Writing "Derek Gives Up On Time Travel" was a little bit exhausting.

So I gave it a few days before writing this.

In part it was exhausting trying to keep up with all of the threads running through it, of which there are several. There are ideas about the nature of Time Travel and Human Mortality and Identity: inside and outside of digital contexts. Much of the character of Derek is leeched away - he is not at all convincing. That kind of cypher of a person who is either a foil for comedy or melodrama. Sadly, Derek succumbed to melodrama in the end.

The overall idea of a Cryptocurrency based on Time Travel is not that far from how actual Ledgers Work - both Manual and Digital. Most of the story is really just a narrative of book keeping. Which, unless you are an Accountant or a Book Keeper or just like lists, is a bit boring. The basic mechanisms of a Ledger have direct correspondences. The Pub Crawl would be a Block Chain. The Nights in the Pubs would be individual Blocks. But the actual assets attached to the Blocks become nebulous.

When Cryptographic Ledgers collides with Social Forces, they become far more interesting than things like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is predicated on being fungible. Even Non Fungible Tokens seek out a mechanism of becoming fungible. Which amounts to simply shuffling money around. You might not call it money. But it is money.

Cryptocurrency for Time Travellers would need to be more subtle than Bitcoin or Etherium. In the context of fiction that makes for potentially interesting plot devices. Yet, we are all, in a narrow sense, Time Travellers. We travel forwards at one second per second. Our direction is towards the "End of Time" - we approach the maximum entropy, the End of Time, the slowest way possible. That kind of Time Travel does mean that there are issues with Cryptocurrencies that benefit from considering Time Travel Paradoxes.

Things like Ledger Forks. They might seem to be "trivially technical" in the sense of, for example, determining the consensus for which fork to follow. However, in reality, each fork comes with a change in the nature of whatever it is the Cryptocurrency or the Ledger or the Non Fungible Tokens set out to achieve. For Bitcoin it is all about fiat: faith in the fungible. For other Tokens it could be something about the social distribution of digital - abstract - objects. For Time Travellers, the concern is not simply the abstract but also the real.

That concern with the Real - with protecting your Grandparents to prevent temporal paradoxes - is something that the Ledger of Cryptocurrencies does not, for the most part, address. The Ledger is abstract and that insulates it from the dangers and disruptions of the real. Which is, very much, why considering a Cryptocurrency for Time Travellers is a useful exercise. It focuses attention on the contradictions within the ecosystem of the Cryptocurrency. The kind of paradoxes that are embodied in Time Travelling Twins, for example, highlight the impact of Chain Forks. Not in the obvious way of fifty one percent attacks or why Miners are necessary but in the way that the Story unfolds.

One of the inspirations for the Story was an Auction of some film from 1976. About six minutes of original film from the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. The auction took place on the 14th September 2021 and the Lot was not sold. The ownership of the Copyright of those six minutes have been the source of much dispute. Which is not about cryptographic keys or pass codes. It is about meaning and human sentiments.

Which is where the Death of Derek was contrived to examine a point: all Ledger Transactions are part of telling a story and stories end. The trivial ledger created by Derek had a tiny number of blocks, which all ceased to have meaning when he died. The closest Cryptocurrency I can think of is DOGE. Not because it is highly valuable in a financial sense but because it regularly focuses peoples attentions into intensely social ends. Such as getting a bobsleigh team to the Olympics. Possibly not even the best bobsleigh team but definitely the bobsleigh team with the most intense support. A global support that went beyond the narrowness of supporting a national team. The reality of DOGE is that it has impacts as profound as the Death of Derek.

Which is possibly an idea that needs a lot more exploration.

Thank you for reading. I was thinking of making a PDF, edited to remove typos and so on. Perhaps with a bit more substance to the narrative.