> Button Funges a Token > by SockPuppet > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Analyzing alpha wallet and mining custodial contracts > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Button sat in his last class for the day, Mr. Cranky Doodle's algebra, when his phone buzzed. It was the double-buzz vibration that he had assigned to his mom's phone number, and to no one else's. Crud. Why was Mom texting him? She knew he wasn't allowed to check his phone in class! "Mr. Doodle?" Button said, raising his hand. "Can you please show us the derivation of the quadratic equation again? I've forgotten the middle steps." "This was on the last exam," he grumbled before turning to the board and starting in with a piece of chalk. "I should make you come up here and..."  Mr. Doodle mumbled and grumbled as he drew a parabola and started the derivation. Button slipped his phone from his pocket and looked at the message from Mom: Ugh, Button thought, slipping his phone back into his pocket. Mom's new boyfriend. "Eeeeeeeeeeee!" Scootaloo screamed. "Thunderlane? He's a pilot with the Blue Angels! Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh!" They were all standing outside of CHS, in the milling crowd of underclassmen waiting at the traffic lane for their rides. Sweetie Belle grabbed Button's wrist and turned his phone so that she could read the message. "'Orange British car?' That's vague." "I bet it's a McLaren," Scootaloo said. "They're British and their color is orange." "It's pronounced 'muh-clair-un,' you illiterate scooter jockey," Apple Bloom said. "Not 'mick-lauren'." "Let's go to Button's house with him," Scootaloo said, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. "I wanna meet Thunderlane!" "Pffft," Sweetie Belle said. "You'd settle for smelling his gee suit." Scootaloo nodded. Rarity pulled up in her Honda and rolled the window down. "Come on, girls, come come, we're going to be late!" Scootaloo pointed at Button. "Get a picture of the mick-lauren for me." Apple Bloom turned red. "Ya did that on purpose!" Rarity drove off, and Button stood alone in the crowd. An orange car came around the corner, inching forward in traffic, the driver tall and with a high-and-tight mohawk. Ugh, Thunderlane. Button snapped a pic and texted it to Scootaloo. Scootaloo replied almost instantly: A few seconds later, a text came in from Apple Bloom: Immediately followed by a text from Sweetie Belle: Thunderlane pulled up and waved at Button. He trudged over and got in. "Where's the seatbelt?" "Seatbelts are for ejection seats," Thunderlane replied, "not cars. Your mom asked me to pick you up." "Thanks." Thunderlane popped the clutch and swerved into traffic. "I'll drop you at your house and hang out until your mom is back from the dentist." Button nodded.  "What the heck is with that spare bedroom?" Thunderlane said. "All the fans sound like a flight deck launching an alpha strike." "I'm doing pump-cloud proof of work," Button replied proudly. "I had to have the electric company bring in a dedicated transformer and meter!" "Crypto shit?" Thunderlane asked. "Crypto isn't... poo," Button huffed. "Your mom isn't here, and I'm a naval aviator. You can say 'shit'." "I'm using a sixty-four GPU cluster to capitalize composable balances for auditing my serviceable hash functions." "Are you the scammer or the scam-ee?" Thunderlane asked as he changed lanes to pass a bus. "I adapt proof of work ratios for scraping block anonymity." "Scam-ee it is." Thunderlane frowned. "Your mom better not ask me for money to bail you out or pay the electric bill. It's over a hundred degrees in that room, with the window-unit air conditioner." Button raised his nose. "We use celsius degrees, because crypto is an adaptive unregulated consensus science. And I keep it under forty degrees." "Celsius went out of business and all the investors got screwed." Button shrugged. "Yeah, that hurt, but you have to have skin in the game." "You make NFTs?" Thunderlane asked. "Mostly I trade NFTs." He thought about the photo he'd sent to Scootaloo. "I'm going to make one of your car, though." "NFTs are just ugly cartoons." "NFTs are the intellectual property of the future!" Button shouted, Thunderlane's needling finally starting to get to him. "I sell algorithmic protocols!" "NFTs are like the old-fashioned multi-level marketing schemes selling Mary Kay and tupperware and dildos, except for virgins." "No no no! Not at all!" Button smacked a hand on the dashboard. "So you're not a virgin? Color me skeptical." "I compute front-run anti-dump seeds on the blockchain to allocate abstract percentages and exchange asynchronous crypto for real Earth dollars!" "How many Earth dollars have you made so far?" Button looked at his phone, punching up his wallets, and frowned. "Seven." "How much did your mining rig cost?" "More... than seven? Look, the market is volatile. Yesterday I had ninety-three million in my wallets." Thunderlane merged onto the frontage road, eschewing the freeway, which was gridlocked with afternoon traffic. "Oh! Look!" Button smirked. "It just jumped up to four hundred and nine thous—aaaaaand it's gone." "It's volatile?" Thunderlane asked. Button tapped some commands in his phone. "I just algo-traded some absolute blocks and locked in some gains!" "How many gains?" "Four hundred dollars." "Well, you're ordering dinner tonight, Warren Buffet," Thunderlane said. "I could go for a steak." Button whispered, "Nnnnnegative four hundred dollars." "I've hauled fuel-air bombs that were less volatile." Scootaloo texted just then: Button replied, "Texting your little girlfriends?" Thunderlane asked. "They're friends who happen to be girls." "Yup. It's the right kind of multi-level marketing for you." Button looked out the window, fuming. "Look," he said, turning back to Thunderlane. "Maybe you just don't understand The Blockchain." Thunderlane pulled into the driveway of Button's house. The parking brake—Button noticed it bore a small sticker reading `arrestor wire`—made a metallic screeching noise as Thunderlane engaged it. Thunderlane shook his head and chuckled. "Okay, explain it to me." "The blockchain authorizes segregated benchmarks, rehypothecating nonced eye-see-oh, enabling trades of cross-chain liquidity by cryptojacking off-chain key—" "Do you know what I cryptojacked last night?" Thunderlane interrupted. Button blinked and shook his head. "Your mom."