The Faith of Coins
"No, of course the shorts should win!"
It was a common enough story.
An asset you had invested in with absolute conviction.
"Why? Things not going the way you thought?"
"Well, it's just... if I only had a little more time..."
"So you're underwater right now, is that it?"
It moved the opposite way.
Enough to make a ghost weep.
If people had any reason left, how could they make a call like that?
That's what makes coins so much fun.
Catastrophic news that should have annihilated the coin market had hit.
Andrew, who had shorted on a massive scale, was the one taking losses instead.
"It'll normalize once enough time passes."
"Boss, it's not yet a situation where we should cover the shorts..."
"You're saying it'll drop the way you expect."
Panic was understandable.
Especially for stock investors.
The peculiar nature of the coin market was hard for them to grasp.
"I did give them proper fear."
"Yeah?"
"I figured if I dumped everything at once to bleed them dry, then pretended to throw them a lifeline only to dry them out again, it would work."
"You misjudged your opponent."
"What?"
Ordinary retail investors got scared the moment risk ballooned.
What if this thing really crashed?
Fear is only natural, right?
Real money was on the line.
You couldn't treat it like paper trading—whatever happens, happens.
That was why institutions with deep pockets held the advantage.
But the world was wide, and exceptions existed.
Click!
He lit a cigar.
A fairly useful new guy had just come aboard.
"Me too?"
"You can't even make money."
"Being stingy over one cigar."
He handed one to Andrew as well.
If the man ever learned what kind of cigar it was, he would faint on the spot.
If he asks, he'll figure it out.
Smoke filled the mouth.
A strangely familiar sensation was inevitable.
"Oh, this is a whiskey-aged cigar, right? Looks like they used something pretty good..."
"Pappy Van Winkle."
"What? Cough! Cough!"
"It's precious. Smoke it sparingly."
An adult's toy.
Cigars were sometimes aged as well.
The one they were smoking had been finished with whiskey.
An insanely good whiskey, at that.
A single bottle went for hundreds of millions of won.
No—even with money, it was nearly impossible to obtain. High-end bourbon of the rarest tier.
Tobacco leaves had been rested in the oak barrels that once held that whiskey.
Through a painstaking process they had been reborn as cigars.
Hoo~
It was impossible for the flavor to be anything less than exquisite.
A rich vanilla aroma and unapologetic woodiness came first.
Sweet-and-sour fruit notes followed close behind.
Cigars with such a kaleidoscope of scents were rare.
All thanks to aging in whiskey that exceptional.
He had secured them only through a special channel, and with considerable difficulty.
Andrew knew their value.
His hands trembled as he stole glances at his boss's face.
"Do you know why you failed?"
"..."
"I'm not chewing you out. Answer."
"I-I don't know, Boss!"
This was no farewell gift.
He was asking in earnest.
Hoo~
Drawing in the cigar smoke settled his nerves.
The trembling hands stilled.
At the same moment something clicked.
Andrew spoke as if he had just realized it.
"Maybe they were on drugs?"
"What?"
"I figured you'd need something that strong just to endure the fear."
In Korea it would have been a joke.
In America, drugs were everyday life.
You could find them anywhere around you.
Especially among investors.
Some of his own employees smoked marijuana instead of cigarettes.
In New York certain products were legal.
"If you hit something stronger..."
"No."
"Of course not, hehe."
"Worse than drugs. In a certain sense."
"?"
Andrew's guess wasn't entirely off base.
Front-line soldiers were in fact administered drugs.
Not as some kind of stimpack—because of fear.
Without them, maintaining reason was nearly impossible.
There's a method more effective than that.
It made soldiers fight with their lives on the line even harder.
History had already proven it.
"Religion?"
"Yeah."
"What kind of fresh bullshit are you about to spout now."
"..."
It might not land.
Especially for anyone who considered themselves an investor.
Investors are rational animals, after all.
Coins.
An extremely peculiar asset class.
Neither a company that earned money nor a raw material of any real value, yet traded at sky-high prices.
"No matter how I look at it, I..."
"Gambling?"
"Yes."
"Like penny stocks?"
Sora nodded.
She answered before he even finished speaking, leaving him momentarily speechless.
Of course stocks have those cases too.
Manipulated stocks. Meme stocks.
Prices that jumped several times—sometimes dozens of times—their original value.
Pure gambling on the surface.
But strictly speaking, a principle for the rise still existed.
Manipulated stocks rose because the operators had accumulated shares.
Meme stocks rested on liquidity plus short covering.
"But coins are..."
"Don't make sense?"
"Yes."
"To believe something that doesn't make sense—what do you need?"
"Ah."
"For the record, I don't believe in God."
Coins, by contrast.
You couldn't corner the market.
Someone who had coincidentally bought cheap seven years earlier might suddenly remember—
Oh right, I still have bitcoin!—and dump it.
The operators running the scheme would be left high and dry.
That was why operators bought out company presidents.
The same held from the meme-stock angle.
Meme stocks had been born from the GameStop saga.
Enormous liquidity poured into the shares.
It forced short covering from the institutions that had shorted.
And that only worked because of the strict laws of the U.S. stock market.
Mandatory short-covering periods.
A whole web of investor-protection statutes in operation.
None of that existed here.
The coin market was a lawless zone in all but name.
The more rational a person was, the less they wanted to buy.
"So..."
"It's religion. Getting it now?"
"Yes. The part I was wondering about feels resolved."
"Oh my."
"Ehehe."
Reaching this conclusion on her own would have been difficult.
But if she had researched it herself and arrived here, that was admirable.
He stroked Sora's head.
She looked like a sex machine, yet she had her unexpectedly cute sides.
"I understand why people buy coins..."
"Yeah."
"But the price jumping into the millions still doesn't sit right."
"That's not hard either."
This was not territory for reason or common sense.
If people had risen up for the Crusades, would they listen to a suggestion to settle things with dialogue?
Same principle.
The mental structure of coin investors.
To understand it, you had to approach from the domain of religion, not investment.
Well, Shincheonji or the Unification Church make decent examples.
Cults, right?
Setting the controversies aside, the fact that they thrived was undeniable.
The Unification Church even held sway over Japan.
Without exaggeration, they operated at the scale of a global conglomerate.
"Even to cults..."
"There's that perspective too. To people with faith, the actual substance of the religion doesn't matter."
The world was not populated solely by rational people.
Capture even a fraction of them and the scale became enormous.
They worshipped bitcoin.
Like a religion, they preached to others and swelled the ranks of believers.
"Policy plays a role as well."
"Policy?"
"America has been spraying money with low interest rates. In times like that, central control loosens to attract aggressive investment. Coins that aim for decentralization become an attractive speculative playground."
Bitcoin's surge.
The product of money and faith fused together.
The price rose.
Countless believers followed.
People who saw that flocked in after them.
Similar to the process that made modern art famous.
And one more reason.
This one he could not easily share even with Sora.
Tell her and he would only be labeled a conspiracy theorist.
He himself had paid no attention until he became a party to it.
Click!
He lit a cigar.
Thinking about coins somehow always brought cigars to mind.
Sora immediately crushed it into the ashtray.
She glared at him, then climbed onto the chair.
"You said you wouldn't smoke."
"My mouth was bored."
"You're doing this on purpose. Really."
A lewd female-superior position.
Having learned it this way from the start, Sora performed it without a second thought.
Getting taken by Sora is nice too.
She moved her tongue with initiative.
Licking his, sucking it—he almost wondered whether he was the one being eaten.
"Senior."
"Hm?"
"I have a request."
"What is it?"
"Will you grant it?"
She gently lifted his face, then licked her lips like the lid of a yogurt cup.
She knew how to do cute things too.
Born a seductress through and through.
She knew exactly the moment a man was most likely to grant a request.
When they shared body heat in bed.
A moment very much like that.
He brought his hand down with a sharp smack on Sora's round backside.
Jjuwap!
Because of the request, he pretended not to notice.
He enjoyed her delicious body at the same time.
Her skin was hot.
Combined with the cool air from the AC, it delivered a sweet-and-salty kind of pleasure.
When this sex machine fully activates, I might be the one who gets drained dry.
Value investing ending in a hostile takeover.
He would seize the initiative so that never happened.
"Hye-ri seems to be having a hard time lately."
"Hye-ri?"
"Yes. Because of the coin club. I think she'd be happy if Senior helped her."
Still manageable for now.
When he twisted his grip on her ass she flinched.
He gently pulled her head in and drove his tongue deep.
A real kiss.
He showed her exactly what it felt like to be eaten.
He chewed her tongue thoroughly and drew it into his own mouth.
"#$^!@^@#!"
Free will evaporated.
Clear drool spilled from the corners of her mouth, forced open by the stolen tongue.
He gripped the thick root of her tongue and refused to let go.
Sora, unable to move an inch—
Pak! Pak!
She slapped his back with her palms.
A surrender signal.
An indescribable sense of conquest washed over him.
"Delicious."
"Really... you have to grant the request."
"Sure~ whose request is it, after all."
How could a heart be so kind?
He had tasted her worry for her friend through the play of her tongue.
Even without a request.
It was his club.
Only Sora didn't know that.
He had already planned to intervene.
Coins were certainly an attractive asset.
But they were not the only attractive asset in the world.
He would teach her how social phenomena moved the stock market.
And that stocks were far more fun.