“The Shitcoiner”

A short story by Samuel Satoshi

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 howling through the sultry morning air as we careened down the lush coastal road.

I had hijacked the pressure seat from the father, a foot-tapping wreck, who sat in the front and made himself busy by cross-checking my driver’s directions to the hospital.

Where it was and whether it was even a full-fledged hospital I was unsure.

The driver peeled around the winding, undulating bends carved through the thick forest, teetering on the edge of a steep slope of green brush leading down to the pearly blue Pacific. Motorcycles, pickup trucks with laborers in the beds and painted-green American school buses serving as public transit hurtled towards us in the opposite direction. The equatorial sun poked above the canopy of trees and painted the vibrant landscape in all its green glory.

My heart swelled for the beauty of my motherland, just as it yearned for my suffering compatriots.

I led the pregnant Salvadoran and her abuelita in Zen Mediation as the motion jostled us on the plush leather seats, squeezing their hands and letting out a sequence of deep “huuums.” But the pregnant Salvadoran’s cries bellowed to Nicaragua and back again. The abuelita pleaded to “madre mia” directly into my ear.

I needed to offer more than my calming presence and limo service. To tap into the bevy of resources masked by my goofy heir, marked by a crooked-toothed smile and leisure-ready Hawaiian shirt, beige sun hat and Birkenstocks. Resources hidden 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.

“Mi amigo, un segundo?”

I leaned into the front of the car, stabilizing myself on the console while I pulled up the Bitcoin 5-year chart on my phone. I took a long moment to bask in its wonder, smiling like a child at the steeply inclined line shooting straight up like the build-up of a roller coaster.

I stuffed the phone into the father’s face, not letting him go on without this precious asset in his life for a second longer.

“Es magnifico-si?”

“Que es?”

“Bitcoin! El 5-year!” I said, twinkling my eyebrows like a magician and adding a “wow!” to fully communicate the sheer awe he should feel for a digital currency capped at a sharp 21-million-coin supply, and powered by a decentralized public ledger instead of 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!”

“Ok-gracias, señor.”

The father mustered a smile before turning back to the directions on his phone.

Whether he didn’t care about the alpha I was feeding him, or he was simply 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.

I put my phone away and settled in for the drive.

It had been a whirlwind fifteen minutes since I was enjoying a leisurely avocado toast at the Garten, my 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. It’s in the hills overlooking El Zonte that I was on the verge of closing on an open-concept cliffside villa, to be paid for in full with Bitcoin.

With the purchase, I’d be granted citizenship to El Salvador, and my Bitcoin capital gains would be made tax-free. An initiative straight from the desk of Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, leader of the decentralized world.

En route from El Zonte to my local residency lawyer’s office is when I encountered the family gathered around their sputtering pickup truck and burst into action.

We turned from the coastal road inland onto a more developed freeway, where my driver raced 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 replaced that of the herky-jerky pace of the coastal road, so the cacophony and angst continued.

But after a half-hour of agony, the tension in the car eased. A proliferation of pedestrian overpasses, billboards and fast-food restaurants appearing on the highway announced our arrival into the city limits of San Salvador. The driver exited the highway and began stopping and starting and honking in the city traffic, consisting of a mishmash of cars, mopeds, and the huffing and puffing American school buses of varying lengths and color schemes that served as the city’s public transport.

It was my first true tour of the capital of the first Bitcoin nation, having spent all of my time in the country until then in El Zonte. What I saw out the window was a giant American strip mall, the busy city thoroughfares lined with endless rows of boxy office buildings, American fast-food restaurants, banks, malls, and fetid brick-and-mortar and thatched-roof shops.

The city lacked a skyline and any discernable character, but the San Salvador Volcano towered over the city in the East. A reminder of the nation’s stark beauty and volcanic potential. Bukele was already in the process of milking the volcano’s utters to mine Bitcoin, which would revitalize the city in its shadows and the entire nation under its domain.

Which had already taken effect, the hospital shaping out to be a modern and palatial white structure built by Bukele in a matter of months for the pandemic, I’d learn.

We arrived at the entrance nearly an hour after I’d herded the family into my hired car. The pregnant lady was taken into a wheelchair by a nurse and rolled through the zig-zagging corridors, arriving at an open bed in a large room oriented like a military hospital. Another nurse and a doctor joined the cadre, closing the curtain with me inside and dissipating all stress as they willed the wet, screaming baby into the universe.

It was the second most beautiful experience of my life, only trailing the first time I laid eyes on Bitcoin’s open source code.

After some official business, the father received his new child into his arms-a young chico it was communicated to me. The father’s eyes welled, tears about to burst.

“He’s beautiful…”

The father nodded and took another moment to himself before offering out his son for me to hold. I accepted the newborn with glee, rocking in my arms and making googly eyes at what was, at that moment, the youngest, purest soul on Earth.

A perfect canvas.

I handed the baby to a nurse then took my phone out and turned to the father.

“Mi amigo-do you have el Chivo wallet?”

The father gave me a blank stare, non-plussed at my rehashing the Bitcoin runaround. But he lamented nonetheless, taking out his phone and navigating to the Chivo wallet—the government-issued digital wallet app for sending and receiving Bitcoin. He had it because everyone who downloaded it received the 30 US dollars worth of free Bitcoin.

Adrenaline coursed through my veins to my fingertips and down to my marbles as I zapped him a bountiful lumpsum of Bitcoin through the lightning network.

Millions Satoshis—Sats for short, Satadores en español—directly into the father’s good graces and away from the prying eyes and mingers of the IMF, WEF, World Bank, and governments of the world.

The transaction fee costing a few pennies.

“For you and your beautiful family-a gift! How do you say in Spanish…un reglo?”

I handed him his phone back, sensing his confusion as he stared at the balance and didn’t react.

“Es mucho dinero-wow!” I added, tapping on the balance to elicit a reaction.

A whole minute elapsed before the father’s eyes bulged out of his socket.

“Para mi?”

“Para tu familia,” I corrected him, sticking my pointer finger into his left tit, then gesturing to his wife and newborn.

The father looked at his family, then back at his phone, then finally commenced the waterfall of tears. He took hold of my torso and directed his snotty tears into my Hawaiian shirt.

“Gracias, gracias, señor!” he repeated.

“There there, there there,” I sniffled through my tears. “You are now a HODLer, my friend-and a father!”

The father went over to his wife’s bedside and showed her his cell phone. She covered her mouth in shock, then cried her own tears.

The father whispered something into the mother’s ear. She nodded and hugged him and he returned to me.

“Su nombre, señor?”

“My name?”

The father nodded.

“Call me Satoshi!”

The father reached down to pick young baby Satoshi up and show him to the world.

“Mi hijo, se llama, Satoshi!”

I cried and cried, more tears leaving my eyes than when I first laid eyes on Bitcoin’s open source code…

…..

I said my final goodbyes to the young family and met my driver in front of the hospital. He was leaning against the Lincoln Town Car, 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 onto my lawyer’s office.

But a force beyond my comprehension and physicality prevented me from getting in.

Instead I shut the door and asked the driver to take out his Chivo wallet. He followed suit as to his driverly duties, and I departed with my second massive sum of Bitcoin of the day.

“Go forth, my friend. Go and dissipate this Bitcoin to the people of this great nation.”

I clasped his back and led him down into the car, explaining myself once more in English and twice more in Spanish.

“Do you understand?”

“To anyone, señor?”

“To everyone.”

“Pero-”

I shut the door, tapped on the window and shooed him down the street with my hand. After a long, awestruck gaze at his phone, he was off, ready to orange pill a nation.

And so was I.

…..

It was a funny feeling, voluntarily departing with so much Bitcoin.

Historically, I had a penchant for stripping strangers of their cryptocurrencies, not willingly helping them accumulate more.

“Cryptocurrencies, decentralized organizations-these are the future of our civilization. Satoshi Nakamoto is the Plato of our time,” said the refined white-haired Greek man over mojitos on a Princess Cruise ship.

I was working for Princess as a customer experience representative at the time, back when Bitcoin was only a few dollars. It was my job 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. I had a penchant for going eight inches deep from the jump, my genial heir and people skills ingratiating me into the deep confidences of these people I’d only just met.

Like the Greek man in question, who showed me his Mt. Gox trading account.

Mt. Gox was one of the earliest Bitcoin exchanges, and the Greek man’s portfolio was replete with thousands of these mysterious digital coins. He explained that holding his wealth in Bitcoin promised him complete anonymity from the world’s governments via a mechanism called the blockchain.

And that one day, one coin would be worth $1 million.

I was transfixed. I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, learning about its revolutionary technology and mysterious founder Satoshi. Then I bought my first Bitcoins.

As buying Bitcoin became a part of my daily routine after wiping shit off my ass, I paid forward my knowledge of this magical internet money to my passengers.

It’s mind-boggling to think how many millionaires and billionaires I birthed.

But one day, I was singing the praises of Bitcoin to my cruisegoers. The next, that of an early Bitcoin competitor.

It was the moment I realized that I was a natural social engineer, hyping the worthless shitcoin to a succession of passengers over several cruises while buying up a large chunk of the coin’s market cap. Once the coin reached the astronomical height of $.002, I sold everything off, rugging all those poor, greedy bastards.

This makeshift pump and dump served as my entry into the wild west that was crypto in the mid 2010s. I 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 capitalize off Satoshi’s revolution. I became an expert at seizing every opportunity to grab all the “funny money” out there for the taking, developing a robust repertoire of pump and dumps, ponzis, pyramids, multi-level marketing scams, and good ‘ol seed-phrase phishing scams. I thrived off the lawlessness of the time, often building my own scams on top of the grift of others.

I 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.

Wealth 10xing out of my asshole, I quit my job and began traveling the world.

Quickly finding myself with a beautiful Colombian bride.

Oh, Roxana. Her velvety olive skin, 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 the hills overlooking Pereira, where Roxana became my shitcoining muse. I poured every last bit of whatever denomination of cryptocurrency I was trading with at the given moment (the “coin-de-jure,” if you will) into things and experiences to make her happy. I even launched a coin in her honor—Roxanacoin—making enough money on the ICO alone to set up trusts for ten of our own little Colombian children if we so chose to breed as many.

But Roxana became terrified Interpol would come crashing onto our wraparound terrace and into our marble-floored living room. She pleaded for me to stop toiling away on my laptop like a mad scientist, tapping and clicking and conniving in my office at my seven-screen set-up, implying the worst.

When I didn’t listen, she left me, a week after she told me she was pregnant with our first child.

With all the money in the world and no one to share it with, contemplating death as an antidote to my deep loneliness, shame and guilt, I pledged to never again act in my own self-interest.

So I became a born-again Bitcoiner. I found the light once again, for good, in Bitcoin’s open source code.

Because Bitcoin is a Romantic poem and a marvel of human engineering on par with the wheel and the printing press. Bitcoin heels and Bitcoin is health. Bitcoin is hope, Bitcoin is fertility. Bitcoin is truth yet it lies when you need it to.

Bitcoin is a juggernaut of justice, 12 numbers in your head, allowing you to flee any situation in the middle of the night buck-naked with your entire net worth intact.

I ceremoniously chucked my old cell phone into the Adriatic to wash away my shitcoining sins, not before converting 99.9% of my entire net worth to Bitcoin and transferring all of it offline to my cold hardware wallet, reserving the .1% in cash to pay for my day-to-day expenses.

It’s my orange pilled awakening that led me to the soon-to-be Singapore of Central America, a decision I made the second Nayib Bukele announced 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.

It’s in El Salvador that I found my ultimate mission that would consume me for the rest of my days on Earth: giving back everything I took from others by spreading love and peace and Bitcoin to every single citizen of El Salvador.

Then to the people of the world.

Mission in tow, I left the hospital and forged headlong into the city of San Salvador. I barreled down the uneven, rubble-filled sidewalks, down desolate side streets, within quiet residential areas and along the highways as the San Salvador Volcano appeared and vanished based on my meandering path, approaching every single one of my Salvadoran-brethren I encountered with my Chivo wallet wielded like an assassin his pistol.

I’ll forever cherish the montage of joy as I planted my seed.

The middle-aged man who I beat to the punch in our little duel. One moment he was unclasping his phone from his belt holster and pulling up his Chivo app at my urging, the next, he was staring soberly at his balance like a victim of shellshock.

The young ladies wielding shopping bags. They scurried away from me when I suddenly approached from behind and asked for their Chivo wallets, thinking I was trying to pick them up. But after sending over a packet of Sats and walking away no strings attached, I heard behind me a combined, screeching cry, then both of them ran up to me to plant a wet kiss on my cheek.

The elderly lady frying pupusas on a grill at a streetside stall, the smell from the sizzling pockets of the rich Salvadoran delicacy wafting into my nostrils. At first she declined to accept Bitcoin as payment until I insisted it was solo propina, her realizing the tip I left was enough for her to close her shop forever, forcing me to take ten pupusas crammed into a plastic sleeve before I left.

The feeling of my Sats osmosing through the nation of El Salvador titillated me to no end. I felt a skin-scratching, drug addict’s compulsion to replicate it. Sweat caked onto my Hawaiian shirt as I racked up the steps, approaching any and all Salvadorans idling on the street, waiting at bus stops, at work at construction sites. I ambled through malls, entered private places of business, hijacked street-hawkers clientele. Erratically I sprinted ahead, back-peddle, sidestepped like an Olympian to catch every quick-paced Salvadoran who thought he or she could enter my periphery without receiving free Bitcoin, accepting only firm handshakes, wily bear hugs and tearful utterances of “gracias” in return.

I even flagged down cars, several times getting them to stop and airdropping the drivers more money than they’d ever had in their entire lives.

Luckily my hard work was made easier by my compatriots, who began spreading word of my free Sats to free their fellow countrymen from the shackles of FIAT currency.

It donned on me as I reached the Jesus statue jutting out of a roundabout in the center of the city. There, two ladies suddenly intercepted my path with their phones out, Chivo wallets pulled up, inquiring politely in Spanish at the alpha they had apparently received from a friend or loved one.

I sent them both their deserved Bitcoin and continued to saunter and stack, recognizing as many would, in their moment of glee, walk a few paces away and show their phones to nearby bystanders, prompting astonished reactions and probing questions as to the source of their gargantuan windfall. I watched as others would immediately call their friends or loved ones on the phone, yammering in Spanish to tell them to come quickly to catch the mysterious gringo handing out free money.

The result was a steady revolving door of Salvadorans approaching me from all angles. Some came and went upon receiving their free Sats while a gaggle of rambunctious teenagers and young men chose to stick around and watched the Sat-stacking barrage unfold, patting my back and asking me questions about my wealth, informing the shopkeepers we passed of my endeavors, creating a spectacle that only drew more curious souls into my orbit.

I greeted all who approached with ample Sats but did not stop moving for a single soul. There was simply no time to waste in my quest to orange pill a nation of 6 million.

It was with this burgeoning entourage that I entered the annals of the Centro Mercado. The main artery of empresas in all of El Salvador.

For hundreds of yards leading straight to the San Salvador Cathedral, its rotunda 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 tables under umbrellas. A sea of graphic tees and blouses and off-brand jeans and counterfeit jerseys were displayed on mannequins and hung from umbrellas and the thatched-rooves. IPods and headphones and volleyballs rested on tables next to cigarettes and vegetables and buckets of horchata. Hawkers pushed wheelbarrows filled with bananas and lugged piles of thick woolen garments over their shoulders. Bullhorns blared out deals, competing against each other and the Spanish punk rock songs blasting from speakers. Tangled telephone wires ran atop the entirety of the market, and old Pizza Hut and Samsung signs collected dust on the brick-and-mortar edifices into the depths of the market.

Smoke from a grill mixed with the ubiquitous lung-choking dust and visible heat waves to create a mirage: thousands of wayward souls desperate to be saved.

And I was the one sent from the volcanic mountaintops by machinations out of my comprehension, charged with the honor.

It was Satoshi.

I knew at once that He was responsible for my newfound charitable ways. He was the entity working my fingers like a puppet to save the world from inflation. He led me to the bustling market, just as he led me to that struggling family earlier that morning. I was his chosen one for I was the one with the means and the broken psyche, whose already exorbitant Bitcoin fortune would become a gangly, messianic beast once 1 Sat equals $1 dollar by 2024, latest.

He was summoning me to repent my past shitcoining ways and unleash the burden burning a hole in my pocket.

“If Satoshi’s God, then I’m Bitcoin Jesus,” I said under my breath.

The crowd packed into the condensed streets served as a pressure cooker, my disciples quickly disseminating word of my saintly spirit to the people of the market. What ensued was a cascade of bodies and cell phones and Chivo wallets and frazzled Spanish dialogue converging into my personal space. Limbs jabbed into my stomach, phones rammed onto my forehead, and frazzled Spanish dialogue rushed into my ear drum as the hordes glommed onto me like lipids onto a fat man’s ribs, making it difficult to wield my phone to interested parties.

The cathedral receded from view as the crowd engulfed me.

I became reactive, unable to respond to the many questions and comments being hurtled at me as to the source of my wealth or why I was giving it away. I sent Bitcoin to any Chivo wallet that entered into my periphery, barely registering the faces and torsos they belonged to. I trudged through the throngs and stacked, relishing the slow-moving tidal wave moving with me through the already lawless setting of the market.

Not even ten minutes elapsed when I had to send more Bitcoin from my cold wallet to the hot wallet on my phone. I held both items out above the masses as I went through the process, in doing so seeing the crowd gathered around me packed 20, 30, 50 people deep, those lining up to get close to me indistinguishable from those hawking and purchasing goods at the market.

It’s in this context that the bracelet seller entered my life.

“Pulsera?”

I looked down mid-transaction to see a lanyard with ten indigenously designed bracelets being shoved into my face.

The young Salvadoran man holding it out to me was no older than 25 and no taller than 5–5, wearing a neon 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 jockeying of the masses nudging him into me so that we were practically conjoined at the front.

“No no, my friend. Bitcoin.”

“Ahhhh-Beetcoin!?!”

At once, the bracelet seller was off on a Spanish tangent. He shouted to cut through the racket of the market and the brouhaha of the fight for my Sats, his success in hijacking my attention accentuating the chaotic energy he oozed. He rambled and gestured wildly in efforts to convey a point, using words like “Beetcoin” and “Chivo wallet” in between words in Spanish that I did not understand.

He was trying to tell me something about Bitcoin, but I couldn’t discern exactly what.

“That is great-wonderful,” I said, brushing off the fact that I didn’t understand him, half listening as I continued to fend off hands and phones and continue to send Sats as best I could.

“…pero no solo Beetcoin-Dog coin, Shiba coin, NFTs-todos los creeptos!”

“What the fuck did you just say?”

I jerked my head just as I was in the middle of sending Sats to a lady in the crowd and saw that he was now sticking his phone out to me, on it his Binance trading account. I stopped moving and stabilized my vision to take in his portfolio, consisting of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a slew of over 15 shitcoins—common offenders like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu Coin, as well as ones I had never heard of.

And he wasn’t done. Working quickly, the bracelet seller, from heretofore known as the Shitcoiner, pulled up OpenSea.io. He showed me his collection of worthless NFTs, cartoons of all varieties, cats, owls, monkeys, anime characters, rainbow doodle drawings, and finally, an NFT bracelet similar to the ones he sold.

He clicked on the bracelet then looked up at me and laughed at the irony, but I couldn’t even muster a conciliatory chuckle.

“Shitcoins? You’re buying SHITCOINS? The currency of the DEVIL?”

He smiled and nodded like a hyper husky, not catching my drift.

“My friend, that is bullshit. BULLSHIT!”

His face suddenly dropped as he registered my displeasure. He began rambling in Spanish, defensively arguing for the merits of shitcoining, the contents of the argument lost in translation.

“What? Que?”

The Shitcoiner sighed, unable to communicate his point as he was thronged to and fro by the restless Salvadorans pining to be orange-pilled.

“Señor, señor-mire.”

He held his right hand up by his head.

“Here, I buy.”

The Shitcoiner rocketed his hand upwards, slowly, on a diagonal.

“Keep, keep, keep…”

As the Shitcoiner’s hand got near his head, he curved it downwards, ever so slightly.

“En el momento que bajo, I sell.”

“But my friend-”

The Shitcoiner grabbed my arm.

“En el momento que bajo. En el momento.”

I was about to open my mouth to rebuttal but found myself at a loss for words at his comically simplistic day-trading strategy.

With the gap in the conversation, the Shitcoiner began conversing in Spanish with those nudged up against us, their phones still outstretched, learning for the first time the reason for the mob scene. He proceeded to present to me his own phone, Chivo wallet pulled up, ready to receive his free Bitcoin.

“No!” I declared to him adamantly. “Not for you, you fucking SHITCOINER!”

He didn’t move and continued holding his Chivo wallet out to me.

“SCRAM!” I shouted, taking a step towards him like one would a rabid predator.

The Shitcoiner took one last look at me and muttered something under his breath in Spanish, before slithering back out through the crowd and out of my life.

I felt intensely unmoored by a shitcoiner’s presence in Bitcoin territory as I tried to get back into my Zen-Sat-stacking-state. The message coming down from the Bitcoin heavens was being misinterpreted without my control. The legs of this developing nation had been opened, like a whore’s, to the grift-fueled world of every other cryptocurrency that isn’t Bitcoin.

Shitcoining is a sickness, and I feared that a pandemic was spreading.

But those doom and gloom thoughts came and went as 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, to be born-again in Bitcoin’s divine image.

So I continued to oblige them.

Memory of the Shitcoiner’s existence faded into the recesses as some of my apostles proceeded to hoist me on their shoulders.

The moment was the culmination of my long and winding journey in crypto and life. From my euphoric orange-baptism to the darkness of my descent into shitcoining and divorce, to my redemption as a single benevolent force spreading Satoshi’s message down in the Latin American orient, the hero’s honor of being hoisted into the heavens by my chosen people was the most content I’ll ever be.

From atop their shoulders I did not stop stacking. Salvadorans reached up to present me their QR codes, and I continued to honor their solicitations as I was paraded down the market.

From that bird’s eye-vantage I spotted the Shitcoiner in my wake.

It was barely twenty minutes after he had left me earlier, and he had commanded a healthy crowd about twenty paces behind where I was being carried. From a distance, I could discern that he was holding out a few bills of cold-hard, vomit-inducing American-FIAT cash to a man in a soccer jersey, who proceeded to hover his cell phone over the Shitcoiner’s in all too familiar a manner.

My body worked quicker than my brain could process what was transpiring. I tapped on one of the hands lifting me up from my buttocks, urging him to let me down. I came back down to earth and pushed and scrapped through the bodies, the friction depositing me face to face with the Shitcoiner.

The Shitcoiner jerked his head as he noticed my presence, stopping in his tracks as he held out more American dollars to another man in the scrum.

“Ah, mi amigo! Hola!”

The crowd encircled us like they were watching a gladiator battle in the Colosseum. I quickly scanned their faces, positive that many of them were moments ago benefactors of my goodwill and fortune.

“My friend-what the fuck is going on here?”

At once, the Shitcoiner began explaining his intentions, his rambling-Spanish taking the tone of “look, man, it’s not what you think!”

“Hey hey-you fucking Shitcoiner-can you speak English?”

Another man stepped forth from the crowd to translate.

“Basically, we sell to him Beetcoin, and he give us effectivo,” he said, sticking out his hand and scraping together his thumb, pointer and middle finger together.

I looked over at the Shitcoiner, smiling in innocent oblivion, and filled in the rest of the story. He was coaxing the Bitcoin I had just gifted to all of those innocent Salvadorans to fund his nasty shitcoining habit.

I struggled to maintain my composure and balance as the existential dred of my Salvadoran existence washed over me, like the thunderous cloud starting to envelope the airspace of the market.

“Mi amigo, Bitcoin-se cayo!” the Shitcoiner chimed in directly to me, continuing to defend himself.

I didn’t even know what cayo meant. At once, my nausea gave way to intense rage, overtaking me as I grabbed ahold of the Shitcoiner and pushed him backward.

“Give these innocent people back their Bitcoin, you fucking criminal!”

I shook the Shitcoiner like a rag doll, pushing him backwards as spittle landed on his face from my rabid state. There was the requisite shouting and hoopla in response to a foreigner assaulting a local as the spectators entered the arena to break us up.

I grabbed for the cell phone in the Shitcoiner’s hand in a futile, last-ditched attempt to recover the Bitcoins for those he had coerced them away from.

Several Salvadorans grabbed ahold of me before I could do so, peeling me off the Shitcoiner and paralyzing me in their grips. I squirmed and gyrated, attempting to shed myself free.

“Let go, let go, ok, I’m sorry, lo siento!”

They pulled my limbs every which way as they restrained me. My mind raced with the nightmare of rotting away in a Salvadoran prison before getting nailed to the stake, a martyr for the orange revolution, while my precious Bitcoin collected digital dust in my hard wallet.

“Señor…”

A meek voice cut through the hysteria. It was the Shitcoiner, standing before me. He was smiling, unbothered at what had transpired. He said something in Spanish to my captors and suddenly I was free.

He gestured for me to follow him down the street. Confused, grateful, supremely overwhelmed, I followed. Away from the stunned crowd we went, stopping next to a lady selling household products.

“Mi amigo,” the Shitcoiner started. “Beetcoin-se cayo-down,” he said, gesturing down with his hand and revealing the nature of the word “cayo.”

“No, no, you have it all wrong my friend-it’s a deflationary asset-it has to go up. Always has, always will.”

“No, no-señor-”

“Has to. There are only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoins, ever—a hard cap. Meanwhile, the US printed over 200-billion one-dollar bills this year than they did last—those demons in the Fed are sucking out any value the dollar ever had. Talk to me in ten years when interest rates are high as a kite and people are flocking to Bitcoin like Syrian refugees to Scandinavian state housing!”

“Señor,” the Shitcoiner said, sighing. “Mire. I give to them less en dolares,” he said as he reached out with both hands to an imaginary business partner, “and they give me, more, en Beetcoin,” he said, taking back the digital currency in his hands.

I now understood why he was bringing up the fact that Bitcoin was down. He was buying the dip from his compatriots at an even further discount by playing into their American-dollar-fetishes. He was striving to improve the circumstances he was born into by using his wit to recognize the value where others didn’t, and his conniving charm to extract that value by any means necessary.

I suddenly respected the Shitcoiner’s hustle. He reminded me of my younger self, his scheme identical to the ones I pulled in my shitcoining heyday.

But it didn’t change the apparent truth that he was using the discounted Bitcoin to buy shitcoins. He was hitching his wagon to shady VCs and charismatic cults of personality who sell hope and the promise of riches for all who stack their retarded coins, only to horde all the wealth for themselves and their lizard friends.

But more than that, he was a man of great intellect and panache, caught up in a practice of shame and dishonor.

A life of shitcoining is no life at all. I knew that from my own lived experience.

I felt a duty to protect this promising yet naive young Salvadoran Shitcoiner. And the only way out was through.

“Mi amigo-have you ever heard of Asscoin?”

“Que?”

“Asscoin,” I repeated, before making a fart noise and crop-dusting an imaginary fart from my ass. At first, the Shitcoiner looked at me blankly, but then we burst into laughter.

I was still crafting the mechanics of my plot as I took out my phone and showed the Shitcoiner the graph for Asscoin. It was priced at fractions of a penny and was a meager, uninspiring curve, going up and down and up like any other volatile shitcoin.

I whistled and furrowed my eyebrows.

“A la luna!”

The Shitcoiner continued looking at the graph and muttered under his breath in Spanish as he evaluated my alpha, pulling out his phone to analyze the asset for himself.

As he did so, I did something that saddened me to my core. On the spot, I bought $50k worth of $ASS.

“Look,” I said, showing the Shitcoiner the balance on my phone.

He gasped, literally putting his hand over his mouth.

“Hermano-es todo para…Asscoin?”

“Todo!”

“Dinero-Ass?” the Shitcoiner asked once more, drawing the money sign in the air.

“Si, amigo. Es el futuro. Nuevo doge!”

And I was right. It was to be the next DOGE because I was going to make it that by pumping it there, then dumping it down to the depths of hell.

For some habits just never, fully die. That poor, poor Shitcoiner.

…….

The bus I caught was the #102, a long, teel, hundred-plus seater packed to the brim with Salvadorans. I was bound back for El Zonte, and I found the only open seat against the window next to a leathery laborer.

Moments before, I had tried to call my driver from that morning to pick me up.

He didn’t answer. I chalked it up to his being busy gallivanting the country, dolling out Sats and spreading the gospel of Bitcoin.

As we made it out of San Salvador and back out to the highway, I looked up ahead out the front window. In the distance, towards the Pacific, the sky was painted in a gentle orange hue from the setting sun.

“Would you look at that? A Bitcoin sun,” I said to the laborer sitting next to me.

He didn’t respond, but it didn’t matter. It was a Bitcoin sun.

All the perspective I needed as I sent my first signals to the uber-exclusive alpha groups I was in on Discord, Twitter and Telegram, letting them know that a pump was afoot.

The feeling of initiating my very own pump and dump harkened me back to Roxana, lying in bed, pleading in vein for me to join her and make love while I grinded to manipulate the price action on now defunct cryptocurrencies like Turtlecoin and Playtoken.

And now, right there on that rickety bus under the cloak of darkness, I transferred Bitcoin after Bitcoin from my cold wallet to my phone in preparation for buying monumental sums of Asscoin with it.

But suddenly, the bus 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 to see a man in a bomber jacket standing in the aisle beside me.

He said something to me in Spanish and gestured for me to follow him toward the front of the bus, where several men were hovering in the entryway near the driver.

“No!” I said forcefully, holding my ground as a lump formed in my throat, unsure what it was he wanted or what I did wrong but knowing innately that I should not readily comply.

But he was insistent, and I had no choice but to follow the man down the aisle. I clutched my hard wallet and cell phone against my briefcase as I tried in vein to assess through the musty darkness whether the man had any tattoos or other signifiers of being gang affiliated, how on Earth he could have gotten wind of my exorbitant wealth, and what his plans for me were.

As I approached the front of the bus, I noticed that one of the men in the aisle near the driver smiled at me in a manner that put me oddly at ease.

I recognized his face, but I wasn’t sure how or why until I looked down to see that everyone gathered, including the driver, held out their cell phones, their bright blue Chivo wallet apps piercing through the darkness.

I looked back up at the man who was smiling at me, realizing that despite just how many Salvadorans I had given free Bitcoin to over the last however many hours, he was almost certainly one of them.

“Querer Bitcoin?” I asked as my heart settled.

They all nodded, and I quickly sent them each a glorious batch of Sats.

After sending Sats to the bus driver, he muttered under his breath in Spanish as he stared at his phone, unable to divert his eyes. He got up from the seat, hugged me, said something hastily in Spanish to the rest of the bus then departed onto the street, fading off into the Bitcoin sun.

There was a stir on the bus, a murmur in Spanish. One passenger finally got up and stormed off the bus, prompting a mad dash as all the other passengers pushed their way off the bus and onto the street.

I sat down into the front seat behind the driver’s, face burning red with guilt and heat from the day. I felt an odd, captain’s-like duty to be the last one on the bus, finally leaving once it was empty.

The fading Bitcoin sun painted a landscape of 50 Salvadorans on the same picturesque La Libertad thoroughfare where my day had started, causing oncoming traffic from both sides to halt.

I took one more look at the crowd, before, like the bus driver, I ambled into the dying Bitcoin sun. I walked a hundred yards down the street and found an upturned rock with a perfect perch to sit, shrouded from the road by a tall canopy of trees.

From that rock, I transferred a few more Bitcoins to my phone then sent the final signal to my alpha groups with info about the coin we were pumping and the exchange to pump it on.

Then, I bought my first batch of Asscoin for $50k. Then I bought another, then another. Quick bursts of cash infused into the dumbest shitcoin known to man.

It was slow uptick at first, but soon, up and up the price of Asscoin climbed.

I hollered to the moon as I bent the world to my will, tasting blood on my tongue as I imagined the wide-eyed Shitcoiner seeing the coin finally spike after watching the price stay stagnant since I gave him the alpha. It would be only a matter of time before he unloaded all of the Bitcoin he coerced out of those innocent Salvadorans into $ASS, foaming at the gourds as he watched his brilliant investment double, then triple, in a matter of minutes.

No day trader or shitcoiner on Earth would have quick enough wits to pull out before Asscoin gloriously lost 99% of its value in seconds, while I stole away with millions.

Just to make sure he was paying attention, I sent the Shitcoiner a WhatsApp message, his having asked for my contact info earlier to stay in touch: “Mi amigo-mire a $ASS 👀👀”

He responded right away: Wow 📈 📈

I chuckled to myself like a Bond villain and kept buying more Ass, engaging in the most aggressive form of effective altruism possible.

The plan to give all of the profits back to my country, after converting every single Asscoin safely back to Bitcoin.

But as I clicked the screen to make one more purchase of ASS before dumping it all, the screen froze.

On it came the spinning circle of death. Then, total darkness.

I shot up from the rock and nearly threw the phone down on the ground. I frantically pressed the power button to no avail.

Dolling out SATs to thousands of Salvadorans all day had run my battery dry.

Without hesitating, I ran down the street in the direction I could only guess was El Zonte, and began waving frantically at the oncoming traffic.

But the Bitcoin sun had given way to total darkness, making it impossible for cars to see me on the side of the road. Glaring lights came crashing around the bend, only after they passed me was I even able to discern if they were cars or motorcycles.I 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 minutes before the members of my alpha groups would take the baton from me and initiate the dump.

My millions worth of Ass, minutes ago resting safely in Bitcoin, would soon be worth mere thousands of a worthless shitcoin.

The volcanos those millions could have moved. The number of souls I could have brought to salvation. Right there on the side of the street, I wept. The tears picked up the dried molecules I cried for baby Satoshi’s birth earlier that day, shimmering from the lights of cars and motorcycles at brief intervals.

I had tried to test the fates and play God and failed.

For there is no God. That’s why Satoshi gave us Bitcoin.