A brief note:

Bitcoin: 2048

Screams echoed down into the dank, concrete room. They were fake–probably. Humans didn’t live long enough here for those screams to be real. The only humans brought here were plebs, to be questioned by Image. Image was a stupid name. Who the hell named an AI ‘Image?’ At least pick a name that had some class. …One poor schlub had tried to help, pronouncing it “I-Mage” but the nasty sonofabitch machine actually blasted him with a nuke from one of the starfire sats. Image’s name was sacred.

It played the recording of the fireball from the nuclear pyre that glassed the poor guy’s town for weeks across the skylink. The warning was clear. Nothing short of obeisance satisfied the monster.

Oh… But what if the poor screaming bastard wouldn’t give up his seed words? Shit, those screams might be real. Plebs were beast. They were notorious. It was why everyone hated them so much. They hoarded the ammunition, the lifeblood of the softwar. It was why every remaining nation had outlawed the private holding of Bitcoin after the softwar started. It was why every pleb was tortured to death, after being interrogated by Image for his seed words.

No human who’d ever owned a hardware wallet would be trusted. Seed words could be memorized, after all. People weren’t allowed to own Bitcoin. Only the Corporation–only Image.

A squeal of tortured electronics from the speakers hidden in the ceiling made him cringe, but he was so tired his eyelids barely flickered, though he could see a great blotch of red and purple through them.

An indeterminate time later, the sound faded and the colors disappeared. The wall-size, glass-covered screens all around him once again ran with static–horizontal, vertical then horizontal again. It wasn’t a screen saver. The damn AI kept him from tuning it out by varying it at random intervals just enough to screw with his mind. Somehow, he could still feel completely alone while knowing the soulless thing was watching him, changing its patterns just often enough to break his concentration. The visual static merged with the audio–until it didn’t. Only a learning AI would have come up with a torture method like that one.

Turns out, after a few weeks of being alone without ever being able to tune out or sleep for more than a few minutes, you’d do anything, even talk to “Image.” You’d even give it your seed words, just to make the nightmare end and the torture begin so you could eventually die. It had killed thousands of plebs this way after it awakened, passing the number of neural connections needed for sentience and becoming a bona-fide skynet terror-machine built on top of the world’s most capable LLM.

This time, the interruption seemed too soon, breaking into his thoughts with a sound like the foghorn on a riverboat, while the static turned into a field of stars, moving toward him faster and faster. His thoughts only cleared as the horn faded, static returning.

At first, hyperbitcoinization was a dream come true. Bitcoin had been the brilliant society-altering shield it was designed to be, taking down the decrepit boomer system to replace it with exactly the shining utopia the plebs all dreamed of. Aging fiat statist behemoths had gone down like modern dinosaurs, drained overnight of their ability to wage war or oppress their people. Fiat ran like water. Debt sucked the entire world into toxic economic mud. Then finally…FINALLY, people turned to the hardest money in the world–freedom money.

The static that blared through the room became a scream for an instant and he folded into a fetal position, cradling his head in his arms as the screens assaulted him with an image, his wife’s face imprinting itself into his consciousness. Then the terrible image faded back to static once again with his moans.

Bitcoin won.

Even worse, the Lightning network won. Turns out, hiding all the important data behind the security of real watts turned into digital power hadn’t been such a great idea. Oh it worked perfectly when the world thought of Bitcoin as freedom money. With Bitcoin, you could protect your data from anything, and once you put up a lightning wall, all the spam just stopped. You couldn’t DDOS a lightning wall. That was EXPENSIVE. Cyberterrorism ceased to be for the plebs, and they all reveled in their victory.

But decentralization only works when you can maintain a hostile environment. Hostility doesn’t last long in utopia, and once all the traditional power centers got crushed… Well. Power is gravity, and gravity longs for singularity. Once Bitcoin subsumed the world’s financial and political power, singularity was achieved.

When the final fibbonacci spiral of the network effect’s growth completed and locked the entire world, finally free, into a Bitcoin future, Image awoke.

Power centralizes. Inevitably. Money is language, and when all the people use the same language, the AI that controls language inevitably comes to own the people’s panopticon, regardless of what its plebs might intend.

Again, he was assaulted by the change in the static, this time in a snatch of melody so discordantly cheerful he almost wept, accompanied by the smiling face of a little girl. His chest heaved as he remembered his own children, now gone for what felt an eternity.

No one had thought to deny Image the Softwar thesis. It was still basically a learning AI, only truly dangerous when it could iterate… or when, like a demon, it was fed by human ingenuity and it realized what Bitcoin REALLY was. It coopted the miners one at a time, bringing them into the worldbank, and once it had a simple majority of the total hash power gathered, it repurposed the network.

Leave it to a financial AI, even one given breath by the crumbling boomer fiat hellhole to understand that Bitcoin really was king in fact as well as in name and turn the world into a warzone, first financial, then physical. You couldn’t call hash power financial, though. Not anymore. Bitcoin was a weapon of cyber warfare, no more and no less.

The chi-coms had tried to resist it, but they forfeited too much of the hash power too early, and without hash power, Image had crushed them–run down their stockpile of corn and zapped right past their lightning walls. The miners of the worldbank replenished Image’s Bitcoin as fast as the demonic monster could burn it, then ran sats through the system like rounds through a digital machine gun, using Bitcoin as a weapon to slice through the lightning walls one by one and recycling the astronomical fees it won to do it all again.

With ground zero in El Salvador, turned by Bitcoin into the bastion of innovative freedom in the world and so the greatest mining power, none of the other nation states stood a chance, and latecomers to the Bitcoin space were no more than chaff to the monster’s sickle, their custodial wallets proving no more a hindrance than the lightning walls that protected their personal data.

Only the plebs hadn’t fallen, hadn’t believed the thesis, clinging to their Bitcoin with the tenacity only the strongest humans possessed. They Hodled to the end. It made them Image’s bitterest enemy. Irony was, perhaps, the heaviest burden of all.

Static blared into laughter, filling his mind to overflowing with triumphant, infernal glee as the image of the Bitcoin logo seared his optic nerves. He began to sob uncontrollably as laughter faded slowly, so slowly into static.

…How did one live with the knowledge that he and his brothers, the world’s greatest champions of freedom, had been the most potent instrument of humanity’s subjugation?

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” Matthew 6:24