The meteoric rise of Bitcoin has brought forth a lot of stories and anecdotal tales about people who could have been millionaires if they could only foresee the rise of the world’s favorite cryptocurrency. From the guy who paid 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas as a joke back in May 2010, to the man who threw away his hard drive filled with millions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency, the internet is replete with stories of so near yet so far. That’s because most people who were mining Bitcoins in its early days were doing it for fun rather than ever considering it as a serious investment. One person, however, can claim that he knew about the rise and rise of Bitcoin.
The Prophecy
It was back in August 2013 that a Redditor who goes by the username Luka_Magnotta, made a series of very specific predictions about the price of Bitcoin including the assertion that it will hit the $10,000 mark in 2017. In fact, he tipped Bitcoin to go even higher in the coming years, hitting $100,000 in 2019 and $1,000,000 in 2021. While it remains to be seen if the latter part of his prophecy will also come true, wait till you hear his elaborate reasoning for his wild claims. According to him,
On average, every year so far, the value of Bitcoin has increased by about a factor ten. From 0.1 dollar in 2010, to 1 dollar in 2011, to 10 dollar in 2012, to 100 dollar in 2013. From now on, there’s a slight slowdown, as the value increased by a factor ten every two years, to 1,000 dollar in 2015, to 10,000 in 2017, 100,000 in 2019, and 1,000,000 in 2021.
So how did Luke_Mendonka, or whatever his real name is, know exactly how and when Bitcoin will scale these peaks? Is he a 21st-century Nostradamus or just a lucky punter? Can he see the future or is he just one more Bitcoin speculator who got lucky with his random prediction? None of the above, if you ask him. That’s because he claims to be – wait for this – a time traveler from 2025 who came back to 2013 to warn people about the future that lay in store for them.
A Time Traveler? Pray Tell Me More
Mendonka also made some very dark doomsday predictions about a time when the world will be divided between people who own Bitcoins and those who don’t. According to him, though, he wasn’t so much making a prediction as informing the blissfully-unaware residents of 2013 about the ‘reality’ of a dystopian future when the rich lived in “isolated gated cities called Citadels (that) are born out of the fortification used to protect places where Bitcoin mining machines are located”.
He also claimed that a small-time cryptocurrency mining company called ASICminer had turned into a self-contained city ruled by ‘king’ who he referred to as “Mr. Friedman” in an apparent reference to Noble Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, who had originally predicted the phenomenon of cryptocurrencies way back in 1999. He goes on to paint the image of a post-apocalyptic world where despots, terrorists and corrupt plutocrats are ruling the roost with stacks full of Bitcoins at their disposal, while ordinary folks are struggling to eke out an existence.
According to Luka, with a global population of over 7 billion and just over 19 million Bitcoins in circulation, each person on the planet is worth just under 0.003 bitcoin on an average, although, “due to the unequal distribution of wealth in my world, the mean person owns just 0.001 bitcoin”. He goes on to describe in graphic detail situations that can be straight out of the next installment of Hunger Games, and ends his post with a plea to “destroy this godforsaken project in its infancy” because instead of eliminating the “central banking cartel” that controls global economies, the rise of digital currencies apparently wrecked the very foundation of human civilization that we know today.
A Troll With a Creative Mind and a Dark Sense of Humor
Eloquent and entertaining as Mendonka’s post is, most of us will appreciate that just about all of it is the result of a very fertile imagination more than anything else. While the jury is still out on whether Bitcoin will ever scale the heights predicted by him, I think it’s fair to say that he’s neither a fortune-teller with extra-human premonition nor a time-traveler from the future trying to warn us about a dystopian world that lies in our future. A troll with a very active imagination and a knack for story-telling, he’s just the sort of guy you’ll want around campfires on cold, dark nights, but don’t tell me that I didn’t warn you about his dark sense of humor.
