I went to the blockchain because my coins were screaming.
Not metaphorically. I mean screaming. A high-pitched, margin-call shriek echoing through the fiber-optic desert like bats trapped in a Bloomberg terminal. You don’t ignore that kind of noise. You load up the laptop, spike the coffee with whatever’s left in the cabinet—two Modafinil, a microdose that stopped being micro three hours ago, and some nootropic stack a biohacker sold me in a Telegram channel that’s since been deleted.
The influencers said everything was fine. That’s how I knew it wasn’t.
Quarter million followers, dead eyes, calm voice, claiming he had no idea why the price was bleeding out like a gut-shot hog on a Vegas sidewalk. “Markets are irrational,” he said, blinking slowly. Or maybe he didn’t blink at all. Hard to tell at this point. The Modafinil was making everyone look like lizards in Silicon Valley hoodies. This man had never met a marginal buyer in his life. He thought price discovery happened on-chain, like Moses chiseling commandments into a hardware wallet.
That used to be true. Once. Back when the chain meant something. Back when scarcity was real and not just a PowerPoint slide with laser eyes.
So I crossed over.
Or maybe I had a seizure. The legal team will argue about this later.
The blockchain is a real place.
I don’t care what the whitepaper says. I don’t care what the computer science professors claim while drawing diagrams that look like paranoid origami. I was there. I walked its streets. I climbed its impossible staircases. I looked down into its mining pits and felt the vertigo of a man standing on a platform that exists in seven dimensions simultaneously while his inner ear insists on three.
The entrance is in San Francisco, naturally. Down an alley off Howard Street that only exists if you’re carrying a hardware wallet and at least three untraceable substances in your bloodstream. The door looks like a service entrance, the kind drug dealers use or software engineers sneaking into their own offices at 3 AM. But when you open it—when the Modafinil convinces you that opening mysterious doors is professional development—you’re standing at the top of a staircase that M.C. Escher designed during a nervous breakdown.
The stairs go up and down simultaneously. They also go sideways. Some of them lead to other stairs at angles that violate Euclidean geometry and possibly several zoning laws. You start descending and realize you’re climbing. You turn around and you’re facing the same direction. The walls are made of granite and light and compressed mathematics—blocks, literally blocks, stacked and interlocked like a prison designed by someone who thought prisons should also be art installations.
Each block is roughly the size of a Manhattan studio apartment and about as welcoming. They’re carved with transaction data, billions of tiny inscriptions covering every surface like obsessive graffiti in a language that looks almost like English but isn’t, quite. Hash functions. Nonces. Merkle roots. The words echo as you pass them, whispering their proofs-of-work like rosaries.
The stairs twist. I follow them because there’s no other option, or because the mushrooms have opinions about free will that my conscious mind hasn’t been briefed on yet.
The first level is the Mempool—a vast cylindrical chamber where the stairs spiral down around the perimeter like a parking garage designed by someone on ayahuasca. In the center, suspended in midair (or maybe supported by forces I can’t see because three-dimensional vision is a liability here), thousands of transactions float in a writhing mass. They look like paper, or like holograms, or like paper that’s pretending to be holograms. Each one glowing softly, pulsing with urgency, screaming its gas fee in neon numbers that change every second.
10 GWEI. 50 GWEI. 150 GWEI.
They’re bidding against each other for space in the next block, fighting with the desperation of people trying to board the last helicopter out of Saigon. Some of them have been floating here for hours, their glow fading to a sickly yellow as the fees around them spike higher. A few go dark entirely—cancelled, dropped, forgotten. They drift down into the darkness below the chamber where I assume there’s either a floor or an infinite void. The architecture doesn’t clarify.
I keep descending. The stairs branch. One path leads up while going down. Another leads through a wall that isn’t there when you get close to it. I take the middle route because the nootropics are insisting I think strategically, and the middle route looks like it might lead to something that could charitably be called ground level.
I emerge onto a plaza that can’t possibly exist.
It’s a massive open square, maybe a mile across, paved in hexagonal tiles that shift colors as you walk over them—red to green to blue to orange, each one showing a price ticker from some exchange somewhere. The plaza is surrounded on all sides by towers. Not buildings. Towers. They rise up impossibly high, each one a single continuous block—block 842,390, block 842,391, block 842,392—stacked like a city made from Jenga played by giants with no concept of mercy.
The towers connect to each other via bridges, but the bridges are also staircases, and the staircases are also waterfalls flowing upward. Miners—or their digital ghosts, or very sophisticated animations, the Modafinil refuses to commit—move along these paths like worker ants, carrying data, solving equations, their bodies flickering with heat and electricity.
The whole place hums. That 13.5-second heartbeat, constant, relentless, the pulse of a machine that never sleeps because sleep is for creatures with metabolisms instead of hashrates. The sound gets inside your skull. After a while you stop noticing it. After a while longer you realize you’ve started breathing in sync with it, and that’s probably bad, but the Modafinil says it’s fine, it’s optimization, you’re becoming efficient.
My coins were here somewhere. I could feel them—not metaphorically, but actually feel them, the way you can feel your phone vibrating in your pocket even when it isn’t. They were close. And they were afraid.
I started walking across the plaza, following the fear like a trail of breadcrumbs made from anxiety and cryptographic proofs.
The bots were everywhere.
They skittered across the hexagonal tiles like chrome beetles, each one the size of a small dog but moving with the horrible efficiency of industrial machinery. Sleek bodies made from brushed aluminum and arrogance, LED eyes scanning the plaza in microsecond intervals, processing prices faster than neurons fire. They moved in swarms, forming patterns that looked almost like murmurations of starbirds but felt more like autonomous weapons systems on lunch break.
One of them cut across my path, stopped, swiveled its sensor array toward me. Its chassis hummed with barely contained computation. A ticker scrolled across its side in red LED: $BTC -2.3% | LIQUIDATION CASCADE DETECTED | SHORTING
It didn’t acknowledge me. I don’t think it could. Consciousness requires inefficiency and these things had been optimized down to the last clock cycle. It calculated, determined I wasn’t a tradeable asset, and skittered away toward a cluster of coins huddled near one of the tower bases.
The coins scattered. The bot adjusted trajectory mid-stride with the sick precision of something that had never experienced doubt. It cornered three of them against a wall that was also somehow a floor—Escher logic, everything here connects at right angles that aren’t right—and started scanning them with a laser grid that looked like it could double as a weapons targeting system.
ANALYZING LIQUIDITY | ASSESSING DERIVATIVE EXPOSURE | CALCULATING OPTIMAL SHORT POSITION
The coins trembled. One of them tried to run. The bot was faster. It tagged the coin with a marker that looked like a glowing red sticker but probably represented some futures contract or perpetual swap. The coin dimmed immediately, its orange glow fading to that sickly jaundice color, crushed under the weight of synthetic supply it couldn’t even see.
I kept walking. You can’t help coins being hunted by bots. That’s like trying to help gazelles being hunted by drones. The food chain doesn’t care about your feelings, especially when the food chain runs on algorithms written by people who think empathy is a performance bug.
Further into the plaza, I found the degens.
They clustered around what looked like a fountain, except the fountain flowed upward and the liquid wasn’t water—it was price data, streaming live from a thousand exchanges, green and red numbers cascading up into the air before arcing over and crashing down like a waterfall in reverse gravity. The degens stood in this rain of data, staring up at it with the hollow-eyed devotion of people who’d forgotten what sunlight looked like.
They were physical in the way nightmares are physical. Solid enough to cast shadows, but their edges flickered like bad video compression. Most of them were young, or had been once, before the 72-hour trading sessions and the Adderall schedules that looked like shift work at a semiconductor factory. They wore hoodies—always hoodies, the universal uniform of people who’ve given up on laundry but not on leverage.
Their eyes were wrong. Pupils dilated to full moons, or contracted to pinpricks, or different sizes in the same head like their brains couldn’t agree on which reality to process. Some of them twitched rhythmically. Not nervous twitches—mechanical ones, the kind that come from too much dopamine agonism and not enough sleep in the same month.
“It’s coming,” one of them muttered, not to me, not to anyone, just to the data rain falling up around him. “The pump. It’s coming. I can feel it. I saw it in the order book. Whale accumulation. Look at the three-hour candles. Look at the—”
“Bro,” another one interrupted, grabbing his shoulder with a hand that shook like it was coming apart at the molecular level. “Bro. Bro. New token just dropped. Presale. Doxxed devs. I saw them in a Discord. Or maybe Telegram. Definitely one of those. Celebrity backing. Utility pending. Deflationary tokenomics. It’s the next—”
They both stopped mid-sentence and stared at the data fountain as the numbers shifted. A spike. $BTC +0.3% in thirty seconds.
“PUMP!” they screamed in unison, and suddenly all of them were screaming, pulling out phones and laptops from pockets that shouldn’t have been able to hold them, fingers flying across screens, buying, aping, leverage at 50x because 20x is for cowards and cowards don’t make it.
The spike reversed. $BTC -0.8%.
Silence. The hollow silence of dreams dying in real-time.
One of them started crying. Quiet, dignified tears that suggested this wasn’t his first liquidation, or his tenth. Another one laughed—the empty laugh of someone whose sense of humor had been replaced by coping mechanisms wearing a humor suit.
“Bottom’s in,” someone said. “This is the bottom.”
“You said that yesterday,” someone else replied.
“Yeah, but this time I’m right. I can feel it. I took a microdose. Clarity. Pure clarity. The charts are speaking to me.”
The mushrooms I’d taken made me wonder if the charts were speaking to me too, but my charts were mostly suggesting I sit down before I fell down, which seemed like reasonable advice that I immediately ignored.
The plaza lurched.
Not an earthquake—those at least respect geology—but a sudden, collective intake of breath, like the entire structure had just realized what number it was about to say out loud.
The hexagonal tiles beneath my feet flickered. Red. Green. Red again. Then they froze.
$BTC 66,666
The number hung there, perfectly centered on every surface at once. On the tiles. On the tower faces. In the air itself, projected in ghostly orange light like a sigil accidentally summoned by accountants.
No one cheered.
That was the unsettling part.
The degens stopped screaming mid-pump, mouths open, fingers hovering above buy buttons like parishioners caught halfway through a prayer they suddenly weren’t sure they believed in anymore. The bots paused—not because they were confused, but because the math demanded a reevaluation cycle. Even optimized systems have to acknowledge numerology when enough humans believe in it at scale.
66,666.
Close enough to prophecy to make people uncomfortable. Too symmetrical to be coincidence. The kind of number that makes otherwise rational men start whispering words like resistance and support as if they were ancient spells instead of marketing abstractions.
Somewhere high above, a tower face flashed:
SELL WALL DETECTED
Another followed:
OPTIONS EXPIRY CLUSTER | MAX PAIN CALCULATED
The number didn’t move.
That was worse than if it had dumped.
It just sat there, humming in time with the chain’s heartbeat, daring everyone to decide what it meant. Salvation. Damnation. Exit liquidity. Screenshot price. The mark of the beast rewritten by quants who’d never read a Bible but understood crowd psychology down to the decimal.
One of the older coins near me—2013 vintage, edges worn smooth by a decade of transfers—shuddered.
“…they always stop here,” it whispered.
“…everyone looks,” whispered another.
“…nobody asks who’s selling…”
The bots came back online.
The pause ended. Orders hit the book like hail. Shorts layered in above. Longs stacked underneath. A perfect lattice of synthetic conviction, engineered to make the number matter just long enough for it not to.
$BTC 66,665
A groan rolled across the plaza—not despair, not relief, but recognition. The sound of a crowd realizing it had just participated in a ritual without understanding who it was for.
The number slipped.
66,662.
66,658.
And the machine exhaled, satisfied.
I found the NFT graveyard on the eastern edge of the plaza, where the hexagonal tiles gave way to something that looked like a mass grave crossed with an art gallery crossed with a server farm having an existential crisis.
They were mounted on walls that extended up into the darkness—thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, each one a JPEG crucified on the blockchain with a small placard underneath showing its minting date and last sale price. Most of the prices were in Wei now, fractional cents, the kind of numbers that require scientific notation to express how worthless they’d become.
Apes. So many apes. Different hats, different expressions, different backgrounds—cyan, magenta, that specific shade of orange that in 2021 somehow convinced people this was worth six figures. Their eyes followed you as you walked past, which was either a clever bit of animated programming or the mushrooms editorializing again. Hard to say.
Pixelated punks. Generative art that looked like a screen saver from 1997. Cartoon animals with “utility roadmaps” on their placards that all ended around Q2 2022 with “METAVERSE INTEGRATION” or “TOKEN AIRDROP” or just “TBD” which is what you write when you’ve run out of lies but haven’t run out of other people’s money yet.
Some of them glitched as I passed. Metadata errors. Broken links. IPFS hashes pointing to 404 pages or servers that had been decomissioned or possibly seized by the FBI, there was a lot of that going around in ’23. These were the suspicious ones, the honeypots and rugpulls, the pump-and-dumps that had been minted on a Tuesday and abandoned by Friday after the founders had converted the ETH to cash and the cash to plane tickets to countries without extradition treaties.
One NFT—a crudely drawn safe with laser eyes, the word HODL in Comic Sans underneath, mounted on a wall that was also somehow the floor depending on which angle you approached from—flickered as I walked past.
”…hey…” it whispered. Not spoke. Whispered. A dry, desperate sound like wind through a dead server farm.
I stopped. You don’t stop. Stopping is amateur hour. But the mushrooms had opinions about politeness.
”…presale whitelist…” it whispered. ”…eighteen twitter spaces listeners…utility coming Q4 2021…celebrity backing…floor price…community…roadmap…”
The words came slower and slower, like a music box winding down, like a prayer no one believed anymore being recited by muscle memory alone.
“It’s 2026,” I said.
”…utility coming…” it whispered, and then just kept whispering, the same two words on loop, quieter and quieter until it faded into the background hum of the blockchain’s heartbeat.
I kept walking. Behind me, a thousand other NFTs whispered their pitches into the void—overlapping sales spiels and roadmap promises and utility claims blending together into a susurrus of delusion that sounded almost like music if you’d taken enough drugs to think desperation was melodic.
I found my coins in a narrow alley between two tower blocks—an impossible space that shouldn’t have existed because the towers were flush against each other from every other angle, but here in this crack between blocks 842,390 and 842,391 there was room. Barely. A thin vertical space where the light came in sideways and gravity worked at an angle that made standing upright feel like a political statement.
They were huddled together, maybe twenty of them, pressed against the wall like prisoners against a firing squad. Their orange glow had faded to something closer to rust. Something closer to surrender.
They didn’t speak. Coins don’t speak—anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or high, and I was definitely high but I wasn’t lying. They whispered. A soft, dry sound like paper sliding against paper, like wind through a canyon, like the last breath of something that had once been worth defending.
”…six claims…” one of them whispered.
”…nine…” whispered another.
”…the ETFs…”
”…the futures…”
”…the perps…they never stop…they never close…”
”…wrapped three times…backed by nothing…naked shorts…”
”…they made more of us than exist…”
The whispers overlapped, a chorus of quiet horror, each coin carrying the weight of multiple derivative contracts, multiple paper claims, multiple layers of synthetic exposure that some trader in a glass tower had conjured into existence with a few keystrokes and a margin account.
I knelt down. The Modafinil was wearing off and the mushrooms were ramping up and my inner ear was staging a coup about which direction was down. The hexagonal tiles beneath my knees showed red numbers. Everything was red now. Red on the tiles, red on the walls, red in the price tickers scrolling across the tower faces high above.
”…what happens…” I started to ask, but I already knew what happened. What always happens. The paper claims multiply. The real supply stays fixed. The price gets manufactured by people who don’t hold the asset, don’t want the asset, just want the spread between synthetic long and synthetic short positions that they can pyramid into leverage they’ll never have to actually deliver on.
”…it used to mean something…” one of the older coins whispered. Early UTXO, 2014 vintage, back when mining was something you could do on a laptop and “blockchain” was a word that made normal people’s eyes glaze over instead of making venture capitalists salivate.
”…scarcity was real…”
”…twenty-one million…”
”…they can’t make more of us…”
”…but they did anyway…they made us out of paper…out of promises…out of derivatives that settle in cash so no one ever has to deliver anything real…”
The whispers faded. Around us, the bots skittered past, hunting. The degens screamed about pumps that would never come. The NFTs pitched themselves to no one. And somewhere far above, on a trading floor three time zones and a dozen regulatory jurisdictions away, a derivatives desk added another layer of synthetic exposure to their book and called it liquidity provision.
“I can’t help you,” I said, which was true. Or maybe I didn’t say it, maybe I just thought it, but either way the coins heard me. Everything here hears everything. That’s the problem with immutable ledgers—nothing gets forgotten, but nothing gets resolved either. Just recorded. Just stored. Just stacked into blocks that connect to other blocks in structures that grow forever upward and downward and sideways all at once.
”…we know…” they whispered.
Getting out was harder than getting in, which is how these things always work.
The stairs multiplied. Every path looped back on itself. I climbed down and found myself higher than where I started. I turned left and faced right. The Escher architecture that had seemed playful on the way in now felt malicious, or maybe just indifferent, which is worse. At least malice acknowledges you exist.
The bots were following me now. Not chasing—just following, maintaining perfect distance, their sensors tracking my heat signature or my wallet address or my general air of someone who’d gotten in way over their head. One of them displayed a message on its LED panel: POSITION DETECTED | EXPOSURE CALCULATED | AWAITING LIQUIDATION THRESHOLD
I walked faster. The plaza spun. Or I spun. Or the concept of stable reference frames had been deprecated in this version of reality. The data fountain flowed upward, then sideways, then inside-out. The degens howled about some new pump while being liquidated on the old one. The towers grew taller, or I grew smaller, or scale became negotiable.
Then I saw it—floating above the plaza like a billboard from a civilization that had given up on subtlety.
NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR COINS
The letters flickered like a neon sign in a district that lost power three recessions ago. Some of the words were dimmer than others, fading in and out like a truth that had stopped mattering somewhere around the time the first Bitcoin ETF got approved and everyone agreed to pretend that custody didn’t matter as long as the number went up.
The slogan looked tired. It looked like it had lost a war it didn’t know it was fighting until the armistice was already signed.
Above it, newer, brighter, burning with the confidence of a lesson that hadn’t been learned yet:
NOT YOUR DERIVATIVES, NOT YOUR PRICE
The letters glowed orange and red, pulsing in time with the blockchain’s heartbeat, or maybe with my own heartbeat, or maybe those had synchronized somewhere around the third Modafinil and there was no meaningful distinction anymore.
And below both of them, scrawled in what looked like corrupted smart contract code—or possibly just the mushrooms giving me religious visions about market structure—a third message:
THE CASINO DOESN’T CARE IF YOU KNOW IT’S RIGGED
THE CASINO IS ALSO ON DRUGS
BETTER DRUGS THAN YOURS
The words flickered and glitched, fragmenting into hexadecimal and reassembling themselves like they were being compiled in real-time by something that wasn’t sure if it was a warning or a threat or just an observation about the nature of modern finance.
I stared at it. The bots skittered past below, hunting. A degen somewhere screamed about a pump. An NFT whispered its pitch. And the billboard just hung there, crackling with static and truth and the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from watching the same con run for the tenth time while everyone insists this time is different.
The Modafinil told me to take notes. The mushrooms told me notes were pointless because everything was already written in the blockchain and the blockchain never forgets and never forgives and never stops humming its 13.5-second heartbeat.
I kept walking.
Finally—and I can’t tell you how because the path didn’t make sense even while I was walking it—I found a door. Not the door I’d entered through. A different door. It opened onto a staircase that went horizontal for a while before remembering that stairs are supposed to have a vertical component.
I climbed out into an alley.
Not the alley I’d entered from. A different alley. New York, maybe, or Singapore, or some composite of every financial district that had ever facilitated the conversion of hope into fees. The door closed behind me with a sound like a block being validated.
My laptop was still in my hands. The screen showed charts. Red candles bleeding into more red candles into the kind of price action that looks like stairs going down forever, which at this point felt appropriate.
I pulled up the livestream. The influencer was still talking. Different hoodie, same dead eyes, same calm voice explaining why the price was doing what it was doing using words that explained nothing.
“Markets are irrational,” he said, or had said, or was always saying in an eternal loop across every video he’d ever made.
In the chat: rocket emojis from bots. “Buying the dip” from degens who’d been buying every dip since $60K. “Wen moon?” from accounts that were probably also bots pretending to be degens pretending to care.
An NFT project announced a “strategic pivot” in my Twitter feed.
A derivatives desk in London opened new short positions.
The price ticked down another percent.
Somewhere deep in the blockchain—in that impossible plaza between towers that connect at angles that shouldn’t exist—my coins were still there, still huddled in their narrow alley, still whispering their quiet horror to each other while the bots hunted and the degens screamed and the whole crystalline structure hummed its 13.5-second heartbeat forever and ever and ever.
”…six claims…”
”…nine claims…”
”…they made more of us than exist…”
The whispers echoed up through the fiber-optic cables, through the cellular networks, through the quantum foam of market microstructure, and emerged on a trading desk as a price that went down.
The Modafinil had definitely worn off now. The mushrooms were making everything look like it meant something. My lawyer—both of them, the smart contract and the one who bills by the hour—would tell me this whole experience was inadmissible as evidence of anything except poor judgment and possibly tax-deductible research expenses.
I should probably eat something.
I should probably sleep.
I should probably check the charts one more time first.
Just one more time.
The laptop screen glows. The staircases inside the blockchain continue their impossible paths. The billboard still flickers somewhere in that plaza, still warning people who’ll never read it about games they’ve already lost.
And somewhere a bot calculates its next trade while a degen takes another microdose and a coin whispers its quiet surrender into the dark.
”…they made more of us than exist…”
The horror isn’t that it’s rigged.
It’s that it works.
It clears.
It settles.
And nobody has to deliver anything real.
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