{
    "p": "ons",
    "op": "post",
    "title": "The Shitcoiner",
    "url": "https://theshitcoiner.xyz",
    "author": "Ethan Bunzel",
    "authorAddress": "393bi7BE5AfQUB13ei8tw7Bq39VPsryC72",
    "body": "There I was, I shit you not, squashed in the back of my hired Lincoln Town Car betwixt an incredibly pregnant Salvadoran and her abuelita, their cries reverberating deep into the cavities of both my eardrums as we careened down the lush coastal road.\n\nMy driver Juan white-knuckled the wheel as he raced through the gauntlet of trees and around the winding, undulating bends, teetering on the edge of a forested cliffside sloping hundreds of yards down to the Pacific. Motorcycles, pickup trucks with laborers in the beds, and American school buses repurposed as public transit hurtled towards us in the opposite direction.\n\nThe sun poked above the treetops and painted the landscape in all its vibrant glory.\n\nMy heart swelled for the sheer beauty of my adopted motherland. Just as it yearned for my suffering countrymen.\n\nI led the two ladies in Zen mediation as the motion jostled us into each other across the plush leather seats, squeezing their hands and letting out a sequence of deep “huuums.” They followed my deliberate breathing techniques for a fleeting moment, the pregnant lady’s breaths gradually becoming more staccato before giving way to a single, roaring sob that bellowed all the way to fucking Nicaragua and back again.\n\nI needed to offer more than my limo service and calming chakras.\n\nIt was only right that I tap into the limitless resources at my disposal, concealed by my journeyman air, dopey crooked-toothed smile, and Euro-casual garb, a Hawaiian shirt, beige sun hat, linen capris and Birkenstocks. Outrageous capital resources, located in the depths of the briefcase I wear on my person always and guard with the Muy Thai skills I picked up while canoodling with a rotating roster of Chiang Mai co-eds during my darkest era.\n\nI leaned into the front of the car, stabilizing myself on the console as I turned directly to the 30-something-year-old father in the passenger seat. He was a foot-tapping wreck, frantically cross-checking Juan’s directions against his own.\n\n“Mi amigo, un segundo?”\n\nHe turned and looked at me with his bloodshot eyes and nodded.\n\nI grabbed my phone from my pocket and pulled up the Bitcoin 5-year chart.\n\nI took a long moment to bask in its wonder, smiling like a dumb little child at the steeply inclined line shooting straight up like the build-up of a roller coaster.\n\nThen I stuffed the phone into the father’s face.\n\n“Qué es?”\n\n“Bitcoin. El 5-year!” I said, twinkling my eyebrows like a magician and adding a “wow!” to fully communicate the reverence he should feel for a digital currency capped at a sharp 21-million-coin supply, and validated by a decentralized public ledger as opposed to a group of centralized gremlins. “Es el futuro! When your new child is 10, one of these will be worth millions! But please, por favor-no shitcoins! None of that crap. Dogecoin, Safemoon, Shiba-inu-whatever-the-fuck. Not even that Ethereum-NFT-bullshit. Bitcoin only, for the love of Christ.”\n\n“Ok. Gracias, señor.”\n\nThe father mustered a smile before turning back to the directions on his phone.\n\nWhether he didn’t care about the alpha I was feeding him or he was too distracted by his water-broken wife’s cries cutting through our conversation, I knew it was time to stop my orange-pilling session for the time being.\n\nI put my phone away and settled in for the drive.\n\nIt had been a whirlwind fifteen minutes since I was enjoying a leisurely avocado toast at the Garten, my luxurious yet temporary accommodations in El Zonte “Bitcoin” Beach-the once sleepy beach town to which an anonymous American donated his Bitcoin fortune to create a circular Bitcoin economy.\n\nIn the hills overlooking El Zonte is where I was on the verge of closing on an open-concept cliffside mansion, to be paid for in full with Bitcoin. With the purchase, I’d be granted citizenship to El Salvador, and all of my Bitcoin capital gains would be made tax-free.\n\nEn route from El Zonte to my local citizenship lawyer’s office is when I encountered the family gathered around the sputtering pickup truck, on the dirt road connecting the town of El Zonte to that main curving thoroughfare spanning El Salvador’s La Libertad coast.\n\nWe turned onto a more developed freeway, my driver racing 90 miles per hour past beat-up jalopies and vendors selling water and food inches from the highway. The discomfort of the speed at which we traveled caused the agony to persist.\n\nBut after a half-hour on the highway, much spent snaking around mountainous hills, an increasing number of pedestrian overpasses and billboards announced our arrival into the city limits of San Salvador. At once, Juan exited the highway and began stopping and starting and honking in the city traffic.\n\nHaving spent all of my time in the country until then in El Zonte, it was my first true tour of the capital city of my new domicile. What I saw from that middle seat was an endless, connected chain of boxy office buildings, fast-food restaurants and thatched-roof shops lining each city block. Salvadorans filled the sidewalks, milling about, working construction, selling food and goods from street stalls. The terrain was hilly, the roads filled with roundabouts and congested with a mixture of cars, mopeds, and the ubiquitous makeshift buses of all shapes, sizes, and painted shades of green and blue, the Spanish music they blasted and their huffing and puffing motors filling the airwaves.\n\nThe city lacked a skyline and had a drab, shabby texture to it, but the San Salvador Volcano towered over the city in the East.\n\nA reminder of the nation’s stark beauty and volcanic potential.\n\nPatron Saint Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, leader of the decentralized world, ultimate alpha-male-savage, was already in the process of milking the volcano’s utters to mine Bitcoin, revitalizing the city in its shadows and the entire nation under its domain.\n\nThe transformation was already starting to take effect, the hospital turning out to be a modern and palatial white structure built by Bukele in a matter of months, I’d learn.\n\nWe made it through a guard gate and pulled up to the entrance, where the pregnant lady was taken into a wheelchair by a nurse. They rolled her through zig-zagging corridors, arriving at one of the many beds in a large, sterile room resembling a military hospital. Another nurse and a doctor joined the cadre, closing a curtain with me inside and dissipating all the stress as they welcomed the wet, screaming baby into the universe.\n\nIt was the second most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen. Right before me existed what was, at that instant, the youngest, purest soul on Earth.\n\nA perfect canvas.\n\nI turned to the father, tears welling as he peered longingly at his newborn child in one of the nurse’s arms.\n\nAs the group of nurses examined and tended to the baby at the far side of the room, I asked the father to take out his Chivo wallet app.\n\nHe was hesitant at first, caught off guard at my rehashing the Bitcoin runaround just moments after the birth of what was presumably his first child.\n\nBut he succumbed at my insistence, taking out his phone and swiping to Chivo-the El Salvador government-issued digital wallet app for sending and receiving Bitcoin. He had already received the $30 worth of free Bitcoin the government gave to all citizens who downloaded it.\n\nAdrenaline coursed through my veins to my fingertips and down to my marbles as I floated my phone over the father’s, scanning his Chivo QR code with my non-custodial hot wallet of choice to gift him an absolutely asinine sum of Bitcoin.\n\nA metric shit-ton of Satoshis-Sats for short, Satadores en Español-delivered directly into the father’s graces through the lightning network. The transaction fee costing a few pennies.\n\nIt was my goal to make it so that the father, the 5-minute-old baby his wife just gave birth to, the babies that baby’s eventual wife gave birth to, and an infinite number of generations of Salvadorans in the chain, would never have to work again.\n\nI succeeded while barely making a dent in my buxom Bitcoin coiffeurs.\n\nFor I started buying Bitcoin when an entire coin costed less than an individual slice of toilet paper. The tiniest morsel of Bitcoin to me can make anyone a don anywhere on Earth, even in places like Switzerland and Qatar.\n\nMy mere pocket Sats created a new El Salvador dynasty.\n\nThe exact amount I sent the father isn’t for me to share, mind you. It’s the father’s Bitcoin now, and the father’s business to choose whether or not to disclose the coordinates of his public key and reveal the net worth I bequeathed him.\n\nBut for the sake of argument, why don’t we call it somewhere between a lot of Bitcoin and an excessive amount for any mere mortal to hold. Let’s just say that as I handed the father his phone back, I almost felt guilty, the old adage of whether to give a man a fish or teach him how to fish playing in my head.\n\nBut as he clutched his phone and began to process his new reality, I remembered I had given him an ocean of fish, and he’d never again need to touch a rod.\n\n“A gift!” I said. “How do you say in Spanish…un reglo? Mucho, mucho dinero!”\n\n“Wow-gracias, señor,” he said, shaking my hand and smiling tepidly as he looked at his phone. “Muchos gracias.”\n\nHis reserved reaction was of course not one of impartiality, but of ambivalence to seeing his life turning so furiously on its axis.\n\nUnder the surface, the tears were already starting to form. Well before the nurse returned to hand the father his newborn chico, as it would be communicated to me.\n\nRight as the father received his son into his arms for the first time, he began bawling his Salvadoran eyes out. The extent of his newfound Bitcoin fortune had finally set in.\n\nI embraced the father from the side and let his tears flow onto my Hawaiian shirt, patting him on the back as I whispered sweet nothings into his ear.\n\n“There there, there there. You are now a HODLer, my friend-and a father!”\n\nHe nodded in agreement and went over to pass his wife their child. He whispered to her and kissed her cheek as he did so, causing the wife to cry her own snotty, mouth-covering tears.\n\nDespite the language barrier and that it was a private moment shared by the two lovers, it was obvious to all of us in that room what he briefed her on and thus the source of her tears.\n\nI had a nearly identical reaction the moment I became a Bitcoiner, when I saw the first Bitcoins associated with my public key.\n\nThe most beautiful sight these eyes ever did see.\n\n…………………\n\nI said my final goodbyes to the young family and met my driver in front of the hospital.\n\nHe was leaning against the limo, shielding his fatigue from the morning’s events with blacked-out shades. He stood up straight upon seeing me and opened the back car door, ready to take me to my lawyer’s office.\n\nBut after serving as a shaman to the young family by ushering them into their new lives as toxic Bitcoin maximalists, I simply could not let my driver escort me to spend Bitcoin for the betterment of my own self. I suddenly felt immense pressure to relieve myself of the burden of my already exorbitant Bitcoin fortune, which would become a gangly, messianic beast once 1 Sat equals $1 by 2024, latest.\n\nAnd I needed to do so quickly. Despite there being no real reason for haste, I felt like bursting out of my skin from the sudden, urgent compulsion to dissipate all of my Bitcoin to as many Salvadorans as possible, as quickly as possible.\n\nI finally understood why it was that I found myself within the loins of this tiny-little Central American nation.\n\nI shut the door and asked the driver to take out his Chivo app. He followed suit as to his driverly duties, and I sent him practically, for all intents and purposes, an entire Bitcoin.\n\n“Go forth, Juan. Disseminate my Bitcoin to the people of our great nation.”\n\nI clasped his back and led him down into the car, explaining myself once more in English and twice more in Spanish.\n\n“Do you understand?”\n\nHe began asking me questions in Spanish but I shut the door. I tapped on the window and shooed him down the street with my hand, there being no time to waste in our shared quest to orange-pill a nation.\n\nAfter a long, stunned gaze at his phone, he was off. And then so was I.\n\n…………………\n\nIt was a funny feeling, voluntarily departing with so much Bitcoin.\n\nHistorically, I had a penchant for stripping strangers of their cryptocurrencies. Not willingly helping them accumulate more.\n\nThe Belgian’s Bitcoin parables date to the early, early 2010s, back when Bitcoin was trading at the greatest discount this world has ever seen.\n\nI was working for Princess Cruises as an onboard customer experience facilitator at the time. My job was to be a friendly face to my passengers by handing out complimentary drinks, tagging along on off-ship excursions, and most of all, engaging in good conversation.\n\nI had a penchant for going eight inches deep from the jump, my genial heir and people skills ingratiating me into the deep confidences of people I’d only just met.\n\nSuch as the refined, white-haired Greek man, who showed me all the Bitcoins in his Mt. Gox trading account one evening over mojitos. Mt. Gox was the first Bitcoin exchange, and the Greek man’s portfolio was replete with thousands of these mysterious digital coins.\n\n“Bitcoin is the white knight saving the world from the piano-falling-from-the-sky that is the global FIAT monetary system,” the Greek man opined as he stared unflappably at the sea. He explained that Bitcoin’s 21 million coin cap created the perfect hedge against inflation, and its trustless, peer-to-peer public ledger eliminated the need for a centralized authority.\n\nThe Greek man downed his mojito, then smiled his most-interesting-man-in-the-world smile as he claimed Bitcoin also freed him from the grips of the governments of the world. “Anyone could memorize their 12-word Bitcoin seed phrase and flee any political situation in the middle of the night, buck naked, with their entire net worth intact,” he said.\n\nFighting back against the worldwide financial elite and their various entities and apparati. Existing on the fringes of government censorship and control. It was all too delicious.\n\nI went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and immediately inserted buying-Bitcoin into my daily routine, right after wiping my morning-shit off my ass. I couldn’t fathom the extent of my privilege for being so early to the only perfect financial system man ever created.\n\nSo I paid forward my knowledge by orange-pilling my passengers. It’s mind-boggling to think how many millionaires-and billionaires-I birthed.\n\nBut the internet is a funny place. One moment, you’re buying Bitcoin and making Satoshi proud. The next, just a few clicks away, you’re buying shitcoins and looking into the eyes of Satan himself.\n\nI was drawn like a kid in a candy store to the infinite utility tokens and stablecoins and cut-and-dry, useless shitcoins launched after Bitcoin to thwart Satoshi’s utopic vision.\n\nMy untapped skills as a social engineer made it all too easy to bilk anonymous greedy bastards on the internet.\n\nThrough a steady diet of pump and dumps, ponzis, pyramids, multi-level marketing scams, and good ‘ol seed-phrase phishing scams, I became a master at capitalizing off the knowledge gaps in those early days of crypto. Often I built my own scams on top of the grift of others.\n\nAlways, I came out victorious, relishing any zero-sum battle.\n\nI fancied myself a magician-my public addresses and transaction history out there on the decentralized public ledger, but the funds gone. Blowin’ in the wind, as Dylan liked to say.\n\nWealth 10xing out of my asshole, I quit my job and began traveling the world.\n\nQuickly finding myself with a beautiful Colombian bride.\n\nOh, Roxana. Her melodic accent and heart-stopping way of dressing in gorgeous linen gowns and the highest of heels for practically no occasion at all. We said our nuptials at a wedding befit for a drug lord before settling down in a luxury penthouse in Bogotá, where Roxana became my shitcoining muse.\n\nBut Roxana thought, God bless her soul, that I was simply betting on black with my delicately-concocted-cons. She became terrified Interpol would come crashing onto our wraparound terrace and into our marble-floored living room. She pleaded for me to stop tapping and clicking and conniving like a mad scientist on my seven-screen setup.\n\nWhen I didn’t listen, she left me, a week after she told me she was pregnant with our first child.\n\nWith all the money in the world and no one to share it with, contemplating death as a better alternative to my deep loneliness, shame and guilt, I pledged to never again act in my own self-interest.\n\nSo I became a born again Bitcoiner.\n\nJust before the bull run of 2017, I ceremoniously chucked my old cell phone into the Adriatic to wash away my shitcoining sins and sever ties to all the enemies I’d accumulated, not before converting 99.9% of my entire net worth to Bitcoin and transferring all of it offline to the same cold hardware wallet I keep in my briefcase to this day.\n\nBitcoin gave me hope, vitality and added prosperity at a time when I felt wayward and impotent, despite my affluence.\n\nSo right after Nayib Bukele announced at the Miami Bitcoin Conference that his country would cease to suck on the teat of the United States and replace Bitcoin for the US dollar as the nation’s legal tender, I booked my Haj to the soon-to-be Singapore of Central America.\n\nI knew I wanted to be a part of the first Bitcoin nation, but I found myself without a true purpose when I got there until I experienced the euphoria of human birth that fateful morning.\n\nForget nonprofits and conferences and startups. The only way to truly spread love and peace and Bitcoin was to hit the streets, put one foot after another, and recruit an army to slay moloch.\n\nMoloch being the cabal of lizards on Wall Street and in the world’s central banks.\n\nThe army being the people of El Salvador.\n\nI was going to single-handedly orange-pill all 6 million citizens of El Salvador.\n\nThen the people of the world.\n\nMission in tow, I left the hospital. I forged down San Salvador’s uneven, rubble-filled sidewalks separating the never-ending jumble of shops and clogged city thoroughfares, approaching anyone and everyone I encountered with my Chivo wallet wielded like an assassin a pistol.\n\nI’ll forever cherish the montage of joy as I planted my seed.\n\nThe two young ladies who scurried away from me when I approached from behind and asked them to take out their Chivo wallets, thinking I was trying to pick them up for hire. But when I sent them an abundance of Sats and insisted there was no catch, they started giggling to themselves like I was the most handsome man in the world and I was flirting with them, laughing at the absurdity of how much Bitcoin they now possessed. I could tell they were champing at the bit to give me kisses on the cheek, which I gladly accepted, one on either cheek.\n\nThe convenience store proprietor, whose shop was housed in the tiniest little thatched roof structure. After I quelled his inquiries as to why I didn’t want to buy any store items and went through the rigamarole of sending him a boatload of Sats, he gave me a handshake so firm I thought he was going to yank it off. That handshake turned into a vivacious bear hug, his jumping-and my lifting him-up onto the counter in order for us both to give more oomph into the embrace.\n\nThe elderly lady in a shawl, stabbing the concrete with her cane to run and catch the bus pulling up down the block. I could tell she probably wasn’t going to make it so I hijacked her path and told her to take out her Chivo wallet, prompting her through the downloading process before sending her a glorious-many Sats. She muttered to herself as she looked at her phone through her cataracts, then began yelling at me.\n\nAt first I thought she was angry I made her miss the bus, but then I realized her cataclysmic fervor was because she could not contain her furious excitement for the whopping gift I’d given her.\n\nOff she went, screeching to the heavens to thank God for her sudden prosperity as she motored down the block in the direction the bus went, suddenly healed of her mobile impairments, in a hurry to inform her grandkids about what she’d be devoting the final phase of her life to and initiating a new generation of Bitcoiners in the process.\n\nThese extreme displays of jubilation were not because I was giving the people of El Salvador free money, but because I was freeing them from the shackles of FIAT slavery.\n\nThat’s not to say they had nothing to be euphoric about.\n\nAfter the excessive sum of Bitcoin I gave the father, I tried my hardest to decrease the number of Sats I was dishing out to each person. Not because I needed to conserve Sats, of course-my well could never run dry, despite the one or two bad shitcoin bets I may have made in my day-but because I didn’t want to turn El Salvador into a complacent, jobless nation.\n\nAn all too real possibility with the amount of Bitcoin I could unleash unto its people.\n\nBut like the little devil I am, the amount of Bitcoin I gave with each gift edged dangerously close to the amount I gave the father.\n\nI couldn’t help it. I was simply addicted to changing lives. The feeling fueled me better than any carbohydrates or proteins or Omega-3 fatty acids. Sweat caked onto my shirt as I ambled down the endless strip mall that is the city of San Salvador.\n\n“Hey hey hey!” I’d yell to every single Salvadoran whose path I crossed, waving my cell phone in the air and hitting them with a quick “Chivo wallet, por favor?” to pique their interest just enough to open their Chivo apps.\n\nBefore they even knew what was going on, they were stinkin’ filthy-Bitcoin-rich, their hearts gaping open as well.\n\nI was a heat-seeking missile for warm Salvadoran bodies. Hijacking street hawkers’ clientele. Jaywalking through traffic to flag down cars, urging them to pull over to fuel up on my Sats. Ambling into places of business, orange-pilling the shoppers in a four-story mall, the entire staff and customers at a KFC, twice, on two different junctures in my roundabout journey, and all of those working out at a gym, forcing all those sweaty gymgoers to take out their headphones and receive my Sats.\n\nI was driven freaking mad by the opportunity cost of all the Salvadorans I couldn’t touch with my Bitcoin if I didn’t rush through each transaction and erratically skirt ahead, back peddle, sidestep to catch every single person who entered within a 20-foot radius of my being, and hustle from one pocket of sidewalk-loiterers to the next by gallivanting down promenades, encircling roundabouts, and sprinting over pedestrian overpasses.\n\nThe San Salvador Volcano appearing and vanishing based on my meandering path.\n\nWhich ultimately led me to the Centro Mercado. The main central market of empresas and negocios in all of El Salvador.\n\nFor hundreds of yards leading straight to the San Salvador Cathedral, its rotunda and belfries jutting into the sky, Salvadorans filled every inch of my periphery. Vendors sold their ware and shoppers meandered in and about a labyrinth of interconnected thatched-roof shops and street stalls. A collage of graphic tees and blouses and off-brand jeans were displayed on mannequins and hung from umbrellas and thatched roofs. IPods and headphones and beach balls rested on tables next to cigarettes and vegetables and buckets of horchata. Hawkers pushed wheelbarrows filled with fruit and lugged piles of thick woolen garments over their shoulders. Bullhorns blared out deals, tangled telephone wires sprang out in a zillion directions, and old Pizza Hut and Samsung signs collected dust on the brick-and-mortar edifices into the depths of the market.\n\nSmoke from a grill mixed with the ubiquitous lung-choking dust and visible heat waves to create a mirage.\n\nThousands of wayward, FIAT-obsessed souls, desperate to be saved.\n\nI was the one charged with the task of bringing them to salvation by Satoshi himself.\n\nI knew at once that He was responsible for my benevolence. He was the force that guided me to the bustling market, just as he led me to that struggling family earlier that morning and to every single Salvadoran I had given Bitcoin to throughout the day.\n\nI was channeling His spirit to orange-pill the chosen people of El Salvador and save them from the impending FIAT inflation Holocaust.\n\nFittingly, one of my first disciples was Juan.\n\n“If Satoshi’s God, then I’m Bitcoin Jesus,” I said under my breath, prompting an inquiry of “qué?” from a nearby bystander.\n\n“Chivo wallet?” I responded casually. She played ball, and I sent her a laughable sum of Bitcoin.\n\nFrom her, word of my divine presence spread through the market.\n\nWithin seconds, it was an artillery attack from all angles. A fray of all frays. A cascade of hundreds, if not thousands, of Salvadoran bodies converging into my personal space, pining for my bountiful free Sats.\n\nThe cathedral receding from view as the crowd engulfed me.\n\nI became reactive, sending indiscriminate sums of Bitcoin to any Chivo wallet that entered my airspace like they were toll-free text messages, barely registering the faces of the people they belonged to. Phones rammed onto my forehead, limbs jabbed into my stomach, and frazzled Spanish dialogue rushed into my ear drum (“caballero, caballero, por favor!”). The masses glommed onto me like lipids onto a fat man’s ribs, making it difficult to wield my phone to interested parties.\n\n“Ok, ok-not to worry, there’s PLENTY of Bitcoin to go around!” I ensured those rambunctious souls.\n\nNot even ten minutes elapsed when I had to reload on ammo and send more Bitcoin from my cold wallet to my hot wallet. I held both items above the jumble of wrists and hands and cell phones to go through the process.\n\nWhat I saw as I did so was astounding. Trust me when I ascertain that every single Salvadoran at the entire freaking market had put their shopping on hold to be orange-pilled by me, the Belgian, Bitcoin Jesus incarnate.\n\nIt was Bitcoin’s Woodstock moment; a sea of Salvadorans, lined up hundreds deep in every cardinal direction. They all, every single one of them, had their phones out in front of them, Chivo wallet apps clicked on, in a Bitcoin-receiving-trance. Every single flippin’ face was turned towards me and firmly away from the market stalls, the piles of physical, American-dollar-priced junk becoming suddenly unimportant to the free digital gold up for grabs. They pointed and conversed about the spectacle as they jockeyed to get close to me, the effect being a vast, shifting amoeba of soon-to-be Bitcoiners.\n\nAs I gritted my teeth and geared up to weather the Sat-stacking bonanza I had provoked, I felt utterly, completely, titillatingly aroused.\n\nI had done it. I found my happy place. Surrounded by thousands of my best friends. Bringing them all into Bitcoin’s exuberant light by shedding my excess means, redistributing the global wealth paradigm in the process.\n\nI could forever rest easy, knowing that everything else in my life would be gravy from then on out.\n\nKnowing too that as word spread from the market to the rest of the city, nation, Central-American region, and then the world at large, it would be eons before worthy souls stopped showing up in droves to pay their respects to Satoshi by taking hearty sips from my bottomless well of digital gold.\n\nAnd I pledged to stay at the market until there was a ten-minute gap between noble solicitations of my Sats. Which I knew would take me through the rest of my waking days on Earth.\n\nIn other words, the market was now my home.\n\n“Pulsera?”\n\nSuddenly, ten indigenously designed bracelets wrapped around a lanyard were being shoved into my chin.\n\nThe bracelets belonged to a smiling and eager Salvadoran man no older than 25 and no taller than 5–6, wearing a neon-orange tank top with the words “Party Animal” on it. He had used his meager size to maneuver through the crowd and implant himself firmly in front of me, the restless crowd nudging him into my front torso.\n\n“No no, my friend. Bitcoin!”\n\n“Ahhhh-Beetcoin!?!”\n\nAt once, the bracelet seller was off so quickly on a Spanish tangent that it felt like I had been inserted into the middle of an hours-long conversation, even though I didn’t understand a word of what he was saying due to the language barrier and ruckus of the market.\n\nI intended to tune him out, frankly, just assumed he was making a sales pitch for his bracelets. Nonetheless he gestured wildly and grabbed my arm to ensure I was listening, all the while 6 Chivo wallets created a Muybridge film across my peripheral view.\n\n“That is great-wonderful,” I said passively, fending off the bracelet seller as I continued to zap massive batches of Bitcoin through the lightning network.\n\n“…no solo Beetcoin, amigo-Dog coin, Shiba coin, NFTs-todos los creeptos!”\n\n“What the fuck did you just say?”\n\nI jerked my head just as I was sending Sats to a nice old lady, hanging my phone over her’s mid-send, to see the bracelet seller was now holding out his phone.\n\nI stabilized my vision and realized he was presenting me not his Chivo wallet but his Binance trading account.\n\nHis portfolio containing a vomitous medley of over 15 shitcoins.\n\nCommon offenders like Ethereum, Dogecoin and Shiba Inu Coin, as well as ones I had never heard of.\n\n“Shitcoins? You’re buying SHITCOINS? The currency of the DEVIL?”\n\nHe nodded and grinned, letting out a sigh of relief that I understood him.\n\n“Síííí!”\n\n“My friend, that is bullshit. BULLSHIT!”\n\nHis husky-like exuberance vanished as he registered my displeasure, his affable tone becoming defensive as he tried to explain himself in Spanish.\n\n“What? Qué?”\n\nThe Shitcoiner cursed under his breath, frustrated by the language barrier and that he was being jostled to and fro by the ever-increasing crowd in our midst.\n\n“Señor, señor-mire.”\n\nHe held his right hand up by his head.\n\n“Here, I buy.”\n\nThe Shitcoiner rocketed his hand upwards, slowly, on a diagonal.\n\n“Keep, keep, keep…”\n\nAs the Shitcoiner’s hand neared his head, he curved it downwards, ever so slightly.\n\n“En el momento que baja,” he said, pointing his hand down to indicate the nature of baja, “I sell.”\n\n“But my friend-”\n\nThe Shitcoiner grabbed my arm.\n\n“En el MOMENTO que baja. En el momento.”\n\nI opened my mouth to rebuttal but found the Shitcoiner’s confidence prevented me from remembering one of the stock responses Michael Saylor uses to combat a shitcoiner’s stupidity.\n\nWith the prolonged gap in conversation, the Shitcoiner began conversing in Spanish with one of the Salvadorans from the crowd.\n\n“Don’t talk to that idiot!” I shouted, jockeying my body to isolate the Shitcoiner from the others waiting patiently and acting in good faith to receive my Bitcoin.\n\nWhen he continued blabbering to them with his shitcoining gibberish, sticking out his phone with the Dogecoin 6-month pulled up to support whatever nonsensical point he was trying to make, I took a step towards him like he was a rabid predator and yelled “SCRAM!”\n\nHe jolted back, muttered something under his breath in Spanish, before slithering back out through the crowd and out of my life.\n\nAn immediate and intense wave of nausea washed over me, just as a thunderous cloud formed over the market.\n\nIt all happened so quickly.\n\nOne minute, I was turning the market into a magical Bitcoin emporium. The next, a Salvadoran shitcoiner had established himself as my mortal enemy. I couldn’t fathom how or why the message coming from the Bitcoin heavens was being misinterpreted without my control.\n\nShitcoining is a sickness, and I feared a nationwide pandemic was spreading.\n\nI wanted to hijack one of the bullhorns and inform the people of the market that every other cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin is a scam.\n\nBetter yet: I wanted to blast the notice to the entire nation in an emergency news bulletin via cell phone push notifications and a television broadcast interruption.\n\nBut then I looked into the eyes of all the Salvadorans still clamoring for my Bitcoin. They were desperate for their sins to be forgiven by stacking Sats. So I continued to oblige them.\n\nTwo of my new disciples proceeded to hoist me onto their shoulders to honor my heroics. Mothers and sons and brothers and sisters reached up to present their QR codes as I was paraded down the market, and I continued honoring their solicitations.\n\nThat’s when I saw that the Shitcoiner had returned.\n\nHe commanded a crowd twenty paces behind and to the side of where I was being carried. It was roughly twenty-five minutes after he departed my presence earlier.\n\nJust enough time for him to run to an ATM and return to ruin my life.\n\nFrom my vantage point, I could discern he was holding out a few bills of wretched-green-American dollars to a man in a soccer jersey, who hovered his cell phone over the Shitcoiner’s in an all too familiar manner.\n\nMy body worked quicker than my brain could fully register what was transpiring. I shouted through the racket and tapped on one of the hands lifting me up from my buttocks to signal to those holding me to let me down. They listened, and the second my feet hit the pavement I began pushing and scraping through the bodies walking with my cavalcade, then those in the second crowd, the friction quickly depositing me face-to-face with the Shitcoiner.\n\nHe turned and noticed me as he held out more American dollars to another man in the scrum.\n\n“Ah-hola, amigo!”\n\nI didn’t respond, spat to the side but in his general direction, sizing him up as the crowd encircled us like they were watching a classic western standoff.\n\nI quickly scanned the faces of the Salvadorans gathered, positive that many of them were beneficiaries of my goodwill and fortune just moments ago.\n\n“Mi amigo,” I said, turning back to the Shitcoiner while keeping my gaze canted down and away from him for dramatic effect. “What the fuck is going on here?”\n\nAnd the Shitcoiner was off again, rambling in Spanish to defend his actions.\n\n“Hey hey-you fucking shitcoiner-can you speak English?”\n\nThe man in the soccer jersey stepped forth from the crowd to translate.\n\n“Basically, we sell to him Beetcoin, and he gives us effectivo,” he said in a tone that signaled his complete lack of empathy for how I’d feel that he was simply discarding the Bitcoin I had graciously gifted him for paper waste.\n\nI looked over at the Shitcoiner, smiling in innocent oblivion, and filled in the rest of the story.\n\nHe was coercing those innocent Salvadorans out of the Bitcoin I had just gifted them in order to fund his nasty shitcoining habit.\n\nMy already sweaty, sunburned face burned a marooner shade of red as I made eye contact with the Shitcoiner and he stepped forward into my personal space.\n\n“Amigo, mire-”\n\n“I’m not your fucking amigo, amigo!”\n\nIn one fell swoop, I grabbed hold of the Shitcoiner’s tank top, lifted his meager frame up and dog-walked him backward.\n\n“Give these innocent people back their Bitcoin, you fucking criminal!” I snarled, shaking him like a rag doll, spittle landing on his face from my rabid state.\n\nThere was the requisite shouting and hoopla in response to the foreigner assaulting the local. A few of the spectators grabbed my waist and shoulders to try and rip me off the Shitcoiner, but I maintained control over his bodily function just long enough to make a last-ditched attempt to rescue the Bitcoin he had pilfered by grabbing for his cell phone, frustrated that I was helping those restricting my efforts.\n\nMy wrist was seized by one of the bystanders before I could do so, as another two successfully peeled me off the Shitcoiner and paralyzed me in their grips.\n\nI squirmed and gyrated, attempting to shed myself free as they pulled my limbs every which way to restrain me.\n\n“Let go, let go, ok, I’m sorry, lo siento!”\n\nForgoing any control over my fate, my mind raced with the nightmare of rotting away in a Salvadoran prison before getting nailed to the stake, a martyr for my firmly held, correct beliefs about the future of our worldwide financial monetary systems.\n\nMy preposterous Bitcoin fortune to forever collect digital dust.\n\n“Señor…”\n\nA meek voice cut through the hysteria.\n\nIt was the Shitcoiner’s. He presented himself before us, pausing the scrapping and tussling with his wide, unbothered smile. He said something in Spanish to my captors, and suddenly I was free.\n\nWanting to chat, he led me away from the stunned crowd, stopping next to a dirty puddle and before a lady selling women’s shoes.\n\n“Mi amigo,” the Shitcoiner started. “Beetcoin baja.”\n\nMy eyes rolled into the folds of my brain.\n\n“No, no, you have it all wrong. It’s a deflationary asset, it has to go up. Always has, always will.”\n\n“No, no-señor-”\n\n“Has to. There are only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoins, ever-meanwhile, the US printed over 200 billion one-dollar bills this year than they did last-talk to me in ten years when inflation is high as a kite and people are flocking to Bitcoin like Syrian refugees to Scandinavian state housing!”\n\n“Señor,” the Shitcoiner said, sighing. “Mire. I give to them less en effectivo,” he said as he reached out with both hands to an imaginary business partner, “and they give me more, en Beetcoin,” he said, taking his end of the deal back into his hands.\n\nI now understood why he brought up the fact that Bitcoin was down.\n\nHe was buying Bitcoin from his fellow citizens at a discount. Playing into their American dollar fetishes and recognizing a great deal where they didn’t.\n\nIn the Shitcoiner I suddenly saw my younger self, his simple yet brilliant scheme identical to the ones I pulled in my shitcoining heyday after my stint with Princess.\n\nWhich is why my heart ached for the shitcoining fuckery he was trafficking in. He was fighting a losing battle against forces larger than anything he could ever fully grasp; crypto whales living on Murphy beds in their Mom’s basement, shady venture capitalist-cults-of-personality, Filipino game theorist-wizards.\n\nNovel, gorgeous minds with an uncanny and unteachable knack for causing max pain, like my very own.\n\nBut more than being destined for financial calamity, the Shitcoiner was a man of great intellect and panache, caught up in a practice of shame and dishonor.\n\nA life of shitcoining is no life at all. I knew that from my own lived experience.\n\nI needed to save him from self-destruction. And the only way out was through.\n\n“Mi amigo-have you ever heard of ASS Coin?”\n\n“Qué?”\n\n“ASS Coin,” I repeated, making a fart noise and crop-dusting an imaginary fart from my ass.\n\nWe looked at each other for a long moment before we burst out laughing in unison.\n\nI was still crafting the mechanics of my plot as I took out my phone and showed the Shitcoiner the graph for ASS. It was priced at fractions of a penny, the curve fluctuating up and down at random like any other volatile shitcoin.\n\nI whistled and furrowed my eyebrows.\n\n“A la luna!”\n\nThe Shitcoiner continued looking at the graph, muttering under his breath in Spanish as he evaluated my alpha, before pulling out his phone to analyze the asset for himself.\n\nOn the spot, on the Binance app on my phone, I converted an amount of Bitcoin into ASS that I will never, ever be able to live down.\n\n“Look,” I said, showing the Shitcoiner the balance on my phone.\n\nHe gasped, literally putting his hand over his mouth.\n\n“Hermano-es todo para…ASS Coin?”\n\n“Sí!”\n\n“Dinero-Ass?” he asked, drawing the dollar sign in the air.\n\n“Sí, amigo-es el futuro. Nuevo Dogecoin!”\n\nAnd I was right. It was going to be the next Dogecoin because I was going to make it that by pumping it there.\n\nThen dumping it down into the depths of hell.\n\nFor some habits just never, fully die.\n\n…………………\n\nThe bus I caught was the #102. A long, teal, hundred-plus seater. I was bound back for El Zonte, finding the only open seat against the window next to a leathery-skinned laborer.\n\nEarlier, I tried calling Juan to pick me up.\n\nHe didn’t answer. I chalked it up to his being busy traversing the country, distributing the Sats I gave him and spreading the gospel of Satoshi per my instruction.\n\nBut as we made it out of San Salvador, I could have sworn I saw him enjoying a ribeye and a glass of red on the patio of a fancy restaurant outside a mall.\n\nMy resolve was shot from the events of the day, and I tried to convince myself I was seeing things.\n\nThankfully, as we made it back onto the highway, out through the front window towards the Pacific, the sky was painted in a gentle orange hue from the setting sun.\n\n“Would you look at that? A Bitcoin sun,” I said, turning to the laborer.\n\nHe didn’t respond, but it didn’t matter.\n\nIt was a Bitcoin sun. All the perspective I needed as I sent first signals to the several very exclusive alpha groups I was in on Telegram and Discord, informing them that a pump was afoot.\n\nI had been dormant in the groups for years. The feeling of initiating my very own pump and dump harkened me back to Roxana, lying in bed, pleading in vain for me to join her and make love while I grinded to manipulate the price action on early shitcoins like Turtlecoin and Jell-o-cash.\n\nRight there on that rickety bus under the cloak of darkness, I transferred hordes of Bitcoin from my cold wallet to my Binance trading account.\n\nAll of which would momentarily be converted to a coin called Ass.\n\nI looked over at the laborer once more and could tell by the way he scrunched his face into a subtle smile and nodded that he could sense my pain in scratching old wounds.\n\nThat’s when I knew I needed a palate cleanser.\n\n“Chivo wallet?”\n\nHe took the hint, opened his Chivo app, and I zapped him many Sats.\n\nThey were the lucky ones, those Sats. Pardoned from being converted to ASS Coin and sent to the gates of shitcoining hell.\n\nA simple nod and “gracias, señor” under his breath was all I needed to keep going. I got up from my seat and quickly commenced one last Sat-stacking barrage for good measure. As word of my endeavors spread to the occupants of the 100-person bus, they began converging towards me from the front and back, jockeying back and forth down the aisle for their free Bitcoin while the rickety bus barreled 50 miles per hour down the road.\n\n“Oy!”\n\nThe bus suddenly came to an abrupt stop, causing me to lurch forward and drop my phone and cold wallet to the ground. I grabbed both important items and gained my bearings, looking up through the dark haze to see the bus driver glaring right at me through the rearview.\n\nA lump formed in my throat as he barked at me in Spanish, while staying in his seat and keeping his gaze out the front window.\n\nImpulsively, I floated down the aisle.\n\n“Señor-solo es para Bitcoin!” I said as I approached the front of the bus, keeping my tone as cartoonishly friendly as I could muster. “Tu chivo wallet, por favor?” I asked him as I held out my phone.\n\nBut as I got within arms length of the driver, he shot up off his seat and grabbed my wrist. Before I even realized what was happening, he opened the door, led me off the bus and deposited me onto the pavement.\n\n“Señor-es could be tu!” I pleaded as I furiously waved my phone into the air.\n\nBut he ignored me, angrily chastising me once more before he began mounting the bus.\n\n“Señor,” I croaked. “Tu Chivo wallet…”\n\nWith his right foot on the top step, left on the bottom, hands ready to hoist his whole body upwards, he paused.\n\nThe power of Satoshi compelling him.\n\nHelping him recognize that there existed an escape hatch to his close-minded, FIAT-controlled existence. A better way of conducting empresas on his bus without relying on a whorish bank as an intermediary.\n\n“Chivo wallet…”\n\nAfter a whole minute, the driver bounded back down the steps, displaying to me his phone with the bright blue Chivo wallet app piercing through the darkness.\n\nI quickly sent him a glorious batch of Sats. More even than I had given the father and Juan, caught up in all the tumultuous emotions of the moment.\n\nHe muttered uncontrollably under his breath, talking in tongues as he stared at his phone.\n\nThen, he shrieked to the heavens and wandered into the dying Bitcoin sun.\n\n“Oh, fucking…ass!” I said, slapping my face, immediately regretful at what I had caused.\n\nI watched from the street through the window as passengers began craning their necks to see their captain abandoning ship. One by one, they trickled off the bus. Some were already on the phone to call loved ones for rides, while others simply began hiking it down the street.\n\nFilled with remorse but knowing how much work I had to do, I, too, set off down the street, in the opposite direction of where the bus was going and thus where the majority of the passengers were migrating, realizing that it was the same La Libertad thoroughfare where my day started.\n\nI found an upturned rock off the side of the road with a perfect perch to sit, shrouded from the road by a canopy of trees.\n\nI transferred some more Bitcoin to my phone, then sent the final signal to my alpha groups to commence the pump.\n\nAnd then I was off.\n\nQuick bursts of un-Godly amounts of cash infused into the dumbest shitcoin known to man.\n\nIt was slow uptick at first. But as I continued abusing the ASS chart with my Sats, up and up the price of ASS climbed.\n\nJust to ensure he was paying attention, I sent the Shitcoiner a WhatsApp message, the two of us having exchanged contact info earlier.\n\n“Mi amigo-mire a ASS 👀👀”\n\nSeconds later, the Shitcoiner responded:\n\n“Wow 📈 📈 ”\n\nI chuckled to myself like a Bond villain and kept buying more ASS, hollering to the moon as I bent the world to my will, tasting blood as I pictured the Shitcoiner unloading all of his stolen Bitcoin into the dumb fucking coin.\n\nNo day trader or shitcoiner on Earth would have quick enough wits to unload their ASS before me and my army of pumpers gloriously pulled the rug on it and sucked 99% of its value in a matter of milliseconds, while I recovered the Shitcoiner’s stolen Bitcoin, temporarily in the form of ASS Coin, soon to be converted safely back to Bitcoin, along with the millions from all the other loser shitcoiners who fell for my quick and oh-so-easy scheme.\n\nThe plan to give all the profits back to my country.\n\nIt would be the most aggressive and direct form of effective altruism possible. With my added riches, I’d be able to open hospitals, fund schools, and build infrastructure to ensure El Salvador became the thriving Bitcoin metropolis it deserves to be.\n\nI made a few more purchases of ASS, then I toggled to the sell button.\n\nBut as I clicked the screen, it froze.\n\nOn it came the spinning circle of death. Then, total darkness.\n\n“Gahh! ASS!” I screeched as I shot up from the rock, pressing the power button repeatedly to no avail. Dolling out SATs to thousands of Salvadorans all day had run my battery dry.\n\nImpulsively, I ran down the street, waving frantically at the oncoming traffic.\n\nBut the Bitcoin sun had given way to total darkness, making it difficult for cars to see me on the side of the road. Glaring lights came crashing around the bend, only after they passed was I even able to discern if they were cars or motorcycles.\n\nI flailed and flailed but my efforts were fruitless. Images of what was transpiring with the price of ASS played over and over in my head. It was only a matter of time before the pump would turn into a dump.\n\nMy riches worth of ASS, minutes ago resting safely in Bitcoin, soon to be worth nothing.\n\nIt wasn’t the loss for my own sake that shook me. The Sats on my cold wallet are ever-eternal.\n\nIt was the volcanos that lost Bitcoin could have moved. The number of Salvadoran souls I could have brought to salvation.\n\nRight there on the side of the street, I wept. The tears picked up the dried molecules I cried earlier that morning for the young chico, shimmering from the lights of cars and motorcycles at brief intervals.\n\nI had tried to test the fates and play God and failed.\n\nFor there is no God. That’s why Satoshi gave us Bitcoin."
}