The below is an excerpt taken from the never released, fictitious novel “In the year 2140”. A made-up novel depicting life in a post-coinbase reward metaverse where governments haven’t been able to reign in nefarious black hat hackers. But bitcoin, as it was designed, still reigns supreme.

The moral of the story, as you will see below, comes from Chapter 21’s: Still Making It Easy.

“With each plodding step in his dilapidated sneakers — his last serviceable pair, Victor could practically hear the road acknowledge its defeat to the relentless passage of time and neglect. Each crunch of disintegrating asphalt was an insistent but ultimately unheard plea for a clean demise. The only other sound of humanity besides Victor’s own melodramatic self-monologuing are the obscenities pouring out of the solitary driver attempting to pass through the pothole riddled avenue.

Who still drives a diesel car? Who still dares to drive at this time of the day, in this part of town? These questions ring through Victor’s mind on his journey back to his father’s home located on the outskirts of Los Angeles, which is mostly now used as a metal scrap yard for the failed Lunar Saylor missions.

A ring sounds on his outdated iPhone 56s. It’s his childhood buddy, Eric. He’s wondering where Victor is. Victor rapid fires a response that he ‘needed to go fetch a few items from his pop’s deserted home,’ then abruptly hangs up without so much as a farewell. Rude? Perhaps! But Eric was kind of a rat bastard anyway. Moreover, usage of digital devices had become inconsistent due to fears of what they now refer to as “digital time snatching” or getting “DTS’ed”.

Dark web nefarious hackers are now able to conduct atomic lightning hacks based on duration of network usage. The longer one uses the internet in a contiguous session, the higher the chances of getting hacked without notice.

Imagine the far reaching implications of such an exploitive maneuver. Governments and white hat hackers have still not discovered a defense against it. People are limited to short ephemeral bursts of internet connection for fear of a complete wipeout of their personal digital assets and information. Bitcoin node operators have been forced to turn off at irregular intervals. The hot wallet, once a convenient and ubiquitous means of storing digital assets, became functionally obsolete. Those who held their private keys on hot wallets were left destitute in the wake of the DTS outbreak. A hard way of reinforcing the age old crypto adage: “not your keys, not your crypto.”

Finally, Victor arrives at his father’s house. Taken away 5 years ago for being part of the ‘hot wallet faction’, his house has since been abandoned. The banks didn’t even bother with its foreclosure or seizure as the house, in their own words, ‘wasn’t worth touching.’

After rummaging through his old man’s closet for over 30 minutes, Victor finally finds the hidden stash of cash stuffed in a shoebox tucked away behind some old military boots. Enough cash needed to pay for an upcoming heart surgery for his ailing mother. This was the only source of money he could’ve had besides resorting to street begging.

On his way out, stumbling across a knocked over wall cabinet, Victor notices a crack in the floorboard of the 90 year old Victorian style home. Curiously, he gets up and inches closer to the peculiar crack which seems to open up to a hollow hole as hinges bind through the side of the floorboard. Slowly lifting up the cracked corner while carefully avoiding a splinter, he notices a stash of just random stuff. Some old notes, letters, and a watch lay at the bottom of the small hole. After lifting out the last letter which was supposed to be the last article in the hole, a card-shaped metal object lays there. He notices an embossed letter ‘B’ on the top of the metal but is unfazed as he knows, if his intuitions are correct, that the thing he is thinking about only exists in the digital ether.

But can they also take on an analog form?

After a double take, he then suddenly realizes this metal object is much more than just a slab of metal…

Thoughts run through his mind as he recognizes the random hexadecimal string on the front is a bitcoin address. Heart beating and with curiosity, Victor peels off the top layer of a 2 layer-ed sticker. Underneath the top layer, another random longer hexadecimal string encoded in Base58 format.

It finally dons on him in a moment so monumental that his life flashes before his eyes.

A sigh of relief as Victor knows he doesn’t have to sell an arm and leg to retrieve the private key from a hardware chip or try to remember a pin # he was never told. It was just there, in plain sight, for him to use.

As his eyes widen open and looks around to make sure no one is snooping on him, he quickly places the metal card in his pockets, locks up the home, and runs out like there is no tomorrow.

As he walks back out into the rugged streets, a sense of happiness, surprise, and freedom is running through his mind. But most importantly, a sense of gratitude for his father for having this wherewithall in thinking of the long term for his children by storing precious digital assets on a physical, non-electronic, and robust hardware wallet. Victor smirks as he know he finally has the means to not only help pay for his mother’s surgery, but also to finally move out of garbage ridden LA to El Salvador.

He looks up to the gray sky in gratitude as he’ll do the same thing for his children.

Like father, like son.

HODL wisely.”

Digital assets unequivocally make our lives more convenient, timely, and cost efficient. The recent surge in web3 and metaverse chatter has us imagining a world where everything can be digital, including our own bodies and existence. But as we see everything around us becoming effectively tokenized, so to speak, we might be forgetting that our lives are still bound on the temporal plane.

Apocalyptic scenarios where our digital assets are still present but highly susceptible to nefarious online characters is still a threat we need to come face with. Partial global blackouts can have us fretting as to whether our digital assets can still be accessed. Life changes as decades progress. Technology changes exponentially as decades progress. But physical storage can still sustain its form if properly secured and maintained. Victor’s father had this foresight in mind and planned accordingly to unforeseen circumstances that could arise. Longevity was at the forefront of his attitude towards his digital wealth. And Ballet was his choice for making that a solution.

At the end of the day, it’s easier for most people to see and feel tangible things rather than to understand an abstraction in digital form. Don’t get us wrong, we support the industry and ethos of digital assets, but we at Ballet believe that there is no greater calling than safeguarding the lanes of two-way travel between the physical and digital world.

Both are possible to have in possession and both are necessary in a world where both the digital and physical are intertwined.

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About us

Ballet is a U.S. company that provides simple and secure cryptocurrency storage solutions for the global mainstream market. Ballet is the team behind the world’s first multi-currency, non-electronic, physical crypto wallet. The company was founded in 2019 by Bobby Lee and an international team of cryptocurrency industry veterans. Ballet is headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada in the United States, and has an office in Shanghai, China.

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