Pain in the Bot
Mar 09, 2018
I'll be honest; I'm a bully. I'm not proud of it, and I'm working on it, but the more I try to suppress my conquering instincts, the more it seeps through the cracks of my life in insidious ways. Thus, I try to focus those needs to just where others are willing to play; which of course led me to crypto.
I wasn't always a bully, but certain childhood events created the monster I am today. Take Monopoly for example. My favorite Monopoly piece was the old-school racecar. It sets the tone for how I like to play the game: fast. I just couldn't wait to get my real estate all lined with hotels, CRUSHING my little sister into poverty as I extorted nonsensical rents from her meager funny money pile. Oh, the joyous memories; except of course when I was losing to my tyrant sister, as she unjustly occupied real estate better suited to my noble pursuits. Curse the gods.
Looking back, Monopoly always seemed like an excellent example of real life, and some parents might even promote this as educational for all things investment-related, but the truth is, it falls WAY short on some very lucid aspects. The most notable false point being that we all start equally with nothing. In fact, I'd say the vast majority of childhood games promote the notion that we all start equally, and luck is the differentiator, but even that's blind so everyone has an equal chance of being lucky.
Fast forward to being an adult.
The first striking contrast of real life to board games is the fact that when you start to enter the game of life, you start in last place (at least for most of us) and virtually everyone is very far ahead of you. By the time you start to figure things out, you're unhappily married, stuck in a mortgage, fat, stressed, and miserable. How the fuck did I end up here? I didn't see any of this coming. Where are my hotels?? I have no get out of jail card!
Life is full of evil traps. Love. Religion. Ego. Sales people. Whatever. Everywhere around you, someone smarter than you created something that you'd fall headfirst into, and by the time you 'get' the trick, you're up to your eyeballs in quicksand and can't get out.
This sad and dismal portrayal of life isn't as stark as we choose to see it (with careful administration of denial), but there is one trap that stands above the rest, one that gives us no luxury of denial, one that liberates the lizard demon within us all... It's the COLISEUM of GREEEEED, otherwise known as the CRYPTOSPHERE!!!
Blood, guts, and glory prevail in this nightmarish ecosystem of lies, manipulation, and treachery. It truly is the focal point of all our deviant human traits that creates this metaphorical Hell.
Allow me to digress. Let's take a look at what money is first of all. Money is a token of labor, that's it, that's all. Without the means to convert money to labor, it has no use. For example, I can pay someone to paint my house, or I can buy a car that someone built. Somewhere, somehow, if I'm using money, people are being made to work. It's value ostensibly arises from the pain of losing money, which you can only recover with physical effort. It's this pain of effort we'd like to avoid that makes us fight so hard for money.
The second point I'd like to make is that there is only one money tree (money out of thin air), and only the governments can pick from it. This means that for the rest of us, there is no access to a money tree, there are only other people that we can take money from. In other words, any money that you end up with, you 'outsmarted' from someone else; whether that be from the caliber of your sales pitch, or sold something for more than you paid for it, or indirectly by being a better employee than the person that didn't get your job. The point is, money always comes from someone else, shifting your obligation for physical labor onto their backs. Don't ever think that the money in your pocket came from outer space, someone less fortunate than you had to give it up.
Now, back to Hell. The cryptocurrency exchanges (even stock market exchanges for that matter) evolved to provide a safe outlet for us to satisfy our very primitive basic instinct of greed. In its purest form, greed's purpose is to make us fight for food, but eons of evolution have occluded that basic purpose to further include accumulation of tokens of wealth, such as: arrows, shiny rocks, gold, mansions, megayachts, cars in space; anything that liberates us from the injustices of the aforementioned trap-laden life.
Greed runs subdued in normal life because it's quickly doused with fervent chastising by the weaker majority, but there are warriors amongst us, dissatisfied with complacency, burdened with an unfulfilled sense of entitlement, inordinately suffering from the very mediocrity the masses find comforting. No sir, we are drawn to the field of battle, not for hate for the others, but for the promise of freedom it whispers, though a little bit of hate goes a long way too.
Now, dear reader, I want you to do something for me; I want you to forget who you are in real life, I want you to imagine putting on a full kevlar-chainmail armor suit, put the scariest horn-studded helment on, pick your weapon of choice, put your 10 XRP gold pieces in your satchel, and then slowly and massively walk into the COLISEUM of GREEEEED!!! The legions of fans are cheering, your eyes adjust to the sunlight, and immediately you see carnage everywhere. Body parts, rivers of blood, screaming from all directions... HELL!! You quickly realize that this battle has been going on for a very long time, and you're far behind.
The first opponent you can't help but see is a massive whale creature sitting in the middle of the arena. It's lazily mopping up noobs with its slow tail movements, effortlessly tossing them right out of the arena while they scream, "XRP is a shit coinnnnnn!!". You catch on quick, and learn to hop over the whale's tail swipes.
It doesn't take long to realize that despite all the gold coins in the arena, there's not a single one of them on the ground. It seems that if you're going to get any more gold, you're going to have to rip it out of another person's hands, and they all look like they're ready to fight to the death to hang onto their gold.
Some beautiful smiling creature walks up to you with a pile of gold in her hands saying, "Isn't this technology wonderful? All this terrific news. I can't wait till I can help everyone I ever..." LOP! Off goes her head! as a 15-foot flash-crash chimpanzee swings through, snagging the gold out of her lifeless hands. You scream in horror!
Before you even get a chance to grasp what just happened, a pair of identical twin slender creatures approach you saying, "Sir, we've come to save you! Our uniquely shaped gold bars are about to explode in value, and we'd be happy to trade our extras for some of your lowly XRP gold". You see they are starving, but instead of sharing your gold, you realize that you have the advantage. Crying, they beg for mercy, but you remind yourself that they voluntarily stepped into the arena, so you take their gold from them, leaving them with nothing. Your satchel is heavier now, it feels good; and so do you. They scream of injustice, you scream of lambo.
You find some other warriors carrying XRP gold, thinking, "at last, I found my kind!", and you partner up and organize into a choir of FOMO. Now the battle against the other teams takes a turn, the FOMO pays off, the gold fills your and your team's satchels, and in short order, all that remains of the opposition are some oblivious whales and a pittance of mentally dysfunctional altcoin holders, all but destroyed by the regulatory nuke that XRP was immune to.
Now the wait. Time keeps passing. You don't get it. Why is your gold still decreasing? There is no more competition!?? More time passes, more gold is missing. Your faith is rattled. You're hungry. You're tired. You start feeling the sting of wasting so much time for nothing. Maybe this shit really is all a scam.. Maybe I've been the sucker all along and I'm just the last to admit it.
Then you see them.. Bots. Indiscernible at first, and you have no idea how long they've been there, but there they are alright. Working together like ants, slowly picking away at everyone's stash, one crumb at a time. Tens of thousands of them. There's nothing you can do to stop them. Your armor is defenseless against them, they squeeze through your fingers, and find their way into your satchel uninhibited. All you can do is helplessly watch your value be depleted.
You take a look around and finally notice, OMFJ, lots of the warriors, even your own teammates, have remote controls! Everyone that's winning has an army of bots! The entire arena is rigged! You yell at them, "HEY, that's not fair! You're all cheating!!" They laugh heartily, replying, "Did you think this was Monopoly or something?? This is war, buddy!!"
You scream to the arena referee, FOUL!! These bots are illegal, immoral, and it's cheating!! The referee looks down at you and smiles... and then turns his back to you.
You turn to the regulations emperor watching from his mighty perch.. "Sire! Please help us! We are dying out here and they are taking advantage of us!" The regulations emperor stands, looks you in the eyes and asks, "Did you stop yourself from taking the twins' rent money when you had the advantage?".. Suddenly you've become cast in the very light of unconscionable greed you tried to cast upon the greedy bot owners. You realize you are no better than they, and would be the first to do the same if given the opportunity. Sucks seeing yourself in the mirror like that.
Frustrated at the inability to defeat the bots, one after another, your teammates drop their coins and exit the arena. The rest of the still-hopefuls in the team collect them, but you can see the weariness in their eyes. Even now, when you look at your golden XRP, it's not so golden any more. Then a bit of panic sets in. Oh shit, what if this starts caving! What if we really are just a huge bubble after all!
Desperate, you offload your XRP to the dear but few team members remaining, feeling maybe a little bad that you took advantage of their misplaced optimism, but a little satisfying snicker does escape your lips. At least now you feel the weight of the world come off your shoulders. Sure you don't have anything to show for all that fighting, but at least you can stop the bleeding, which is more than you can say for the remaining holdout suckers, I mean your buddies.
You turn to say goodbye before leaving the arena, but you are shocked to see your teammates laughing, then not just laughing, but changing shapes, growing rapidly, exposing their true massive demonic form with HUGE satchels filled with XRP Gold that they've secretly been collecting from the others they've convinced to give up. Now that XRP Gold is positively glowing bright, now blinding, now burning. Then, with a bang that would put Zeus on his ass, those demons that stole your gold, blast into the heavens above as the skies fill with XRP gold, far out of your reach.
Fucking... bastards...
So just remember when it feels like you're getting your ass handed to you in the crypto battlefield; you signed up for this, and it's a winner-take-all, no-holds-barred game, and nobody is going to press the "start over" button to level the playing field for your arrival. Leave your hugs at home, piety is a liability, and you can't trust nobody. If you're going to win at this game of all games, the one game where it's allowed, nay, SANCTIONED, to bash anyone and everyone's head in by any means available, you have to be prepared to fight till the end, to accept and expect lies and injustice, and... you must go it alone.
As mom always told me...friends are for pussies.
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