Bitcoin Is God
I was a college graduate hunting for my first job.
Might as well kill some time on Nootube.
To be more precise, I was still preparing to prepare for the job hunt.
One glance at the screen and there it was—another Galdecup raging among people with absolutely nothing better to do.
Sigh-inducing as the comment section was, I couldn't help thinking the very same thing myself.
If only I could go back to being a kid...
And so, watching the Galdecup unfold on my screen, I drifted off to sleep like I always did.
...Or so I thought.
"Chanhyuk, time for kindergarten!!!"
I had gone and regressed all the way back to my childhood.
"Alright, kiddos~ eye exercises, here we go~"
As I rolled my eyeballs along with the routine my kindergarten teacher was leading, my mind was somewhere else entirely.
It's 2006. I'm seven years old, and kindergarten graduation is just around the corner.
None of it felt real, but I adapted fast.
After all, this was a pivotal stretch of my life.
The most important thing is money. And soon enough, the window opens—the one where I can finally make it.
I'd always loved novels, and along with them anything to do with money and markets—and I remembered exactly when that window would arrive.
Bitcoin. 2009.
I was going to get rich off it, then live exactly as I pleased.
"Chanhyuk!! Eye exercises are over—come on, hurry up."
"Okay, coming."
Back home, I laid everything out in my head.
I've got no grand ambition to conquer the world, and thinking hard is the thing I hate most.
But if I mined Bitcoin on a single home computer from 2009 through 2011, the haul would be measured in trillions of won.
I began building my plan—kept it simple, left no room for variables—and as the seasons turned, my elementary school entrance ceremony drew near.
The first day of elementary school.
"Chanhyuk, play nice with your friends, okay~?"
"I will, Mom."
"Our Chanhyuk's grown so mature all of a sudden. He'll do just fine—don't you worry."
I'd tried to act my age, but apparently there was no hiding how much I'd changed.
"Mom, Dad! I'm off!!"
After parting with my parents, I headed for my classroom.
I was tall—ridiculously tall—and I always sat through class from the very back row. When your full-grown height is 192 centimeters, that much goes without saying.
Sure enough, we'd all just climbed up out of kindergarten, so the room was nothing but little shrimps. Not one kid so much as tried to throw his weight around.
"WAAAAAAHHH! I wanna go hooooome!!!!"
What a fucking crybaby.
There were tantrum-throwers too, naturally—and so my life as an elementary schooler began in 2007.
Before regressing, I had been a spectacular Geumjjok-i—one of those kids who badly needed someone to beat some sense into them.
I once envied my glasses-wearing friends so much that I shined a laser straight into my own eyes, blindness risk be damned—and ended up wearing glasses anyway. I used to hang off the corridor railing of a 21st-floor apartment, dangling over the drop to show my friends how fearless I was.
There has literally never been a Geumjjok-i like me.
Even so, with my height and decent face, I was pretty popular with the other kids—boys and girls alike.
The little rugrats are a pain, but they'll have their uses.
Privately they bored me, but I never shoved away the friends who kept coming around.
To mine Bitcoin in 2009, I need the home computer all to myself, and the electricity bill alone will top 40,000 won a month.
The move required to get that computer all to myself was...
"Mom? I want to quit my academies and study on the computer instead."
Despite money being tight, my mom had signed me up for every academy under the sun, and I'd made a career of skipping every last one of them.
"Huh?? What on earth are you talking about??"
Mom pushed back at the nonsense, but because she took me for a boy who'd matured early, she didn't scold me.
"Kids these days study on their computers, I hear. I'm not planning to play games or anything."
She knew perfectly well I'd never cared for games. What worried her was whether a computer could really stand in for studying.
"If I study on the computer and it doesn't work out, I'll go back—as many academies as you want."
And with that, I won Mom's blessing.
From then on, first place in the entire school on every exam came easier than a cakewalk—which was more than enough to lock in her trust.
And so 2009 arrived, the single most important stretch of my life, and I moved exactly as I'd prepared.
In Bitcoin's infancy, mining was so painless it made today's version look like another universe. No account, no sign-up—you simply downloaded the program written by Bitcoin's creator and mined.
How much you mined also depended on your machine, so I'd already begged my parents to upgrade the computer—for the sake of my "education," of course.
When Bitcoin first launched, it paid 500 to 1,000 BTC a day through the first half of the year; from late 2009 into early 2010, competition cut that down to 100 to 250 a day.
With my upgraded CPU, I could mine more than double even those figures.
Once this window closed, GPUs would shrink what any home computer could mine to pocket change.
But if I could just make it through this stretch...
My hands and feet were trembling.
Just stick to the plan...
The physical demands were small; the mental demands were a different animal entirely. Miss even a single day, and the Bitcoin lost would come to 3,000 coins.
I knew from my past life that one Bitcoin would be worth over 100 million won—so even by the stingiest arithmetic, that was 300 billion gone in a day...
My mouth had gone bone-dry. I swallowed my nerves and got to mining.
My eyelids kept sliding shut. Was it because this body was so young?
I pinched my thigh hard enough to squeeze out tears, fighting off the sleep crashing over me in waves.
Block after block kept stacking up—50 BTC apiece.
Night melted into dawn, and Mom shook me awake.
"Chanhyuk!! You have school!!"
Bloodshot and dripping sweat, I put the question back to her.
"Mom... can I skip school today?"
Her eternally sturdy son—the boy who had never once in his life faked a sick day—was saying he felt awful. Mom nearly jumped out of her skin.
"Chanhyuk!! Honey, get in here right now! Something's wrong with Chanhyuk!!"
Dad came running at her frantic shouting, and in the end, the kid with a spotless record of never playing hooky won his day off. I convinced my parents that rest would fix me right up, then shut myself in my room.
"Th-this... how much is this..."
An amount that would someday be worth 142.5 billion won—all of it mined in a mere four hours and twenty-five minutes.
Whew...
The longer I stared at the number on the screen, the more real it became, and the trembling in my chest finally began to settle.
Not that I ever intend to move an enormous sum all at once.
Bitcoin is transparent.
The moment I moved a wallet stuffed with tens or even hundreds of trillions of won, the great crash would begin. Setting up paper companies like the masterminds in novels wasn't an option yet, and frankly, that kind of headache was above my pay grade.
So instead—
Time to put my friends to use.
I began dragging my unsuspecting buddies to the PC bang, our local gaming café, each of us running a fresh new wallet while we "gamed," and quietly stacked Bitcoin across wallet after wallet.
There were hiccups along the way. The rig sometimes turned the family computer into a howling racket machine.
"You damn brats!!!! What the hell are you doing to make that computer this loud!!"
My friends got chewed out by their own parents for practically living at the café.
"Why are you kids at the PC bang so much these days!!"
And once, I nearly got shaken down for pocket change by a pack of middle school delinquents.
"You got 500 won on you?"
Countless episodes like that—and yet through all of them, I kept piling up mountains of money.
By the end of 2010, I held twelve wallets at 8,000 BTC apiece—95,000 in total—worth over 9.5 trillion won at my old life's prices.
And that didn't even count the wallet running around the clock on the computer at home.
Everything I'd mined at home so far came to a staggering 500,000 BTC. At future prices, even a lowball estimate put it around 50 trillion won.
Add it all together: 595,000 BTC. More than 60 trillion won.
...
I had no idea how far this snowball would roll, or what Bitcoin would do down the road—but I decided my mining days ended right here.
"Chanhyuk, you make sure you settle in well at middle school too, alright??"
"Honey, it's not like our Chanhyuk's the type to get bullied."
And so I entered middle school.
One BTC was trading at $35. I was sitting on more than 20 million dollars.
In Korean money, that came to roughly 22.6 billion won.
I toyed with the idea of cashing out a sliver to actually spend, but every time I remembered that each coin would someday top 100 million won, my hands refused to budge.
At this point even going to school feels like a chore... I want to drop out.
School was a drag, sure, but the knowledge that I was rich made the walk there feel feather-light.
Hm... Class 2, first year?
Half wondering whether I'd been in Class 2 back in the day too, I stepped into the room—and familiar faces began to come into view.
Oh, wow—right, he was in this class. And him! Seeing everyone after so long is kind of surreal.
I made my way to a seat, taking in the faces I hadn't seen in years, and noticed a few boys slouching around with maximum swagger—middle school syndrome hitting early, apparently.
God, zero style. Do they seriously think sitting like that makes them look cool?
I gave the kid at the desk next to mine a look that said I just watched something disgusting, and he glared right back at me.
"The hell are you staring at?"
I couldn't stand his slouching, swaggering attitude one bit—and with zero brakes, it just came out.
"Got a problem, fucker?"