Cryptocurrency Drama (The Final Act)

At last you can read the spellbinding conclusion to this epic saga!

Big request: at the moment Twitter - in their infinite wisdom - have locked me out of my account for the FOURTH time. No Twitter, I'm STILL not a bot! They don't like the fact that I refuse to give them my phone number. If you're reading this, then please share a link on Twitter for me - I am currently unable to promote this post myself.

Just a reminder that I will publish this entire play as one BIG post in the near future.

For now, here are parts 1 - 3 in case you missed them. I hope that you've enjoyed this series. Let me know if you'd like to see another one in the future:

ACT 3

Scene 1

Bit Brain waves a defeated goodbye to Ernie as he leaves the store. He walks straight across the dusty road and into the building directly opposite.

Bit Brain opens the door and a little bell rings to announces his entrance.

NED
Welcome to Ned’s Excellent Offers! My name is Ned, how may I help you today?

Bit Brain turns slowly to his left to face Ned behind the counter. He takes in his surroundings as he does so. The store has a fair amount of people in it, but nothing like the one across the road. Most of the people here appear to be of Eastern descent.

BB
How do you do Ned! People call me Bit brain. I’m looking for another place to shop, my CPU no longer works at the store across the road. Sorry that I don’t have much money to spend, I just want to pick up a few things, preferably cheap items that may gain value over time.

NED
Ah yes, I understand. You are not the first person to come in here with a story like that. I’m afraid that the CPU system of the store across the road has caused similar problems for many people. I'm scared that they may already have gone too far, that they may already have blocked one too many people from their shopping network.

BB
Blocked ONE too many, they’ve blocked thousands!

NED
Ha ha ha! It sounds like you know the full story then! Yes, they have. For the last week we have seen many angry faces leave that store empty-handed, each one of them blocked from the system by the CPU requirements. My friend Erik and I have watched them through our store-front windows. Whenever we see such a person, we say “oh not again, they've blocked another one!” Amongst ourselves we’ve started calling their store “the Blocked One”.

BB
That must be good for you in terms of increased business?

NED
I suppose it is, in the long-term. But it’s still sad, not something we like to see. I don’t think that pioneering frontier businesses should be run that way. It’s certainly not how we run! They may be our competition, but that doesn’t mean that we enjoy watching them fail.

BB
How do you run things here?

NED
Why, our store is free to use of course! Unlike some others, there are no tall barriers to entry for our customers.
Obviously you still pay for the items you buy, but we don’t charge you any transaction fees for that. In fact, our credit system is practically unique in that there are no transaction fees on our main line of products.

BB
I don’t get it, why isn’t your store busier than theirs?

NED
For few reasons I guess. For one, we are not originally from around here.

BB
Well none of us are, we all came to the frontier from back East.

NED
True, but our tribe came from much further East, we came from very far East. My people are called “the Eastese”. We look a little different to the locals and our traditional culture is not like the culture here.

BB
Please don’t play the racism card, that card is so tired and over-used!

NED
Don’t worry, that’s not what I was implying. We don’t have problems with racism here, we just have problems with people stuck in their comfort zones. You see Mr Brain, people like to stick to what is familiar to them. The locals here are attracted to people such as the Director of Automated Networks at “the Blocked One”, because they all originally came from the same place. When he makes mistakes, they choose to follow him blindly rather than to hold him accountable. Combined with a significant amount of denial, they are greatly hamstringing themselves by taking that approach.

BB
That’s just what I told them!

NED
There are a great many people around here who do not believe that I am capable of competing with the Blocked One, though their reasoning is largely grounded in some form of biased familiarity - a logical fallacy - but a powerful one nonetheless.

It’s ironic because, and please excuse me if this sounds boastful, back in my homeland, Ned’s Excellent Offers is the biggest name in frontier businesses!

Sadly our Eastern frontier was a very harsh place, even worse than here. We also fled into the wilderness, but government forces caught up to us and forced us to turn back and play by their rules.

BB
Oh no, that’s terrible!

NED
Well yes, and no.

They learnt that we were not going away, and we learnt how to get along with them. At first they were incredibly hostile towards our ideas, banning many of them outright, but since then they have made much progress, frustratingly slowly at first, but now the pace is finally picking up.

BB
Couldn’t you just have fled again and run even faster and further East to escape the clutches of your government?

NED
I suppose we could have kept on running, but I also realised that this was a battle we would one day have to fight. What I then did was to work with my government, advising them on frontier businesses so that they could establish policies which worked for all of us. My country is highly conservative, so it has had to implement those policies bit by bit so as not to upset the older conservatives, but things are changing fast now!

I built Ned’s Excellent Offers with government policies in mind, so that I would make it fully compliant. I could have run, but why run when you no longer need to? The government back in Eastenia is now even becoming supportive of BTC, previously that would have been unheard of!

Best of all, and something the people over here tend to ignore, is that Eastese population back home outnumbers the locals here in the West by far! Our average wealth is considerably lower, but that is rapidly changing as our economy develops. Us Eastese are a growing force of significant magnitude, something which often goes unnoticed, or also just gets denied.

BB
Your store, I can’t help notice that the variety of goods here is not nearly as great as at the Blocked One.

NED
There is no hiding that, you are correct. Our policy here is to stock high-quality goods. It means that we have had a slow start, but I believe that it is the correct approach and will pay future dividends. We charge our suppliers a substantial fee to place their goods on our shelves. This ensures that the fly-by-night merchants with low quality goods do not approach us to sell their wares.

BB
That could be a problem, I know a man who wants to start a District Apothecary service, I was hoping he could run his DApp as part of your store network.

NED
Give me his details. I have a growth fund which exists to help such businesses. We can help him create it and offer him substantial funding if necessary. We place great importance on growing our own little economy, that is the smart thing to do. Here at Ned’s Excellent Offers we like to act as the hub of a “smart economy”.

BB
That sounds great Ned, I’m very excited to have found you guys. Looking at the facts - free of emotion and bias - it seems to me as if you guys are indeed where the smart money is.

NED
I can not say for sure, but we would like to think so. It pains me to see people blindly follow something which isn’t working properly. Follow it, sure, but then don’t be shy to complain about it if it is failing you!

You know, we all make mistakes, even us “smart economy guys”! Back in October we tried to start a small zoo. We arranged for a few different types of Eastenian animals to be transported here. The one consignment was a large group of yaks. They were shipped in big wooden crates marked “YEZ” - Yaks of the Eastenian Zoo. Unfortunately there was a problem with our delivery process. The crates were much bigger than we anticipated and they started blocking up all our storage space and transport pathways. We lacked the transport capability to deal with all of them and they were coming in faster than we could carry them away.

We had rigged a system of large cranes designed to swing the YEZ crates over our buildings and to drop them gently out of the air onto the waiting transport carts. Unfortunately we forgot that we can only process so many “air drops” at a time, after that our network gets too busy, much like the people in “suggestion mode” over at the Blocked One.

But unlike them we admitted that we had a problem. Our distribution network did behave as expected, it did what it was designed to do, but we still saw it as a problem. We have looked at how we might prevent this in the future, because we don’t want such problems again! This may mean that we have to charge a very small amount for future transactions, but we are not going to a CPU system, we will keep it very cheap. We already have a logistics system which is Greater than Archaic Systems - we call it “GAS”. GAS can be used to create cheap priority transactions without bottle-necking our distribution channels, especially once we revamp our own store into Ned’s Excellent Offers Version 3.0 next year!

BB
Well Ned that does sound better than what the Blocked One is doing. I still find it hard to believe that so many supporters of that store fail to criticise it when it does wrong. I believe that creating sacred cows is very dangerous. It’s not as if the Blocked One even has a wealth of great products on their shelves, if you look closely, most of them are either fairly simple games or some type of casino equipment.

NED
That’s also true, remember what I told you about us having a policy of fewer but higher quality products?

By the way, did you ever visit Alan’s Document Archive on the far side of town?

BB
No, I don’t believe I did.

NED
Well you aren’t missing much, there is practically nothing there. His building remains “under construction” even though it’s been years since the foundations were first laid.

Alan’s Document Archive doesn’t have any documents archived in it!

*Ned looks upwards, thinks for a few seconds, and then carries on speaking*

Well, that’s not entirely true. He does have one small document there. It’s yellowing with age now, but he still refers to it as his “whitepaper”, it’s kept under the otherwise empty front counter. Alan stands there each day, telling people how great his store will be - one day. Construction does take place, but he’s now way behind the rest of us!

BB
How does his business survive, where does he get the money from?

NED
That’s the sad thing, it’s the same sort of bias we spoke about earlier. You see, the nasty reality is that Alan’s Document Archives is valued at more than what Ned’s Excellent Offers is!

BB
You have got to be kidding me!

NED
No I swear to you! Look, we all pop in to say “hi” to Alan on a regular basis, he’s a genuinely nice guy and he tries hard. It’s not his fault that he has had issues with some of his business co-founders, that was just unfortunate. Alan also struggles to take charge of his construction team, they make him promises, he makes his investors promises, and then the construction team somehow gets behind. Over and over again. Alan gets terribly excited about his grand ideas, but we rarely see anything come to fruition.

One would think that at some stage his investors would start backing out, but they don’t. Some say that it’s because he once organised an event where he took all the investors down to the dam just outside of town. They sat on the pier together and he read them his whitepaper. For reasons I can’t understand, the investors walked away very impressed by that “pier review” process. Basically all that means is that a bunch of like-minded people agreed with Alan. To me that really doesn’t mean much.

At the moment everybody is just talking about how great Alan’s Document Archive will be once his wife Shelley finally arrives to help him. Shelley will no doubt make improvements, but at the end of the day, Alan’s Document Archive remains Alan’s Document Archive.

We know that the whole town took a big knock during the bear rampage, but Alan’s Document Archive is still a lot better off in terms of public support than what I think it should be. The facts are simple: his store has empty shelves and an incomplete building.

Yet it is worth more than mine, go figure! In fact, I’ve just heard that with all the EIDOS trouble at the Blocked One, some people are now suggesting that ADA may be the answer to their troubles! They just don’t learn...

BB
I hear you. Supporting something you believe in is commendable, but how many times will you allow someone to drop you before you cease to enable them? How can you let people make you empty promises and then not even challenge them when they go down the wrong path?

If you are going to allow someone unrestricted free reign, then they will never develop respect for you as an investor. They are going to walk all over you. By doing so you encourage bad behaviour. That’s bad for them, bad for you, and bad for frontier developments as a whole!

NED
You are correct. No outsiders are ever going to take their projects seriously. Just imagine this scenario:

“Can I sign up for CPU?”,

“Sorry ma’am, not today, please come back in a month and bring a lot of cash.”

“What’s the problem?”

“There is no problem. Everything is working as it should.”

“But I can’t get my CPU today?”

“No ma’am. But don’t worry, this is good.”

That’s not how you do business! That much should be obvious, even to a child!

BB
Well thanks for the discussion Ned. It’s been a little depressing, but unexpectedly enlightening. I’ll be seeing you around for sure!

NED
Thanks for stopping by Mr Brain. Why not swing by my next-door neighbour on your way out? His store is called Virtual Entity Traders, it’s growth prospects are starting to look rather good now that the Eastenian government has become so friendly towards BTC and similar projects.

BB
Thanks, Ned, I think I’ll do that.

Final Curtain