Derek, has given up Time Travel.
Derek says there is no money in it. I had given him £100 and told him to travel back in time, put it into shares and then travel back forwards to get the profit. He was fine up to the point where he realised that a 2020 Ten Pound Note was not legal tender in 1960. This did not deter Derek. The whole caper simply hinged on what was on the back of the Bank Note.
Legal in 1960 could be arranged.
Derek travelled back in time to 1 March 2018 when he could swap Darwin Notes for Jane Austen Notes. No problem there.
Derek then travelled back to 31 July 2003 and swapped his Darwin Notes for Charles Dickens Notes. Not a trouble.
Derek then travelled back to 20 May 1994 to swap his Charles Dickens for Florence Nightingales. Faultless.
Derek then travelled back to 31 May 1979 in order to swap Nightingale for Lions.
With his hands full of Tenners, Derek walked out of the Bank and got mugged.
Muggings happen all the time. But, Derek informed me, he had been mugged by someone that he recognised from the Bank in 1992. A Punk with a mohican. Not one of these modern hairspray ones. A proper mohican, held up with sugar water, bravado, and powder paint. A vintage 1977 mohican.
Derek believes there are time travelling Punks stalking him. A transtemporal cartel of snivelling, three chords, and a chorus, pirates intent on mugging him for £100.
Derek has always been a big believer in popular culture and puns. The three chords, A,G,E forming a fabulous pun for a Time Traveller.
I told him he was being paranoid, delusional, and just a tiny bit silly. He looked me in the eye and said, really slowly: they are letting me do the legwork of laundering banknotes back through the timestream, mugging me and then investing it for the big bucks. They have robbed my millions by lifting a few monkeys. They are geniuses.
Derek is mad as a bucket of oily monkeys but he has a point. Time Travel does make a mugging far more complex. Derek is not built for huge complexity. He likes a pie and a pint and a game of dominos in the nook of one of those pubs that vanished in the 1980s. It is why he got interested in Time Travel in the first place.
So I said to him, perhaps you should give up Time Travel. He agreed. Far too quickly for my liking. But: he agreed.
I asked Derek what he was going to do instead. He smiled and said he was going to develop a cryptocurrency for Time Travellers. He might be an oily monkey but his sense of the absurd is impeccable.
Which is how Cryptochrono would, either at some point in the future, or some point in the past, become bigger, and more ridiculous, than Doge.
