Yesterday, I told Buddy (my twelve-foot-tall 3D-printed purple plastic naked sentient statue of Buddy Hield that I mistakenly ordered from a custom 3D-printing place over a year ago) that he should invent his own cryptocurrency. The reason I told him to do that is so that we can do a “soft test” of his custom-designed cryptocurrency mining hardware that I also had him make for me.
I’m pretty much a cryptocurrency guru compared to average joe off the street, but I’m clueless when it comes to the actual implementation of actual cryptography algorithms. I’m also clueless when it comes to the networking side of a new crypto coin. I tried to look at some of the source code that’s out there, but it made my head hurt so I stopped. Now I’m convinced that it takes a genius to design new crypto from scratch. Luckily I have my own genius living with me and he doesn’t even have the hygiene and personality issues normally associated with human geniuses.
So I told Buddy the basics of how the cryptocurrency needed to function: it needs to be “minable” through algorithmic number-crunching, it needs to be decentralized, it needs to be secure, and it needs a ledger to keep track of transactions. I also told him that most new coins have some kind of social justice angle to them, or some sort of crazy business purpose with a lot of buzzwords, so that the hipsters want to invest in that coin instead of other coins. Buddy listened to me the whole time but I got the feeling that he already knew everything I was saying. So I left him alone with my computer for an hour while I ventured outside to get groceries.
When I got back and checked on his progress, I was floored. Buddy has already shown competency in machine code, but the hardware he designed must not use a standardized CPU operation set, because this code was completely beyond anything I have ever been exposed to in my life. The source code file was one solid jumble of characters with no apparent control flow that I could see. There were Cyrillic and Arabic characters in addition to the standard English characters I recognized. When I asked Buddy how it got compiled, he pointed at the code again, which must mean that the code running BuddyCoin (my tentative name for the new cryptocurrency) is also the compiler for the language that BuddyCoin is built on. Or something. It blows my mind every time I try to comprehend it.
I want to ask Buddy how this program/compiler gets loaded onto his hardware, but I’m scared of running it. Given Buddy’s advanced knowledge both of computing and financial markets, he may have set up BuddyCoin in such a way that it instantaneously causes runaway global prosperity. Or it could cause a devastating crash that will leave humanity destitute and lawless. All I want is to become a crypto billionaire by using his hardware to mine Bitcoin.
I can’t keep putting this off, though. Maybe I’ll test BuddyCoin in a non-networked state, stricly as a mining benchmark. Whatever happens, Buddy will always be my best friend.