Merinda paused long enough to swing herself up onto the bright red IKEA dresser that served as a bar cart and clothes horse. Calvin had taken up post by the sink in the tiny New York apartment she’d been renting for the past 6 months, which didn’t leave many other places to stand.
“You know what you’re asking for is pretty dodgy, right?” she continued, pushing the half empty gin bottles out of the way to settle further back up against the wall.
“Look Merinda, you know that the Federal Exchange Commission’s mandate doesn’t give it the latitude it’s been claiming to make rulings on projects like this one. Even if they did, the government doesn’t have jurisdiction over this project. We’ve incorporated in the Bahamas and block any requests originating from the Fed’s jurisdiction, by IP address. I mean, it’s fairly well understood that everyone will use a VPN to access it, and that they’ll lie to us about where they’re coming from. We can’t do anything about that.”
Merinda’s quizzical expression brought Calvin to a stop. “The news wires have this as being more about your initial sale mechanics not the sale participants. They’re saying you’re being made an example of, that nobody’s supposed to be able to just burn the GovTokes like that. You did burn the tokes, didn’t you?”
Calvin seemed a bit uncomfortable. “I can’t really talk about it. I’m trying my hardest to forget everything I know about exactly what the contract did before the hearing in two weeks. Ben’s got me on some pretty good menthols, but just to be safe, it’s best not to rewalk that nerual pathways… you know this come on.”
Merinda sighed, her head lightly thumping back against the framed photo on the wall behind her. “Ok. What do you need from me, exactly? I don’t know what you’re planning to pay me with, but believe me, it’s going to be expensive.”
Calvin pulled up a spreadsheet on his phone. “Ok, so. You’re right that the SEC’s mostly upset over how we handled the initial sale. One part of our defense is going to be the restrictions we put in place on user sign ups. We both know that they got put in place a bit too late, but Ben’s got a handle on the reorg we need to pull off to backdate the commits. He’s been working on it a few weeks now, and it should be ready to flip shortly. It’s a small enough chain that we’re hoping no one will notice. Regardless of how well that works out, we’re going off of how Sia and Block.One came out of a similar issue. Block.One pulled the token from circulation and got a minor slap on the wrist, compared to the total the pulled in. It was this warchest that saved them — they could afford the expensive legal opinions that invoked the right hail mary’s. You get why we don’t have exactly the same resources as Block.One though.”
Merinda interrupted: “I can’t fucking believe you burned all those GovTokes.”
"It’ll be fine, I promise, we just need to get this law passed before the scheduled SEC hearing on final penalties in two months. Which is where you come in. We need to get people voting for this thing. You’ve got the best handle on where influence lies these days. We don’t have cash to pay you or your contacts yet, but you saw those signup stats I sent you yesterday. This is already huge.”
It was true, Merinda could probably put the right words in the right people’s message queues to at least get the bill out of committee, which might be enough to get the SEC back to the table on mitigation steps or a court to issue a stay.
Most people thought of the golden promise of social media as popularity — to Merinda it was influence. Her apartment was small, and her job pretty lousy, but her small newsletter and chat group affiliations across Discord were worth more than anyone really knew. Anyone that is other than Calvin. Calvin knew who she was online — no one else did.
She had gotten to know Calvin when she first moved to New York, years ago now. He had put her in touch with the a few people who had hired her to do copywriting for their small startup. He had been one of the first to subscribe to her newsletter when she started it, had been the one to point out how her cultural curation skills were really worth something.
She didn’t owe him, not exactly. But she had cashed in some of her GovTokes to buy into the new platform he and Ben were working on. If it went under, she’d be out quite a bit. There wasn’t any getting those GovTokes back.
“Tell me more about this bill Calvin. How does it get you off the hook?”
“It’ll make our Chatter blockchain the identity system for the voting records, which will, I think, move the tokens that we’ve sold out of the realm of currency and into the government records. The freedom of information act will make it such that we can’t delete the tokens or remove them from circulation, like Block.One did. In fact, we won’t really, legally, be allowed to change or touch much of anything in the history if this law goes into effect.”
“What does it do about the money people burned to get into it?”
“That gets washed under the rug — the US military has burnt more money than anyone is allowed to talk about. The truth is that the government’s books are so fucked that it’s actually an asset to them to take on a project who’s net output is a blackhole. They can just blame the imbalance on Chatter token creation.”
Calvin snapped his phone off, and slipped it back into his black jean pockets. “I’ll have Ben send you the bill draft that Senator Sander’s office forwarded him last week. Like I said, I don’t really have much to offer you on this so I’ll get it if you decide to pass. But I think the new Chatter system will really give you a good grounding for building a new audience, though you know I can’t really tip my hand on how it works — you know how to build audiences from scratch though.”
Merinda grinned. “I do know how to work a platform. Ok, send me the stuff over. You know how to reach my Signal drop. I’ll think it over, and if it’s a good idea I’ll start pushing things out next week. You’ll know you owe me when you see it.”
She hopped down from the dresser and opened the door, letting in a humid blast smelling of hot oil and friend noodles from the Chinese soup shop on the ground floor. “Alright, I gotta run by the pharmacy before it closes. I’ll see you at the BitDev meeting next week?”