Chapter [2]: [NO CLEAN EDGES]
Ethan slept badly.
Not the kind of restless sleep that came from caffeine or noise, but the deep, jagged kind where dreams hooked into memory and refused to let go. He dreamed of spreadsheets bleeding red, of phones vibrating endlessly on conference tables, of a bathroom mirror fogged by steam and regret. He woke before dawn with his heart racing and the taste of metal in his mouth.
For a few seconds, panic flared—sharp and instinctive.
Then the room resolved around him again. The cracked ceiling. The rattling fan. The thin blanket twisted around his legs.
He sat up and forced himself to breathe slowly, counting the seconds the way a therapist had once taught him in a life that no longer existed.
In. Hold. Out.
His body obeyed. His mind followed, reluctantly.
There was a danger here, he realized—not of failure, not yet, but of momentum. Of letting the sheer weight of future knowledge push him into reckless action. In his previous life, he'd always been chasing something: a deadline, a valuation, a promise of "later." It had felt productive. It had been lethal.
This time, he needed friction.
He showered, dressed, and made instant coffee in a chipped mug that read WORLD'S OKAYEST GUY. The irony didn't escape him. He drank it standing by the window, watching the city wake up. A delivery truck double-parked outside. Somewhere, a radio played muffled pop music from the late 2000s—overproduced, optimistic, unaware.
At the desk, he opened the ThinkPad again. It took longer than he remembered for anything to load, which was good. Slowness forced intention.
He started with a spreadsheet.
Not a portfolio. Not projections. Just columns labeled Income, Expenses, Cash.
He filled in what he knew.
Copy shop wages. Rent. Utilities. Groceries. A small line for "miscellaneous" that he hated because it always lied.
When he finished, the picture was clear and unforgiving. He had no margin. No buffer. Two or three bad months would push him into credit card debt, and from there the slope got slippery fast.
So Bitcoin would have to wait.
Not because it wasn't important—because it was. Because when he did move, it had to be survivable. He'd seen too many traders blow themselves up chasing asymmetric bets without asymmetric discipline.
He closed the spreadsheet and opened a text document.
Rules, he typed at the top.
No leverage.
No all-in positions.
Security before profit.
If it feels easy, it's a trap.
He stared at the list. It felt naive, almost childish, like something you'd write in a notebook and then promptly ignore when adrenaline took over.
He added a fifth line.
Mental health is a risk variable.
That one made his hands pause on the keyboard.
In 2009, no one talked about that—not seriously. Stress was a badge of honor. Burnout was a joke you told over drinks. But he knew better. He knew how the slow erosion felt, how ambition could hollow you out from the inside until even winning felt like losing.
He saved the file.
At work, the copy shop was busier than usual. Flyers for foreclosure auctions. Résumés printed on slightly-too-nice paper. Pamphlets advertising "financial freedom" seminars that promised everything and explained nothing.
Ethan watched customers carefully. The way their hands shook when they handed over credit cards. The way they flinched at prices that would have seemed trivial a year earlier. Fear was everywhere, thinly veiled and poorly managed.
This is why Bitcoin will matter, he thought. Not because it's perfect—but because trust is broken.
During his lunch break, he sat in the back room with a sandwich and his phone. He resisted the urge to check prices that didn't exist yet and instead pulled up forums again. BitcoinTalk. Cryptography lists. Long threads where half the posters sounded like prophets and the other half sounded like lunatics.
The signal-to-noise ratio was brutal.
But buried in the chaos were patterns. The same arguments he remembered: scalability versus purity, anonymity versus legality, ideology versus practicality. The same fault lines that would widen over the next decade.
He took notes. Usernames. Opinions. The ones who argued in good faith. The ones who disappeared after a few months. The ones who would later claim they'd been there from the beginning.
After work, he walked instead of taking the bus, letting the repetition of his steps ground him. He thought about money in concrete terms—hours of labor, not abstract numbers. Every dollar had weight. Every mistake had duration.
At the apartment, Noah was on the couch with a laptop balanced on his knees, code scrolling past in dense blocks.
"You look like hell," Noah said without looking up.
"Thanks."
"No, I mean worse than usual."
Ethan hesitated, then sat in the armchair opposite him. "Do you ever feel like… the rules everyone's playing by don't make sense anymore?"
Noah snorted. "Buddy, I'm a junior dev in a collapsing economy. Of course they don't."
"I mean structurally," Ethan pressed. "Like the incentives are broken."
Noah finally looked at him. His eyes were sharp, curious. "That's a big word for a Tuesday night."
Ethan shrugged. "Just thinking."
"Well, think quieter. You're making me nervous." Noah closed his laptop. "You going out tonight?"
"No."
"Shame. There's a party down the block. Cheap beer, bad music, existential dread. The full package."
Ethan almost laughed. Almost.
"Maybe another time."
Noah studied him for a moment, then nodded. "Suit yourself. Don't turn into a monk on me."
Later, alone in his room, Ethan lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling again. The fan rattled on.
He thought about the first Bitcoin purchase he would make. Not when—how. Cash trades? Risky. Early exchanges? Worse. Mining? Possible, but electricity costs and hardware depreciation would eat into margins, and the difficulty would adjust faster than people expected.
He needed patience.
Days passed.
He settled into a rhythm. Work. Research. Walks. Sleep that slowly improved from jagged to merely shallow. He began to feel the edges of this younger body—its energy, its resilience. It was tempting to exploit that too, to work longer, push harder.
He resisted.
One evening, while scrolling through a forum thread about Austrian economics, he noticed a post that made him sit up straighter.
A local meetup. Cypherpunks. Informal. Low attendance expected.
His pulse quickened.
This was dangerous territory—not legally, not yet, but socially. Communities this small were fragile. One wrong impression and doors closed quietly, permanently.
Still, opportunity rarely announced itself politely.
The meetup was held in the back room of a bookstore café, the kind that smelled like espresso and dust. There were seven people there, counting Ethan. Laptops open, notebooks scattered, half-empty mugs abandoned in favor of arguments.
They talked about hashes and trustless systems and whether governments would ever tolerate something they couldn't control.
Ethan listened more than he spoke.
When he did speak, he chose his words carefully. Asked questions instead of making statements. Let others reveal what they knew—and what they didn't.
A woman across the table caught his eye. Asian, mid-twenties, hair pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail. She wore a blazer that looked slightly out of place among hoodies and T-shirts, and she listened with an intensity that suggested she was cataloging every claim for later dissection.
"You're quiet," she said eventually, turning to him. "What do you think?"
Ethan considered lying. He considered deflecting.
Instead, he said, "I think most people here are underestimating how long it'll take for this to matter—and how ugly it'll get before it does."
A few heads turned.
The woman tilted her head. "Ugly how?"
"Regulation. Criminal misuse. Public backlash." He met her gaze. "And internal fights. Ideology tends to fracture when money gets involved."
Silence settled over the table.
Then someone laughed nervously and changed the subject.
Later, as the group dispersed, she approached him near the door.
"Maya," she said, offering her hand.
"Ethan."
"Economics," she added. "Policy track."
He nodded. "That explains the questions."
"And you?" she asked.
"Trying to understand incentives," he said. It was the safest truth he could offer.
She smiled faintly. "Good luck with that. Let me know if you figure it out."
As Ethan walked home that night, the city lights reflecting off wet pavement, he felt something unfamiliar stir beneath the layers of caution and calculation.
Not hope.
Connection.
It scared him more than any market ever had.
Because this time, there would be no clean edges. No isolated decisions. Every choice—financial, personal, ethical—would bleed into the others.
And once again, whether he liked it or not, he was in the game.