S3E2: Champing at the Bitcoins (GaPJaxie)
One day, Twilight had an idea. It was a wonderful idea, magnificent, delightful, pleasant, and after she consulted her thesaurus, it was also stupendous, phenomenal, peachy, and “something else.” It put a spring in her step all morning, and made her sing for sheer joy as she went about her routine.
(As a princess, Twilight normally avoided singing while brushing her hair, as it inevitably resulted in woodland creatures flying in from the Everfree to attempt to assist her, and they always did something fancy with her mane that felt too formal. But on that day, she was so happy she didn’t even mind how many braids that manticore made.)
“Hey, Twilight,” Starlight called as she trotted down the palace’s main stairwell towards the dining room. “Forest animals did your mane again?” Spike had made a heaping pile of pancakes for breakfast, flavored with little bowls of syrup, butter, fruit, and quartz. Trixie had even taken some quartz to be polite, though she mostly pushed it around her plate.
“It looks nice,” Trixie agreed, as Twilight pulled out a chair to sit down. “Like a princess from… what’s that movie? Princess Bride.”
“You mean Star Wars,” Spike corrected her, indicating the elaborate loops around Twilight’s ears. “It’s the buns.”
“Starlight says that I can’t comment on how nice Twilight’s buns are,” Trixie said, eliciting a flinch from Twilight. “You know, now that we’re ‘serious.’ She won’t even—”
“No,” Twilight lifted a hoof, silencing conversation around the table. “No, we’re not doing that bit this morning. Everypony, I have an announcement. A household announcement, you might say. Or a royal decree, since I’m a princess.”
“A space princess,” Trixie observed, and somecreature kicked her under the table. “Fine, what is it?”
“I think,” Twilight locked eyes on Starlight and Trixie, “since you two both have jobs and can support yourselves, that if you’re going to keep living in my palace, you should have to pay rent.”
She looked so pleased to say it. Her ears perked up, her tail lifted, she even smiled and shifted in her chair to sit up that much straighter. Every element of her posture was tinged with anticipation, intently focused on Starlight’s reaction.
“Sure,” Starlight said, with a shrug. “That seems fair. Do you accept Bitcoin?”
Twilight’s shoulders sagged, and her ears drooped. “Well I… wait. What do you mean, ‘Bitcoin’? Like, you want to pay your rent entirely in one-bit coins?”
“No. Like, Bitcoin. You know. Bitcoin?” When Twilight showed no signs of comprehension, Starlight got up from the table. “Sorry, one moment.”
She wandered into the next room. Twilight could hear grunting, heaving, straining, the chime of unicorn magic.
Then, Starlight came back into the dining room, carrying a single enormous coin. It must have been a foot and a half across, and on a brief estimate, might have weighed seventy pounds. One side of the coin was stamped with Starlight’s face and the motto “A Sucker is Born Every Minute,” the other side had a mandatory legal disclaimer, etched into the metal in a tiny font.
Starlight dropped it onto Twilight’s table. The edge bit into the wood, permanently scarring the oak.
“No.” Twilight said. “No, I refuse. You have to pay your rent in money, real money. Not whatever extended practical joke this is.”
“That’s fine,” Starlight said. “Give me a few hours to go sell this. They’re worth like, forty-thousand bits each at this point.”
“Fifty thousand,” Trixie corrected, her horn faintly aglow. “No, wait, ten thousand. No, twenty, thirty, five, sixty. Okay, it’s back to around forty.”
“Goodness, busy trading day,” Starlight replied. Trixie shrugged and went back to her pancakes, crushing the quartz into a powder with her unicorn magic in an ill-advised attempt to actually try it.
Silence hung over the table.
“Spike,” Twilight said. “Take a note. I don’t know what this is yet, but I need to review the Equestrian legal code to find out how I can arrest them both for it.”
“Better judges than you have tried, Twilight.” Trixie said, before taking a big bite of her pancakes. A loud crunch echoed through the dining room.
As politely as one could, Trixie spat out blood and bits of her teeth. “I think I need to go to the dentist.”
Twilight assembled all her friends and the Elements of Harmony, in the hope that Starlight would for the first time in her life have the honor of being blasted with rainbow lasers. Starlight felt that it was a little mean-spirited for Twilight to point out that sometimes the elements disintegrated evildoers outright.
“But it’s not money,” Fluttershy said, for the third time.
“Right,” Starlight said, turning the giant coin around. “That’s what it says on the back. ‘Mandatory disclaimer: the monarchy won’t let me tell you this is money, even though you can save it, spend it, and what is money anyway? But the government doesn’t want you thinking you could get super-rich investing in Bitcoins, so, legally, this isn’t money, wink.’”
“It actually says, ‘wink,’” Twilight pointed out, lifting a hoof to indicate the offending word.
“Yeah, Trixie wrote the copy. I mean, it’s fine.” Starlight shrugged. “Besides, you don’t want ponies thinking they could get super rich investing in this, right?”
“Because they won’t!”
“Come on,” Rainbow Dash interjected. “Just because you’re not going to YOLO the entire treasury on memecoins doesn’t mean other horses can’t hodl.”
Twilight shut her eyes and lifted her hooves to her temples, attempting to rub away her rapidly developing headache. “Rainbow, say that again using only real words.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“What about the motto?” Pinkie demanded, pointing at the coin. “That does seem super scammy.”
“Yeah,” Starlight nodded. “Also Trixie, but don’t worry, we’re fixing that in the next update. From now on, it’ll be in pony latin. Illic 'potator natus omni momento.”
“That does somehow seem more respectable.”
“Wait.” Twilight’s head jerked up from the table, eyes flashing open. “What do you mean, the next update?”
Starlight sighed, and prepared to once again run through the same explanation over again. “Look,” she said, reaching up to the enormous coin. She twisted the metal rendition of her own face, revealing the hollow compartment inside the coin. Within that compartment was a ledger, a quill, and a bottle of ink, all of which she produced for the room.
“Bitcoins,” she explained, “aren’t actual coins, they’re a distributed ledger of value. Whenever you want to spend one, you update the ledger to reflect the transaction.” She mimed writing with a quill. “Then send copies of that transaction by mail to every other Bitcoin holder, wait two to four weeks for processing, and once they update their ledgers, the coin is spent.”
“So it’s currency—”
“Legally, not money,” Starlight pointed out, sing-song.
Twilight ground her teeth. “So it’s like currency, except it takes two to four weeks to spend, you have to pay postage every time you use it so there’s huge transaction fees, most places don’t accept it, and you have to lug around a seventy pound ‘coin’ everywhere you go.”
“And the ledger itself is made from the skins of endangered species, yes.”
Fluttershy lifted a hoof, but before she could ask her question, Starlight cut in: “And explaining why the ledger has to be made from endangered species skins would require math.” The hoof went down.
“Starlight, why in Celestia’s name would anypony want this? It seems inferior to regular currency in every way.”
“Some ponies think you can use it to buy drugs or other illegal compounds without the government finding out about it,” Starlight said. “Since no physical coins change hooves, it’s just a ledger, there’s no DNA evidence to follow.”
“But…” Applejack raised a hoof. “Doesn’t the ledger… you know. Record who spent what on what? Like, if Trixie used it to buy drugs, wouldn’t the ledger say, ‘Trixie bought some drugs from Shady Joe?’”
“Yeah. Trixie didn’t really think that part through,” Starlight let out a long sigh and lowered her head. “And I’m trying to get her some help, okay?”
“Wait, I jus’ made that up.” Applejack’s ears perked up. “Is there a real ‘Shady Joe’? And how much does he charge? Because my usual uh…” She glanced at Twilight. “Nevermind.”
“So, other than doing crime badly,” Twilight hissed. “It has no value at all. Is that right?”
“It’s an investment!” Starlight replied, lifting her head and adding an upbeat kick to her voice. “This coin has appreciated in value 10,000% in the last week alone. If you invested in Bitcoins, you too could be rich.”
“And where would that money come from?”
“From other ponies who think it’s a great investment.”
“Starlight,” Twilight’s hoof ground back into her temples. “That’s a ponzi scheme. If the payout from an investment comes from other ponies who think it’s a good investment, it’s a ponzi scheme.”
“Pone-zi scheme,” Pinkie corrected.
“No, it’s artificial scarcity.” Starlight ran her hoof down over the coin. “If everypony could make diamonds whenever they wanted, they’d be worthless. Just shiny rocks. Diamonds are special because they’re rare. Well, Bitcoins are rare. Ponies want them, and there’s only so many to go around, so they appreciate in value. Simple as that.”
“And, why are they rare?”
“I made them rare because I wanted to be super-rich without going to jail for running a ponzi scheme.”
A long silence came over the room. Several of Twilight’s friends coughed.
“What?” Starlight raised an eyebrow. “You told me to stay out of jail.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Besides,” Starlight continued. “The concept of artificial scarcity has so many other applications. For instance, last month, I bought Rarity’s entire stock of tophats. Then I created unique Bitcoin like icons, each of which was emblazoned with the image of one of those tophats. Since only so many of these tokens will ever exist, they’re real collectors items! Then I sold them for a million bits and burned the actual tophats to generate buzz.”
“Wait,” Applejack lifted a hoof. “And Rarity went along with this?”
Rarity looked up from her gold-plated smartphone, her latest dress being made entirely out of lustrous pearls and fabric pressed from rare stamps. “Sorry, what was that?”
“Nevermind.”
“But nopony actually ever wore the hats?” Pinkie Pie checked.
“I mean, they had a unique claims ticket to the top-hat. It’s like having the top hat in every way except wearing it. I was thinking of calling them Non-Fabric Tophats, or NF-”
“Stop,” Twilight sat up straight, lifting a hoof. “No. Enough. Enough. You’ve created a ponzi-scheme, which narrowly avoids the legal definition of being a ponzi scheme only by creating artificial scarcity, specifically for your awful pseudo-currency that’s made from endangered species and whose only purpose is to buy drugs and extract wealth from the ponies who trusted you. Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t blast you with the elements of harmony.”
Starlight looked at Rarity. After a moment, she cleared her throat, and Rarity looked up from her phone -- which she had been using to purchase another rental property. “Oh, right. Veto. Elements not assembled… etcetera.”
“Fine,” Twilight growled. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t throw you in the dungeon.”
“Well, you wanted me to be able to pay rent, right?”
“Are you offering to bribe me?” Twilight was aghast. “You think you can just throw some gold at me and I’ll forget about the whole--” A bag clinked. “Wow, that is a lot of money. And you’d pay this every month?”
One day, Twilight had an idea, though Spike had recently misplaced her thesaurus, so it didn’t even occur to her to describe her idea as “gnarly” or “recherché.” It was a good idea though, and it put a lightness in her hooves as she went about her morning routine, chatting with the manticore and his bird friends about life in the Everfree.
“Good morning, Starlight,” Twilight called as she made her way down the palace steps towards the breakfast table. Trixie’s new teeth were made from diamonds, which enabled her to chew the quartz without harm, though Spike still wasn’t sure why she wanted to. “I had an idea today.”
“Another one! And in the same year,” Starlight grinned as she applied syrup to her own pancakes. “You’re on a roll.”
“I am going to tax Bitcoins,” Twilight said, turning up her nose. “It’s high time the holders of these alternate pseudo-currencies paid their fair share.”
Again, she waited for Starlight’s reaction, and again, Starlight said only: “Sure, that seems fair.”
A silence hung over the table.
“Oh.” Starlight dabbed at her face with a napkin. “I don’t hold any of the coins myself, Twilight. I sold my entire reserve ages ago. These days I make most of my money off of transaction fees. You know, managing coins.”
“So…” Twilight hesitated. “Ponies don’t trust the government, but they do trust a mare who lives in the government’s spare room?”
“It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?” Trixie asked.
“Oh. Well.” Twilight poked at her plate, which was as yet bare. “What’s your new… thing, then? What’s the next big thing from Starlight?”
“Well,” she replied, “the concept of artificial scarcity did well with coins, and with hats, so I was thinking about how to make money off of other things being scarce.”
“Like what?”
“Food,” Starlight replied. “Turns out, killing all those endangered species had some pretty serious long-term environmental consequences. So you know. I’m dealing with that now.”
Twilight put her fork down. She stared.
“The hair loops really work for you,” Trixie observed. “You know, Twilight… if you were interested, Starlight and I were going on a date up in the mountains this weekend. You could tag along if you-”
“Trixie, we talked about this.”
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- GaPJaxie · 16k words · 233 8 · 2.4k views
- Cold in Gardez · 9.1k words · 453 11 · 4.7k views
- Cold in Gardez · 8k words · 246 8 · 3.3k views
- GaPJaxie · 8.3k words · 214 13 · 3.2k views
- Cold in Gardez · 73k words · 284 6 · 3.1k views
- GaPJaxie · 2.4k words · 201 9 · 2.8k views
- GaPJaxie · 63k words · 286 13 · 3k views
- GaPJaxie · 14k words · 38 4 · 318 views
Stats
Page generated in 0.14 seconds
Total duration
791 users online
695,305 hits today, 2,561,572 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
I was sort of expecting excessive hyperbole or sarcasm given the title of this chapter, but no, it seems to be a simple, level-headed reframing of the whole business.
Aaaand the cherry on top:
Such scam. Many mark.
Incredible.
Why is there a slice of life tag, then?
I don't know why, but this got me really got me laughing.
Starlight, you f
king monster.
(Though if this did result in top hats actually being seen as rare and desirable, I could probably retire early and then some. Hmm...)
Anyway, fun story, Jaxie. Though it does feel eerily like the conversations I've had with my juniors when talking about crypto, and I'm not sure I should feel like the Twilight in those conversations.
... I just wanted Twilight to banish Starlight to the sun or some other celestial body. ANYTHING. Starlight being a Crypto-Pone hurts my soul.
Great story though.
Yep, Twilight has ascended to a Politician in addition to an Alicorn.
11396173
Worse. A landlord.
These roasts never stop being funny because they remain accurate descriptions of cryptocurrency and NFTs. Also the characterization of the ponies is hilarious.
This makes my line go up.
Thanks, I f
ing hate it.
Yet again, knocking it out of the park!
derpicdn.net/img/2022/4/1/2836672/medium.jpg
The numbers will only go up!
I’m smiling, yet furious. Excellent work.
Took me a bit to get to this, but, as usual, excellent. :)
...You know, I was contemplating these definitely-not-scams just now, and I wonder...
Has anyone yet tried selling NFTs of other NFTs?
I mean, does that make any less sense?
11405686
People have tried that, they scammed a few suckers out of a few hundred thousand dollars and ran.
11407635
I think I'm only surprised that it was only a few, if the idea'd occurred at all.
11534387 11534508
ST, that's an interesting question. I googled "psychosis", and Google's chosen definition was,
The part that's in italics is the standard definition of psychosis, and by that definition, antisocial personality isn't a psychosis. But the part in boldface is the social constructivist definition of psychosis, and implies that antisocial personality is a psychosis. A social constructivist believes that reality is what most people believe it is; so to a social constructivist, these two definitions mean the same thing.
I don't think I can afford to go to EFNW. Thanks for asking, though!
11534385
And thank you for reminding me of it! I don't think I can afford to go to EFNW. Thanks for asking, though!
11585249
This is canon now.