Today I overcame my fear and plugged in the custom cryptocurrency mining hardware that Buddy made for me. Buddy is my 12-foot-tall 3D-printed naked purple plastic statue of Buddy Hield and he’s basically a genius the likes of which could go toe-to-toe intellectually with any of the greatest thinkers of our time. One of the many ways that his genius has manifested itself is in the custom design and implementation of circuitry that can churn through CPU-intensive crypto mining algorithms like they’re simple addition and subtraction. At least, that was the assumption before I turned the thing on, though I had no reason to doubt Buddy’s abilities.
I had Buddy load a cryptocurrency of his own creation onto the machine to test its capabilities. I’m calling it “BuddyCoin” for now, since coming up with a tech-sounding name like “Chainix” or “LuxLedger” or “Angulaz” is sort of pretentious in my view. Because Buddy finds our human computing paradigms to be extremely restrictive, he made his own compiler (the “BuddyCompiler”) for his own programming language (“BuddyLang”) that BuddyCoin was coded in. My own programming intuition tells me that BuddyLang is very close to assembly code for the CPU’s in Buddy’s custom hardware (the “BuddyBox”), but I can’t know for sure. He doesn’t say anything about it. He just babbles excitedly and points at the code like I should be able to understand his ultra-advanced thought processes.
I might have screwed up the BuddyCoin test run though. I mistakenly had an ethernet cable plugged into the BuddyBox. When the machine came to life and I was monitoring its output on my bank of monitors (connected, again, by a proprietary cable that was able to send 8K resolution to six different monitors over a single cable the width of a piece of dental floss), I was mostly concerned with how fast the algorithms were getting solved to create each BuddyCoin. Let me tell you, it was fast. Really fast. Buddy’s code printed out some neat graphs that compared BuddyCoin to the hardest-possible Bitcoin algorithms, and, from what I could tell, the BuddyBox would mine every remaining Bitcoin in a microsecond. BuddyCoin was designed to have a coin limit in the quintillions, so it didn’t finish that quickly.
The TV was on in the background, and when I looked over, there was a news ticker on the bottom that was reporting unexpected fluctuations in the financial markets. That always happens, so I didn’t pay much attention until they said the words “New, state-of-the-art cryptocurrency made by an unknown party.” Panicking, I immediately yanked the network connection out of the BuddyBox, and then, thirty seconds later, the TV people were reporting confusedly that the financial markets had stabilized, but the new cryptocoin had already been added to the major crypto exchanges and was trading at extremely high prices due to its immense mining difficulty. They said that one large-scale Bitcoin-mining operation in China had switched to this new coin, but after fifteen minutes, had not even mined 1% of one coin on all their racks and racks of specialty hardware.
Meanwhile, my screens were telling me that I had about seventy million BuddyCoin in my BuddyCoin wallet.
I’m scared, guys. This isn’t a game. This is real life. And in real life, I think I’m a millionaire if not a billionaire. I’m shaking right now. My only hope is that BuddyCoin crashes when people realize that it can’t be easily mined and that it’s maybe a hoax or something. The ledger’s already out in the world and it shows me having some insane amount of BuddyCoin pre-mined. They’re going to find me and Buddy. Every crypto nerd in the universe will want to know who I am.
I don’t blame Buddy, though. He only did what I asked of him. He’s my best friend, and that means that I’ll see us through this predicament no matter what.