Coin

"Bitcoin?"

Manhattan, New York.

Even the skyscrapers that shot straight up into the sky were still places where people lived.

"Yes. It's been making the rounds lately, hasn't it?"

"It got completely wrecked."

"That's exactly why I'm bringing it up! Shorting it would be sweet as hell right now, wouldn't it?"

This was where the investors lived.

A subordinate had suddenly shown up with work in hand.

I told him not to bring me anything outside of investments.

The market had closed for the day.

From here on out, he should have been free to rest easy.

There was a blind spot, though.

The coin market was an irregular that never stopped rolling, twenty-four hours a day.

"Drop it."

"Huh? Why?"

"We don't have the bandwidth to scrap over something like that. Our firm isn't that free."

The year was 2030.

The coin market was in an uproar.

No—it would be fair to say the chaos had been scheduled all along.

Why the hell are people still buying that garbage.

Bitcoin had a built-in limitation from birth.

The security system of the blockchain was not perfect.

That fact had been known since before 2017.

Once quantum computers arrived, it could be hacked with ease.

"This is solid intel, though!"

"Ah—you're really not letting this go."

"I'm the IT specialist here, aren't I? I looked at the patent. This is content aimed at release within two years at the latest."

Three years earlier, a quantum-computer paper had been recognized by academia.

At the time, coins had been slammed down by as much as −95 percent.

And now the patent has come out.

Unreleased information.

Only tabloid scraps had been scattered to the public.

But one of the staffers had somehow managed to snatch the real thing.

It was a common enough occurrence on the Street.

There was a reason Wall Street rumors hit with such accuracy.

"I already told you the position is set."

"Since when does the boss care about that kind of thing? When something looks tasty, leverage is your daily bread, isn't it?"

"……."

The employee wanted to pull as much of the firm's capital as he could.

On any ordinary day, he would have reviewed the material himself and drawn up a concrete plan.

If there was something to eat, he dove in like a hyena.

That was the direction his hedge fund pursued.

But even he had days when the mood simply wasn't there.

"Do it within your own authority."

"This is a real jackpot, though……."

"You want to get fired?"

"Ugh, fine. Don't come crying later, okay?"

Andrew held the title of director, for what it was worth.

His authority was by no means small.

In terms of ability, he was someone the boss fully acknowledged.

He would handle it fine on his own.

Coins just don't sit right with me.

What the employee knew, there was no way the boss didn't know.

He had picked up the rough outline already.

The problem was that he had come to know things beyond that outline.

And those things left him uneasy.

Tap, tap!

Conspiracy theories.

He didn't dislike them.

They could be used as investment ideas.

Great for scaring the retail crowd.

He used them often enough in ordinary times.

Spreading rumors through underground advertising firms, that sort of thing.

But he never believed them himself.

Getting jerked around by unconfirmed information disqualified you as an investor.

.

.

.

A story had been circulating through the coin scene lately.

No—the rumor itself had been floating around for years.

It wasn't entirely baseless.

After all, CIA information ops were nothing new.

The reason that pile of modern-art garbage started fetching tens or hundreds of millions was a CIA production too.

Why was something that looked like a grade-schooler's drawing so expensive?

The question was actually reasonable.

During the Cold War.

European masters like Picasso had begun to fall under the spell of communism.

Culture's influence was enormous.

For the United States, a serious response was necessary.

One part of that response was jacking up the prices of artworks.

There was nothing money couldn't do in this world.

If it couldn't, you simply hadn't spent enough.

They swept the highest prices at art auctions.

It's a common enough play in the stock world too.

Pump-and-dump stocks.

You deliberately inflate the price.

Then people buy, thinking it's a genuinely good stock.

A similar phenomenon played out in the art world.

Once the works sold for high prices, the artists made serious money.

The works themselves gained recognition.

If it's expensive, it must be great, right?

They seized not only cash but prestige as well.

A heartwarming tale of how they blocked communism's cultural invasion—except for the aftermath.

Thanks to that, we now lived in a world where paintings that looked like a kid's doodles sold for hundreds of millions.

Was modern art the only such case?

He hadn't thought about it before.

Lately, another idea had begun to take root.

Bitcoin might be the same kind of thing.

If the U.S. government really wanted to, what couldn't it do?

Assign value to a scrap of data.

If investors started buying one after another?

You could absorb the liquidity flooding the market.

Money that should have gone into real estate, stocks, or bonds would get locked up in Bitcoin instead.

That produced an effect of suppressing inflation.

Which in turn allowed the United States to issue even more bonds.

The privilege of a reserve-currency nation that could literally manufacture money.

They created Bitcoin in order to abuse that privilege. It's not a story without logic.

Ordinary people didn't know this part well.

America was printing money on the presses and spending it however it liked.

Missing a trillion dollars?

Just make it, lol.

Without a single ounce of exaggeration, that was the vibe.

Of course there were side effects.

When money ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠poured into the market like mad, inflation followed.

Barely ten years earlier.

The global price explosion during the COVID crisis had been 120 percent America's fault.

I just hope that blade doesn't end up pointed only at me.

Lately that anxiety had been creeping in.

A thing of the past.

"Senior, you don't like this kind of stuff?"

"What were we talking about?"

"Coins! Coins! How can you zone out when someone's talking to you!"

There was no way the memory wouldn't surface.

It had been the starting point where he first caught on to the truth of the world economy.

Bitcoin, huh…….

An asset that had drawn a line through investment history.

Nothing had ever skyrocketed in value quite like that.

Of course he knew.

He knew Bitcoin would moon, and that it would climb even higher afterward.

The reason he still hadn't touched it was simply that he hadn't thought of it.

No—the correct expression was that he had refused to think of it.

"How do you see coins, Senior?"

"They're pretty."

"Huh?"

"Big chest, too."

"What the hell are you even saying!"

Everyone had something like that.

Not necessarily a bad memory, yet one you preferred not to recall if you could help it.

And it's not like I need that kind of thing at all.

Once you reached the top tier, opportunities weren't required.

What was demanded was pure skill alone.

In the world of the strong, being able to see a little of the future wasn't even an advantage.

Even in One Piece, Observation Haki users still got their asses handed to them.

"I've been thinking about it a bit."

"You think?"

"Ugh! You're the only senior who talks to me like that, you know."

But for now he was still the weak one.

If something could be used, it had to be used.

A little PTSD wasn't enough to make him the type who hesitated.

Coins really were an attractive asset, no question.

He wasn't talking about the simple fact that the price had risen.

From the position of someone who understood the special nature of coins and the impact they had on the market.

"Anyway, the way I see it."

"Fine, I'll listen to your half-baked thoughts."

"No matter how I look at it, coins feel like a scam."

"Why."

"The whole blockchain thing already seems shady……."

It wasn't widely known yet.

Bitcoin had been that radical.

An asset with no physical existence at all.

A bit like Monopoly money.

A Seed Bank one-million-won note.

Who the hell was going to accept that?

Sora's doubt was perfectly rational.

"Decentralization also sounds like nonsense……."

"Which part?"

"Who exactly is guaranteeing Bitcoin's value?"

"Seed Bank could guarantee it."

"Huh?"

That was correct.

If she had been swayed by the clumsy logic of the coin cultists, he would have been disappointed.

Cute.

Coming to him for advice was adorable too.

But as an investor, she still had a long way to go.

"Isn't that just because you don't know coins?"

"Well, maybe."

"Quick to admit it."

"I don't think I know it well yet."

Still, the fundamentals were there.

All the drilling—

No, all the teaching—had paid off.

The stock market is just like that.

I think this is right!

And yet the market, for some strange reason, often went the opposite way.

You had to know how to fight inside doubt.

Sometimes you also had to know how to admit you were wrong.

"You know why you don't get it?"

"That's why I'm asking."

"Because you're fundamentally mistaken about coins."

To survive in the market, you needed both strength and weakness.

She didn't have either yet.

I can teach her.

Sora wasn't the only one confused.

Even the high-flying Wall Street investors had taken years to catch on.

High-grade information like that.

He would teach it specially.

Coins ran on a completely different track from ordinary assets.

"I know."

"Know what?"

"Roughly…… aren't they just like penny stocks? Speculative gambling assets."

It wasn't a story that could be ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wrapped up that simply.

Wall Street investors of course knew what penny stocks were.

That's the common misunderstanding of people who don't know coins.

If the conclusion had been that easy, the whole thing wouldn't have lasted this long.

No theme stock ever ran for years on end.

"Coins aren't gambling."

"Then they really have value as future currency……."

"Not that either."

"Then what the hell are they!"

"Religion."

You had to start with faith.