12th January 2018 - Arrival
Immediately I had arrived, I had known something was wrong. That was okay... I hadn't expected it to go perfectly. After all, I had just done what no human had ever succeeded at, and I had come out of it alive. What I hadn't realised, however, was that everything was wrong.
Perhaps I should back up and explain. But you will have to forgive me --I don't have all the details and answers I should. Not anymore.
I am from the future.
Really, I am. It's nice over there, a lot of cool stuff, a lot of opportunities. I was a physicist for a decentralised research facility, had been for a number of happy years. Our token was valuable, as were our discoveries, and I had gotten married off the income. We had two kids, Emmet and Ursula, and I love my family. I swear, I do. All I have done, all I am doing is for them. I want to be able to give them the good life they deserve. And if this works out, I just might.
See, it all started going bad a few years back. Our blockchain had become full of quacks, and our value had begun to drop. Very soon, it became so bad that the income wasn't nearly enough to sustain us, and my bitcoin reserve was almost completely depleted. Worse, my reputation in the blockchain had dropped when I'd tried to form a channel to investigate the possibility of building a time-travel device. Maybe it was because of all the tension, I'm not really sure, but no one wanted to entertain the idea. They thought dealing in anything other than pure, grounded science was only harming our blockchain more.
With barely enough to care for the kids (my wife Emerald's online store was not really well known and delivered goods only within the country), I knew I had to do something. I thought about the ideas I had concerning the time-travel device, and suddenly remembered all I had learnt of the blockchain revolution in both history and economics classes. If only I could build the machine and go back to when it begun, I would be able to purchase a few dozen bitcoins, keep them in my wallet and return to my own time, 60 years later. I would be a multi millionaire!
Perhaps it may seem like a foolish dream, but I was desperate. Neither I nor my wife had any other skills and we had the kids to take care of! Besides, if I did it, they wouldn't even know I was gone at all. I would come back in the exact same minute I left. It would all be fine. And so I went to work, using the little money I had preserved for a rainy day. And I had succeeded.
This much I can remember.
Almost everything else is gone.
I'm not even supposed to be here, in 2018! the machine should have taken me all the way back to 2008, ten years earlier. I was so confused when I saw the date on a television news channel (Wow, these are not yet decentralised! Weird!). And to make the situation worse, two things I did not expect also happened. The machine did not travel with me, and I lost a big part of my memory.
Now, I have only a little cash, Bitcoin is $13,800, I can't remember the trends it and other coins will take to guide me on which to hold and which to do quick trades on, and I can't return back until I've acquired enough money to rebuild the machine.
But I did remember something. I remembered Steemit and Steem. Perhaps they are so big in my time, I just couldn't forget them, like I couldn't forget bitcoin. But honestly, I do not know. Still, it's my only hope. I have used the most part of my cash to purchase a phone with which I signed up on the platform. That was two days ago. I received my confirmation and password a few hours ago.
I am homeless, and have just enough to feed me for two weeks. But I have Steemit now, and I have hope. I will begin to relearn everything I think I used to know about the coin and token currency market while at the same time, use the platform to earn enough to invest and trade.
I will confess, I am scared. This is a time I do not understand. I have no allies, no property. But I am determined. I will see my children again.
