Cryptonite

I always imagined my future would look like Sipping the finest scotch inside my beautiful mansion overlooking the shoreline of Malibu beach, but fate has different plans, didn't see myself lying on a hospital bed with no fortune to account for, when the whole world is celebrating the New Year Eve. Have you heard of Kryptonite that makes Superman weak and the only thing that can kill him.? Well, our Kryptonite came in the form of Cryptocurrency, it became our “CRYPTONITE”.

It all started in the dorms while we were doing Master's, myself Raj and my best friends in the University Ram and Rana. We are fondly called "RRR", we are not known as Geeks or Studs, we are just different. Like every other night after we are done with classes, on-campus jobs, and finally the best part of the day, our version of “Happy Hour” - With few beers down, in between casual conversations, we were writing our big ideas sometimes on a tissue paper and sometimes on the back of our assignment papers. One of those crazy nights, we were watching a video of Satoshi Nakamoto also known as “Father of Bitcoin” . A flash of thoughts raised through each of our minds as we started looking at each other.

First words out of my mouth,

“I think we should get into Bitcoin, let’s start mining.?”

Ram looked back at me and said,

“Buddy, it will cost anywhere closer to $20,000 to even start”

Rana didn’t discount our words, started thinking more about it and replied back

“Big dreams also require some luck, let’s make some luck tomorrow. Each of us is buying a lottery ticket tomorrow to get the investment we need.”

God must be smiling looking at us when we made the decision to start this venture. We won but not the big jackpot of 1 Million, but just what we needed, amount of $20,000. We all felt this is our gateway to the big fortune that’s waiting for us. The next day, we used $20,000 and the little savings we had left, to buy what was needed for mining bitcoin. Our dorm transferred from scattered books all over the place to a bunch of servers running 24/7. While everyone was busy celebrating New Year and busy partying, the only music that came from our dorm was the fans whooshing inside the computer, the power supply units humming and the spinning of hard drives.

Finally, our big day arrived on Jan 1 2012, we started producing bitcoin contracts, our first bitcoin contract valued at 5.37$. While still maintaining the balance between completing Master's and mining bitcoins in the night. Just like our hopes of a big fortune, the valuation of bitcoin was going up and down. Two years later after our first bitcoin contract, we were finally ready to party on the eve of new year, with each bitcoin contract valued at 770$, we reached our target of mining 2000 contracts.

Friends from the university started taking notice of us after what we were able to accomplish, but with the new fortune, we started feeling threatened by a potential Virus or a Hack or someone stealing our fortune. To safeguard our investment, we bought a “Black Notebook” and started recording the vault tokens for our Crypto Contracts. We stored the “Black Notebook” inside a bank locker and we together made a pact that we need to be patient about Bitcoin, and not to touch it until 6 years and cash it out only on the eve of new year Dec-31-2020, no matter what the valuation of bitcoin is and go on our separate ways.

With the arrival of COVID in 2020, priorities in life changed for everyone. With a valuation of each bitcoin contract at $30,000, we are sitting on a fortune of 60 Million dollars, but greed crept into each of us. I made plans to make the “Black Notebook” disappear and keep all the fortune for myself one day before the meet-up. But fate brought us again closer to each other, instead of shaking hands with each other, we were holding guns to each other that we bought for personal protection with no intention of harming anyone.

The next 5 minutes were the longest silence of my life, with adrenaline pumped in and loss of clarity in our thoughts, Rana fired the first bullet accidentally, it passed into my shoulder, followed by bullets from me and Ram. All 3 of us got hurt in the process and accidentally destroying the one thing that brought us to the place, “The Black Notebook”.

With blurred visions and glaring sounds, there we are again lying next to each other in the hospital beds and looking at each other, this time all we had was “Silence”.

Bitcoin our Cryptocurrency became our Cryptonite.

THE END.