How Christmas was almost saved by crypto
Santa would have been much better off transacting kid’s behaviour on the blockchain and delivering their presents through smart contracts.
Santa was hit as hard by the latest economic downturn as anyone else outside of the 1%. His tax deductions had gone out of the window, his wages had stagnated, and he had to outsource his little helpers in order to keep the cost of running his business under control.
Just as the song goes, Santa knows when you’re sleeping, and he knows when you’re awake, but he knew nothing about disaster recovery and didn’t keep any backups of his database… for goodness sake. Such as it was when one of his helpers accidentally wiped out his server farm and his list of all the good girls and bad boys in the world vanished into thin air.
“Christmas is over!” he exclaimed, almost on the verge of a panic attack. “The kids already know they’re getting less this year because money is tight, but now they’re going to get nothing!” Santa should have known better than anyone to test his failover strategies in the event of a crisis, but he was just as much a victim of the steady onward march of technology as anyone else. Consultants urged him years back to invest in IT infrastructure to keep track of the little shits and, a few hundred million later, Santa and his elves were struggling to keep track of everything in their buggy, incomplete ERP system. Was much easier when it was all on paper, although the environment wasn’t too keen on that one.
He was right, you know. Christmas really was over, or it would have been if it wasn’t for his secret saviour he affectionally dubbed Santoshi. Thanks to Santoshi-San’s efforts in revolutionising currency and accounting systems, Santa had seen the light. You see, he didn’t have to know when the kids were sleeping or being naughty if he provided a mechanism for them to do that for him.
Imagine how stupid he felt when he realised that he would have been much better off transacting kid’s behaviour on the blockchain and delivering their presents through smart contracts. The kids would still get their surprises on Christmas day because the blockchain was encrypted, and there was no risk of losing data because it behaved like a globally distributed ledger. Such fucking genius!
And with it, SantaCoin was born. Children around the world would earn SantaCoin for good behaviour and lose it whenever they did something naughty, and whatever SantaCoin they had in time for Christmas was exchanged for coal, potatoes, Nintendos, and whatever else was on the wishlish they saved on their SantaCoin app. Everyone was invited to the ICO, which meant that even the nastiest children got a few nice presents to sell them on the upcoming changes.
This did not necessarily save Christmas for good, though, as SantaCoin itself became subject to gross speculation from all the Scrooges of the world. The risk of the scheme imploding grew more and more likely over the years as the value of the coin itself far exceeded the value of the gifts it was exchanged for, and the volatility meant that the children didn’t know if their millions of coins would actually earn them anything at all. This meant SantaCoin was almost too much like real money and he would see Christmas’s ruin a second time.
Worse than that, Santa found it increasingly hard to keep track of all the gifts and the smart contracts he had to execute, as scammers, perverts and warlords started selling drugs, weapons, and the children themselves on a dark-web ecommerce site known as the Red Ribbon Road. This flooded the blockchain with hundreds of thousands of illegal and untraceable transactions and eventually outnumbered those dedicated to making the children happy over Christmas. Some reports surfaced of children excitedly unwrapping heavily artillery on their snowy lawn, and parents finding their baby formula laced with crack cocaine.
Having tried and failed to make his cryptocurrency and blockchain useful, Santa gave in and went back to spying on children and recording their behaviour with good old pen and paper. It was much harder work but at least it worked.
