A [Short] Christmas Tale
-: The book of Crypto Currency :-
Locked away by his own hand in a tower above Constantinople, overlooking the sparkling blue waters of the Bosphorus, was the mad monk Adbul Alhazred. Not that he ever looked out the window, as his head was down, shaking his matted black hair to and fro, as he feverishly crafted, embellished and poured forth the fabled
Necronomicon. No one knows for sure when and how he achieved the feat, but when it was finally done Alhazred fainted; a man broken by his labours.
In his spare time, though it is hard to imagine he had any spare time, after trawling all the occult texts since the days of Hermes Trismegistus, he dabbled in mathematics and cryptography, and knowing the weaknesses of greed and fear in the hearts of men and women, he understood incentive systems all too well.
Those scraps of paper were left lying around, to be swept up many years after his death by the servants of the keeper of the guards of the Great Sultan's mightiest general. Somehow the scraps found themselves into a curio shop in the back alleys of the city (now known as Istanbul) where they were bought by a young traveller from the West on his grand tour through the European centres of culture.
That traveller was a student of the Irish mathematician William Hamilton, inventor of quaternions. The student, whose name is mysteriously lost today, was the first to understand Alhazred's mad scrawlings since the time they were penned. He compiled the fragments, filled in the gaps and anonymously published his tome
Crypto Currency on December 25th, 1850.
Only two copies are known to exist, one of which was reportedly last seen in the vast library of Satoshi Nakamoto, which fills the magma chamber of an extinct volcano of an island somewhere in the Sea of Japan. The second copy has finally been found, and is about to be enjoyed with a glass or two of 1850 port.
Merry Christmas!
