Derek was quite convinced that Cryptochrono, a cryptocurrency for Time Travellers, was an astoundingly clever idea.

To begin with, the Ledger was distributed out across space time. This was, Derek, assured me for the secuirty of the assets. When I asked what assets, he did the most infuriating thing. Derek tapped his nose, leaned in and simply repeated the word: assets.

To be fair, when he explained the whole thing made sense. Space time events, such as an evening at a pub, became non-fungible tokens on a ledger that was encrypted using the uniqueness of space time coordinates. It sounded really plausible. It also sounded plausible that the uniqueness of space time coordinates would allow for the storage of value in particular space time coordinates because space time has space as well as time. If you read it out loud, quickly, it sounds like snake oil.

Derek, I was beginning to think, might be a snake oil salesman. With a time machine.

When Derek explains things, there is always a sense that you are gradually becoming more and more stupid or more and more intoxicated or both. Derek puts this down to the Universal Preservation of IQ. It is a theory Derek has held to for some decades. Since the 1960s. The theory is that IQ is a field that we are embedded in. Like the field that the Higgs Boson is embedded in. For the Higgs Boson, the movement of the Higgs Boson is what causes gravity. For Derek the field contains Morons. When I first heard the theory, I laughed. Derek insisted that this was his theory and so he could call the hypothetical particles whatever he wanted. He had originially called them mini- particles because they would be so small. But that made them minions. Then jarg-, then crims-, and a whole list of others. The only one that made sense, at least to Derek, was the mor-.

We are enmeshed in a field of morons, announced Derek, and that means the total quantity of intelligence is fixed and limited. In order to do something smart we need to be surrounded by stupid. He pointed at the idea of a cryptocurrency for Time Travellers - Cryptochrono - being an incredibly smart idea but being dependent on Pubs in Leeds in the 1980s. Which is as far from smart as you can get. In order for a node in a ledger distributed across spacetime to be encrypted and hashed and all those other astoundingly difficult tasks, there needs to be a lot of intelligence employed. Which sucks the intelligence out o the moron field and so lowers the IQ around you.

Time Travel, Derek announced, could be the death of the Intellect.

After a Pub, sometime in the 1980s, was turned into a reenactment of the Allegory of the Cave, to prove some obtuse point about who was the mugger in the prior decade, I was beginning to think that, perhaps, Time Travel might be an undertaking best left to someone else. It was all the pettifogging about the difference between Allegory and Metaphor that made me restive. All I really wanted was for Derek to travel back in time. With some cash. To buy some shares. To keep those shares for a few decades. To cash in the shares. To repeat the loop a few times. To reap a profit. It was a classical idea for reaping riches - wealth and power - from time travel. Derek just seemed to be able to prevent it from ever happening. For no apparent reason.

Mugging Derek in 1979 was not just about getting money to finance the caper. Mugging Derek in 1979 was an act of idiocy. Which seemed to confirm Derek's theory of the Universal Preservation of IQ. The whole of 1979 seemed a particularly stupid year. The Sahara Desert had snow. Which is stupid. There was a tsunami in Nice, France, which killed twenty three people. Again: stupid. Eight people were trampled to death by three elephants in an Illinois gymnasium. Again: stupid. The whole year seems to have been a vortex of stupidity. One more mugging could hardly make it more stupid.

Which was a stupid assumption on my part.

The amount of stupidity globally rises as the intensity of intelligence, applied to a locally examined problem, rises. While it makes no sense that this is te case, Derek confidently explained, with some diagrams of a Gaussian Distribution - or it could have been a Bell Curve, I have to admit to not paying excessive attention in order to retain my intellect - that as the average IQ rises, to prevent kurtosis and a distortion of the cosmic background stupidity. I never really believed that: cosmic background stupidity. But Derek was insistent. The entire universe tends towards a state of equally distributed stupidity.

Which, Derek insists, is why Time Travellers genuinely need a cryptocurrency. Time Travel is an intense problem - be it allegorical or metaphorical - and that needs the application of huge amounts of intelligence and that means a huge rise in stupidity. Only Cryptochrono can save the discerning Time Traveller from being stranded in the Past - or the Future - because they are surrounded by stupid people.

I asked, what about being stranded in the present because of stupid people?

Derek Gives Up On Time Travel: How it All Became A Chore.
Derek Gives Up On Time Travel: How It All Became Curiously Repetitious.
Derek Gives Up OnTime Travel: How It All Came To A Bit Of A Head.
Derek Gives Up On Time Travel: How It All Became Personal.
Derek Gives Up On Time Travel: The Thickening Of The Plot.
Derek Gives Up Time Travel: How It All Became Tense.
Derek Gives Up Time Travel: How It Unravelled.
Derek Gives Up Time Travel: How It Got All Complicated.
Derek Gives Up Time Travel: How It All Began.