Cryptomania

What is government? Was it a machine forged to control people, or a natural progression of civilization? What untamed instincts lay within humans when order vanished?

Harry Parson squinted at his trading screen, the flickering light casting shadows in his dingy Brooklyn apartment. He clung to the charts with a gambler’s hope, convinced that this next trade could be his way out. Lines zigzagged across the screen, whispering promises of success. But as soon as he bought, the market shifted like a cruel trick, and the profits slipped through his fingers.

“Hold on, just a little longer,” he muttered, knuckles white as he clutched the mouse. Greed sank its claws into him, whispering of jackpots—if he could only wait it out. But when his position tanked, regret seized him, tightening like a noose. He slammed his fist on the desk, the echo filling the empty room. How had the charts looked so clear before?

Desperate for an escape, he jumped at the chance for a weekend trip to North Carolina, to an abandoned amusement park called the Land of Oz. As he and his friends arrived, the place seemed surreal: a decaying relic of a past generation’s magic, now a hidden sanctuary for weekend ravers. Harry swallowed the “ticket” handed to him—a paper square with Dorothy’s smiling face—and stepped onto the golden brick road. A strange warmth unfurled in his chest, and the ordinary world began to dissolve.

Colors shifted, shapes warped, and laughter twisted around him like smoke. His friends’ faces blurred, then vanished. Alone now, he stumbled through dark trees that seemed to lean in, their bark contorted into mocking faces. The wind carried the high-pitched cackle of witches, and panic thrummed through him. He ran, skidding over the uneven ground, until a small cabin appeared in the darkness, looking as if it had been tossed there by a tornado.

Inside, a man sat cross-legged on the floor, watching Harry with a serene smile. “Lost?” he asked, voice steady, eyes sharp.

Harry nodded, out of breath, clutching his knees.

“Name’s Sam,” the stranger said, offering a hand. “Let’s get you back on the golden road.”

The words felt like an anchor, something real to hold onto, and together they stepped back into Oz’s psychedelic haze, time bending and flowing around them in strange currents. When Harry finally surfaced from the night’s wild blur, he found himself sprawled on a patch of grass, dawn stretching across the sky. Sam was gone, and Harry was left to wonder if he was just another hallucination.

Back in New York, the charts called to him again, promising one more shot. It was November 2017, and all anyone could talk about was bitcoin. Newspapers screamed predictions: “The next big thing!” “Bitcoin to hit $100,000!” Harry’s mind flashed to Sam, the way he’d spoken about breaking free from control, the allure of a currency without banks, without borders. The excitement swelled, filling him with the thrill of finally hitting his jackpot. He bought in at the peak, sinking everything he had.

But within weeks, the bubble burst. His screen glowed red, his savings erased. Jaw clenched, he stared at the numbers, hands shaking. It was all gone. Desperation gnawed at him, and he thought of North Carolina—the only place he had felt free from the relentless cycle of greed and regret.

This time, Sam was waiting for him, a grin stretching across his face as he leaned against an old van, the side painted with graffiti of binary code. “Back for another trip down the golden road?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

They went through winding roads, talking about bitcoin, the dark web, and the tech god who created a currency free from government chains. Sam, it turned out, was no ordinary IT guy. He spoke of a man named Satoshi Nakamoto with reverence, as if the creator of bitcoin were a prophet. Harry’s fascination grew, fueled by Sam’s tales of miners and coders chasing freedom with every new line of code. It felt like magic—a world beyond charts, beyond Wall Street.

The van became Harry’s classroom, the soft hum of computers replacing the pulse of the stock exchange. But even as he learned, frustration simmered. Days blurred into months, and he watched the market from the van’s cramped quarters, wondering when he would finally strike gold. One sweltering July day, while rummaging for a USB drive, he froze. In his hand was a small drive labeled with a single word: Goldmine.

Curiosity turned to shock as he plugged it in, the screen lighting up with a digital treasure trove—over eleven million bitcoins. He could barely breathe. The jackpot, his long-awaited ticket, had been lying here, hidden.

When Sam returned, Harry was waiting, his face a mask of barely contained rage. “All this time, and you let me scrape by?” The anger built, and in a moment of frenzy, he lashed out. By dawn, Sam was gone, buried in a makeshift grave under the North Carolina sky.

With the van and its contents abandoned at a nearby train station, Harry returned to New York, selling off the bitcoins bit by bit, enough to keep himself comfortable. But shadows haunted him. At night, he dreamed of Sam’s face, his voice whispering of freedom and trust. And then, one day, an investor reached out—someone who knew everything about the Land of Oz, about North Carolina, about Sam.

The sale price was low, but Harry didn’t argue. He was rich, but not free. And his buyer—someone with a controlling stake in bitcoin—had plans beyond Harry’s understanding.

By 2032, cryptocurrencies ruled, and a single global government used bitcoin as its main currency, monitoring every transaction, every vote. Freedom became a distant memory, a dream overshadowed by the omnipresent glow of technology—a world Harry unknowingly helped create.