Bitcoin clowns, p.12
Bitcoin Clowns, page 12
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
“What’s this?!” Axe grabbed my shoulder a bit too tight for it to be pleasant. Dumbo squinted dodgily at me. Behind them, the Salamander guy was basking himself in the hot air blown out from the heater. “Fraccck! Shanghai is so damn cold!”
“Five minutes. I just need to join this one meeting for five minutes and I’ll be right out. Would you three be so kind to wait for me out here quietly in the lobby? — Where’s Candice? Someone give these gentlemen some warm tea!”
“Nahh, no can do!” Salamander turned his attention away from the heater and said. “We go in with you or you’re not going in at all.”
“Okay…I guess we will just go to the vote together then.” Then I turned to Rebecca, who looked a bit uneasy about my company and told her, “Don’t mind them,” and I smiled weakly at her. She was too preoccupied with the voting to counter the proposal.
“Sis, who have you brought in here now?” Simon, wearing his usual smug expression that no one could resist punching, exclaimed in surprise. “Why bring him in? He doesn’t work here anymore!”
“Hi Ted,” I said, ignoring Simon all together as I sat down next to Rebecca. My three chaperones each found themselves a chair somewhere in the conference room and settled themselves in for the meeting. Salamander had taken the seat closest to the heater, near where the typist was sitting. The typist looked up momentarily uneasily from her laptop but lowered her head quickly and stealthily again as if he was Quasimodo looking at humans from the tower.
“Good to see you again, Chief,” Ted replied as politely as his betraying, Judas ass could manage.
“I think we could all recognize the fact that Jong is the founder of PissCoin, and I believe that his opinion here would be very invaluable, especially on such complex and important matter — I know what you think, Simon, but as long as I’m the CSO of Bilious, I have the power to keep him here in the meeting.”
On this, Simon grumbled, then he said, “Let’s not waste any time then. Let’s vote…”
“I would like for Ted to explain to me why the proposal to fork PissCoin before the vote occurs.”
“Regardless of the explanation, there are only three of us here that can vote.”
“Ted, a programmer to a programmer,” I looked at him dead in the eyes and asked, “Tell me why exactly you want to do this? I’m open to being convinced.”
Being given the stage, Ted did not get Simon’s permission before he opened his mouth to talk, just like any nerd who was given the rare occasion to talk about his works of passion would. “After carefully reviewing the specifications of PissCoin and the discussions by our miners on various forums, I have come to the realization that we need to increase the block size for PissCoin in order for it be able to process transaction as quickly as the market seems to demand it, to bring it down from 10 minutes, like Bitcoin, to 2 minutes, that’s the first point.”
“Okay…” I sat ruminating Ted’s first point of improvement. The long block time was a bottleneck for Bitcoin at the moment and no one could deny it. For largely unknown coins like ours, I could not imagine that they would run into the same problem as Bitcoin any time soon, but it could arrive at that point theoretically.
“Secondly, we would change the Proof of Work type from ASIC to GPU mining. Coins that allow GPU mining has a lower barrier to entry to miners. This way we can make sure PissCoins are much better distributed.”
I bit my lips. Another controversial and intractable discussion that plagued the mining community. Both sides had good arguments.
“Why would this be the case?” Rebecca raised the question to Ted. The rest of the people in the room looked incredibly dumbfounded and disinterested.
“We are basically making it easier for people to mine our coins. We need miners, because without miners, no new blocks will be produced and no new coins could be rewarded and distributed, leading potentially to a situation where PissCoins would be abandoned by the market sooner or later after losing most of its value. In order to maintain PissCoin long-term survivability, I think this is for the best.”
“Jong, what do you think?”
PissCoin was not going to be the next Bitcoin, and everyone knew it, but was it correct to not do your homework because you were not your teacher’s favorite student?
“I’m ambivalent about the change,” I said eventually. “Bitcoin uses ASIC mining, Ethereum uses GPU mining. It’s hard to say which one is better. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. All I could say is that Ted is not wrong.”
“And the new version will be relaunched as PI2S-Coin officially, instead of PissCoin, that’s the most important thing,” Simon chimed in to explain the least important detail of the whole upgrade, the name change.
“All right…” Rebecca looked anxiously at me, then back at Simon. “In that case, I will vote ‘yes’.”
“There are only three valid votes that count in this room, and obviously both of Ted and I will vote for it, so this meeting is really just a formality, Rebecca. But nonetheless, I’m glad you are onboard,” Simon stood up and said goodbye to everyone. “I’ve got a snooker game tonight. See y’all later — Ted, come with me!”
Ted shot up his chair on hearing his name, looked apologetically at Rebecca and said, “Have a good evening.”
“Gentlemen,” Axe also jumped up from his seat and grabbed me once again by my shoulder, “Let’s go!”
“Chop chop!” Dumbo said, following the lead of his boss.
Rebecca looked like she had something else to discuss with me, or at least that was my impression. She ought to have run into a lot of problems now that I wasn’t there to man the ship and Ted turned out to be a double-snitch, but I had to hastily say goodbye to her in the conference room and locked ourselves in the computer lab before she could stop us.
Chapter 23: Addresses
“Money here and money gone, sorrow brings the wager on…” I mumbled to myself.
As I had promised earlier, it took me only a few seconds to find out who transferred the funds out of Salamander’s online Bitcoin wallet on the Blockchain Explorer.
The essence of cryptocurrency transaction was that every transaction was recorded clearly on a distributed registry and could be retrieved by anyone. With Salamander’s wallet address (which is in form of a string of characters) I could easily load up the list of transactions in and out of his wallet. There were a few of them, each time in staggering amounts, but the most recent and deadly one was a payout of twenty thousand Bitcoins made to the address, 39vGmc6HE1FMS8ijKXtgrutoDrxtyuCk19, leaving Salamander 0.52BTC to buy a very large pizza, maybe a bottle of brand-name whiskey and drown himself in sorrow.
“Who the fuck is that?” Axe leaned his oily face dangerously close to the computer screen. I moved my swivel chair to knock him out of my comfort zone. “Does your website says who this person is? Is it Philip Zackary? Cao He? Is this person in Shanghai?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. That was also the beauty of cryptocurrency and why criminals loved to use it, ‘cause the coins could not be traced, like actual paper money. A cryptocurrency wallet address had neither the resemblance nor connection to any conventional geometrical information of its owner. Clicking into the receiver’s address though, revealed that while the twenty thousand BTCs from Salamander was not the only payment in, the wallet had not made any transaction out. That meant, this address was the big money pot at the end of the rainbow.
“Brief me what’s the situation now!” Salamander slid himself over on a rolling chair from the other end of the computer lab. I tried to explain in my best English how everything stood as of now, but he did not understand that there was no such thing as a central authority where he could look up the owner of the account that had his money.
“How’d I know you’re not lying to me?!” The sight of his last 0.52BTC on the account displayed in high resolution LED screen agitated him. He pulled out his gun and pointed it at me. “You’ve found my money so quickly and yet you don’t know where it is! Ha! How does that add up? You tell me!”
I looked pleadingly at Axe or Dumbo hoping to get some help but their blank expressions told me I needed to make it my life’s mission to write a book called Cryptocurrency for Dummies, in Chinese, and hand it out for free if I could get out of here alive.
‘Reasoning’ was a suboptimal negotiation strategy when dealing with idiots and we all knew it. The only thing I could do now was to ‘Challenge’.
“You’ve shared your private key with Philip or Cao didn’t you?” I sneered hysterically as hard as I could. No one could stand being derided, especially criminals who thought they were the antonyms of ‘mastermind’. “You just gave it away, didn’t you! All twenty thousand Bitcoins. Hahaha!” Bending over laughing, I slapped my thigh a couple of times for the theatric effect.
“What are you laughing at?!” Salamander got affected by my words and his deadly stance softened. He put his gun down. Axe leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, waiting to hear what I had to say. “What did Max Venture do to me?!”
“No, you tell me what did you do with Max Venture first! I can’t help you without knowing every last detail.”
“ARGGHHH!” Salamander kicked a metal frame rigged with an overflowing of circuit boards and wires that was lying on the ground and I instantly realized that it was a box filled with old GPUs from all sorts of brands. It was heavy and it didn’t move an inch. “Shiiit!” He danced around for a second in pain.
Axe leaned his head towards me and explained his employer’s plight on his behalf, “Look, here’s what I know. The cartel gave Salamander two hundred million USD to launder, and through a series of introduction, your guy Cao He said his company Max Venture’s operation could help him.”
I nodded, trying to stay calm as someone revealed to me the sophistication that Cao, my very own good-for-nothing stock-brokering cousin Cao, could come up with. All these years, I had underestimated him. Money laundering. I would have resigned him as a guy who runs a Chinese Laundry in Chinatown at most.
“That’s all I know,” Axe stopped his story abruptly. I frowned at him. I supposed a kidnapper-for-hire had but the lowest level of clearance in confidential cartel information. “C’mon, find his money and we all get paid, otherwise, none of us are going to see Paula and Jessie again, if you know what I mean,” he whispered those last word under his breath.
It did not matter that he did not know, of course — Max Venture and its partners sold cryptocurrency funds, a highly intransparent investment instrument that was not at all regulated, as Marv’s note reminded me. Putting two and two together, the cartel’s two hundred million dollars were put into one of Max Venture’s fund and converted into shares, which paid out regularly into Bitcoins, until the two hundred million USD became two hundred million worth of Bitcoins that came from legitimate returns from investment. I had watched enough movies to be reasonably well-versed in how these things work, theoretically. As a hacker though, I never believed any of such scheme would truly work. It was only a matter of time that bad-doers would be exposed, provided the right incentive.
“Let me make a call, I’ll be able to check whether Philip Zackary or Cao He have your Bitcoins in their possession.”
“Who are you going to call?”
“The police.”
Once again Salamander’s gun barrel was aiming at my face. Axe ducked away from the line of fire like a spooked cat. I raised my arms to express that I meant them no harm (which was totally not the case if I could only help it).
“You want me to check who took your money. All we need to do is check the accounts of all possible candidates that might have stolen your money, you followed me?”
I continued when there was no answer. “So what we need to do is to get their Bitcoin wallet addresses and cross-check them against the one we’ve gotten — now listen, I know a lieutenant, Lieutenant Wu, a woman, assigned to look into the murder case of Philip Zackary. She has access to all their computers and cell phones and notebooks…I only need to give her a call and we could very likely get the wallet addresses of Philip and Cao. Then we would have an answer to your question in no time. We might even be able to retrieve your money!”
“It’s a good plan,” Axe said.
“Are you out of your mind? The police will then know our presence!”
To my surprise, Axe defended me, “at least there’s progress. I’ll keep an eye on him when he speaks to the woman! He wouldn’t dare say anything unnecessary.”
I nodded.
“No is a No!” Salamander shot a bullet at the pile of old computer towers. One of them started burning up. Dark smokes mushroomed up dangerously closed to the ceiling.
Suddenly, tango music filled the room. Salamander pulled out his phone and answered the call in Spanish. The call seemed important as he walked into the server room and shut the door behind him.
As soon as he was gone, I picked up the can of chemical fire extinguisher by the door and spritzed at the fire, killing it before it could spread and do any real damage. At least none of the Bilious servers were affected, just some stray equipment that shouldn’t have been there.
I took a moment to take a deep breath. My brain was going dead from lack of oxygen going into my blood for holding my breath too long.
“Well, looks like I shouldn’t have insisted that we let you talk to the police,” Axe mused.
“You’re…you’re trying to help me,” I muttered at Axe now his employer was out of earshot.
“You’re quite right.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s no way that guy’s getting his money back,” Axe whispered back an answer that none of us wanted to hear.
“How’d you know?”
“I was there with Salamander when he confronted your business partners. I could tell from his face that the Zackary guy had zero clue what happened to Salamander’s money. I could just tell. He maintained that look of shock and innocence till the very end when Salamander popped him.”
“Geeze…what about my cousin?”
“That joker? He was on his knees crying and begging for us not to kill him. I bet every last dime in my pocket that he would have confessed long ago if he knew anything at all.”
“That means there is no need to cross-check anything!” I scratched my forehead nervously, “Oh my God! Then that leaves me. I’m gonna get killed. Why…why did you help him get to me anyway if you knew none of us have the money?” I shoved him on his chest.
“Well, I thought the Jong I know, the one who outwitted me in Yibin, would have more tricks up his sleeves!” He shoved me back and hissed in frustration. “If Salamander doesn’t get his money, not only do I not get any money for the job, Dumbo and I are probably gonna be thrown into Huangpu River.”
“You’ve a gun right? Just shoot him dead now and we can all just go home. I promise I will not tell anyone that I’ve seen you!” I ignored the fact that actually all of our faces have already been recorded the moment they walked into the building.
“Don’t be so naïve, if Salamander doesn’t kill us, the cartel people will.”
“These cartel people that you kept talking about, who are they?!”
“The Argentinian Tortoise gang. They are the largest suppliers of counterfeited drugs in South America. 90% of the drugs on the market over there are counterfeits. Ever heard of them?” Axe asked. “I thought you wouldn’t have. It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that they only keep people who knew too much alive as long as they are still useful.”
“Why the fuck did you agree to help them then?! This is like suicide!” I hissed at him under my breath. Salamander was still in the room talking to, probably his Argentinian superior, whose face I could already see vividly in my head, one that he probably would like to twist off my neck.
“Just keep this brilliant brain of yours running while we keep him at peace with this new plan of yours to buy us more time, and I’m sure you will eventually figure out a way to find the money back for Salamander,” he suggested. “When there is absolutely no other way, then we take twenty thousand new Bitcoins from somewhere else and gave that to him instead. You said those things don’t have a mark anyway, right? So any twenty thousand of them will do, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but how the fuck do you suppose I could get twenty thousand Bitcoins from? If I have that ability I probably would have already been sipping margaritas with Rhianna-look-alikes in Barbados.”
“Delivery!” Outside of the computer lab, a delivery guy from Elema (China’s Uber Food) shouted at the empty reception desk. We saw the blurry shape of Rebecca through the frosted glass door went over to pick up her dinner from the man.
“Brother Axe, I’m starving! How are you two not hungry yet?!” Dumbo grunted loudly. He had been playing with his fingers ever since he entered the room. The only purpose a person like him served in life was as a distraction from the bitterness of reality. “We’ve been to Shanghai now for ten hours and I haven’t even had a decent meal!”
