an enormous grin: “Pussy Sushi?”
“Like the Honey Badger video,” Guus explains. “This is our ticket, man. Lambos, yachts, and banquets of sushi served on the bare bodies of beautiful big-titted blondes. Write the key down.”
Aart stands up, grabs a sheet of paper, & jots the key down: 5xBee23aZc41nErd1AsddDNeXfg543009ah18EfnM. He clicks continue. “You made this yourself?”
“Nguyen helped me.”
“So I’ve got a wallet,” Aart says. “What happens now?”
“What’s your public address?”
Aart reads the numbers out, Guus meticulously tapping each onto his phone screen. “Okay, now wait a minute… wait… wait… anything happening?”
“Nothing…” Aart hits refresh. “Nothing… nothing… nothing… oh, sweet.”
The zero balance on the wallet has suddenly become 15 followed by six zeroes.
Guus: “You are now the owner of fifteen billion Pussy Sushi coins.”
11.
“This place is crazy,” Jurate says, twirling in the frat’s bar-like main living space.
“It’s cool, yeah?” Ciara’s enthusiastic, & happy her friend shares her enthusiasm.
“It looks like a bar,” Vallya says, betraying no emotion.
“Can I get you a drink?” Wesley asks. “We’ve got beer, vodka, gin, whiskey, bourbon, white rum, dark rum, tequila, sambuca, ouzo, Aftersock, absinthe — ”
Jurate: “Beer’s fine.”
“But what are you supposed to do with it?” Jako asks, sitting on one of the corner-nook sofas.
“This exactly what I say to them,” Federico says. “Is fucking useless.”
Guus: “It’s a proof of concept.”
Jako: “But what concept have you proved?”
Guus: “That we can make a coin.”
Federico: “That you can make a fucking shit coin! The coin you’ve got is no use to anyone!”
“So we’ve got the proof of concept,” Guus says, ignoring Federico. “Now we just need a use case.”
Jako: “That’s, like — how you say? Carriage in front of the horse. You’re doing it backward.”
Federico: “Exactly!”
Jako: “Surely you find a problem first and then design a solution for it?”
Federico: “That’s what I tell him!”
“Think about mouthwash,” Aart says, knowing Jako, Wander & Max are much more likely to be convinced by marketing-focused explanations than technological ones. “Mouthwash had no obvious use case; in fact, the guys who made it thought it might be used for floor cleaner, or toilet cleaner: they had no idea it would take off as an oral hygiene product until the marketing guys got hold of it.”
“And that’s where you guys come in,” Guus says, smiling smugly.
Jako: “Well, my opinion is you need to change the fucking name first!”
“What, you don’t like Pussy Sushi?” Guus asks. “It’s like in the Honey Badger video…”
“Just call it Fucking Shit Coin,” Federico says, sharing an awkward half-second of eye-contact with Jurate as Wesley brings the girls over.
“Hey, guys, this is…”
Introductions follow, bottles of Hertog Jan are clanged together, & space is made for Wesley & the girls on the sofa. Time passes, conversation flowing, the rate at which beers are sunk increasing.
“I’m sorry about the time before,” Federico says to Jurate. They fall into drunken forgiveness & flirting.
“I heard Putin’s really into blockchain,” Guus tells Vallya, who tells him: “I don’t know anything about it.”
& so on, empty beer bottles accumulating, cigarettes being smoked, joints rolled, harder drink turned to — beginning with tequila shots — , the night getting progressively messier, the chatter getting louder, music videos playing on the television, & then the Honey Badger one comes on — the one which inspired Guus & Aart in the first place, where’s he’s on the yacht eating sushi off a model with the diamond-encrusted platinum chopsticks.
“And so tomorrow I have to go again to the place,” Vallya pouts. “Oy.”
“That sucks,” Ciara says, though she’s honestly fed up of hearing about Vallya’s endless bureaucratic issues getting Russian documents approved in the Netherlands.
Guus: “You know, that could all be solved instantly with blockchain.”
“Really?” Vallya asks, showing genuine interest for the first time all evening.
“Yeah,” Guus says, one eye on the television, awaiting the triumphal moment when Honey Badger brings out the diamond-encrusted platinum chopsticks. Guus launches into an in-depth explanation of the transformative power of decentralised distributed ledger technology for all manner of cross-border record keeping, Vallya rapidly losing interest as it becomes apparent he’s offering no immediate-term solutions.
“Would you shut up about the Fucking Shit Coin?” Federico says, arm now around Jurate a couple of seats away.
Everyone laughs, & Federico leans back in to talk seductively to Jurate, who’s very much into it, Federico playing up his accent for maximum effectiveness; & Jako & Wesley both draw Vallya’s attention away from Guus; & Guus stares at the television, as the Honey Badger music video gives away to Gucci Mane living the high life in some lush tropical island mansion; & Guus keeps pinging the two mantras off each other — Vallya’s issues with the Russian documents, & Federico’s repeated denigration of “your Fucking Shit Coin,” & Guus’ mind swirls as more alcohol’s sunk — a double berth of sambuca & ouzo shots — & the night wears on, much booze drank & weed smoked, & Ciara & Aart & Guus & Max & maybe one other one who’s too fucked to say much are in Aart’s room, smoking another joint & drinking Jack & Coke, & Guus is ranting about blockchain & the potential use case for the Coin Formerly Known as Pussy Sushi, & how they need a high-quality whitepaper written in English, & Ciara would maybe be perfect for it, & everyone else is too fucked to say much, so Ciara’s indulging him, & trying to comprehend Guus’ jargon-laden rant, & Aart’s getting tired of listening to him, & when Ciara says for the fifth or sixth time “I don’t really get it though,” and this time asks after “How can you stop other people stealing your coins from you?”, Aart pushes past Guus (who’s still ranting) to open a desk drawer & pull out his paper with the private key for his Ethereum wallet on it, & he’s excitedly explaining to Ciara how “this key is completely unique, and as long as nobody else sees it, nobody can access anything, and your public key is a totally different number that you can send money to,” & now that he’s interrupted from his rant, Guus is left to rock back & forth in his stoned drunkeness, & he suddenly blurts out what he’d been looking for: “I’VE FUCKING GOT IT!”
& Max stirs on the bed, & whoever’s lying beside him’s woken from their slumber by Guus’s cry, & those two & Aart & Ciara stare at Guus in half-comprehension as he bring his rant to the climax he’s been looking for:
“Fucking Shit Coin! FSC! Federico’s a fucking idiot, but he’s got a thing for marketing, right? FSC! Got a good ring to it! So we use it to sync the documents, so Vallya’s situation’s solved on the blockchain, right? So her Future’s secured on the blockchain. So there’s Synergy between the documents issued in Russia and Nederlands. So there’s Synergy from past to present to Future. So that’s what we call it, right?”
Guus stares at the others, awaiting their enthusiasm.
“…sorry…” Ciara mumbles, “I’m don’t get it…”
“Future Synergy Coin!” Guus shouts. “FSC! It’s fucking gezellig! A decentralised blockchain platform for the secure cross-border storage and access of the important documents of the citizens of all the world’s nations!”
Max opens & closes his mouth a few times, too fucked up to say anything.
Ciara stares at Guus, then at Aart, still utterly confused.
Guus looks at Aart, eyes pleading with him to be the first to understand him.
“Yeah, I get it,” Aart says, mostly out of sympathy. “Future Synergy Coin… because it synergies with your future…”
“Exactly!”
& the rant continues, & all rapidly interest, but Guus is enthused through the next ten drinks, & as the others pass out & disappear into the night around him, he becomes the last person awake in the frat house, sitting on the quad sofas beside a passed-out Wander, furiously scribbling a rough abstract for the Future Synergy Coin whitepaper across a bunch of McDonald’s napkins found in a kitchen drawer.
12.
“…and we can pay you,” Guus says.
Ciara’s trying to listen to Guus, she hungover, barely able to focus, until he says those magic words: we can pay you…
“Yeah?”
“Of course. I’ve made a bunch of money from crypto already, but I’m sure this idea’s gold. Future Synergy Coin is gonna make a thousand times more than whatever I’ve made buying other people’s coins.”
“But… a whitepaper?” Ciara leans forward in her seat, between Aart & Guus on the quad-sofa in the party-ravaged frat’s main living space. “I don’t even know what that is…”
“It’s like a research paper explaining what the coin does,” Aart says. “It’s not much different than an essay you’d have to write for your course.”
Ciara’s relieved that Aart’s stepped in: he explains everything so much more calmly & understandably than Guus.
“You just have to look at some other whitepapers from successful cryptos,” Aart says. “You can pretty much just copy their background sections, take a few bits and pieces from different papers, and put it into your own words.”
“But I don’t get why you want me to do it,” Ciara says. “Surely you both know a lot more about this crypto thing than I do?”
“Because the English needs to be perfection,” Guus says. “The whitepaper is everything. The whitepaper is what convinces people this isn’t just some new Fucking Shit Coin; this is Future Synergy Coin. This is something world changing. Something they have to invest in.”
“Yeah? Well… I suppose I could write something like that…”
“Of course you can,” Guus grins. “And as I say, we’ll pay you. We can pay you in cash — say, 500 Euros?”
Fuck. Ciara imagines the bike that €500 could buy.
Aart stares at Guus, shocked he’s offering so much.
“Or we can pay you some part in cash, some part in Future Synergy Coins,” Guus says. “I can almost guarantee the price will rocket. Every coin’s going up at the moment.”
“500 Euros is fine.”
“Excellent.” Guus leans back on the sofa, clasping his hands behind his head, triumphant. “I’ll tell Nguyen to start working on the website.”
ICO.
Ciara completes the whitepaper in a few days’ rush, desperate for the €500 & a new bicycle, pulling together sections & strands & diagrams from a dozen pillaged & semi-plagiarised pre-existing professional efforts, rejigging sentence structures & paragraph orders to avoid plagiarism-detecting algorithms — a skill her university course has taught her well — while Nguyen rustles up a rudimentary website, then makes adjustments & adds swirling graphics of blockchain-signifying spiderwebs of interconnected nodes under Aart’s direction, while Guus suggests a few slight changes to both the whitepaper & the website, feeding Ciara & Nguyen the details to make the whole thing a success: giving the coin a total supply of 10 trillion, a high enough figure to make each coin seem unbelievably cheap compared to the likes of Bitcoin & Ethereum, even if FSC’s marketcap was to soar into the tens-of-millions-of-dollars range (a goal Aart laughs at the impossibility of), with 50% of coins available to the crypto investors via the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) crowd sale, 25% split between Aart, Guus, & Nguyen, & the last 25% allocated to the Future Synergy Coin development budget; fluffing the resumes of the team to be listed on the website, vastly overinflating the success of Nguyen’s previous coding projects, making Aart out to be an elite Dutch business bastard & an expert in every topic touched upon in any of his university modules, while Guus depicts himself as the genius at the center of it all, an incomparable fusion of tech & business savvy, a hip young master of the future tokenised economy; & the hard-cap on the ICO is set at 15,000 ETH, a figure roughly equal to $4.5 million, & at this point Aart & Ciara are convinced this bold project will come to nothing, that they’ll never find enough people stupid enough to fund a project with such ambitions from a group with such little track record: & because of this, Aart balks when Guus asks him to contribute his 1.5 bitcoin, with Guus adding 1.5 of his own, to bribe a leading ICO review website into giving their project a 4-star rating (a 5-star rating cost far more Bitcoin than either possess or can afford); but Guus promises Aart the potential returns are astronomical, far outstripping anything he could get by simply hodling & hoping for Bitcoin to increase in value: & against his better judgement, Aart gives in to Guus, & transfers his 1.5 BTC to the ICO review website; & the 4-star rating appears, & on 17th October 2017, the Future Synergy Coin ICO goes live.
More from $hitcoin:
$hitcoin: How to get your $hitcoin token listed on a cryptocurrency exchange
Why I Wrote $hitcoin: The First Novel to Fully Capture the Insanity of Cryptocurrency’s Gold Rush
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