The Great Simoleon Caper
A plot to foil a future electronic currency… and the even more devious plot to foil that plot!
Join us for a high tech story presented by Mike Lorrey.
Plus Free Pizza and a Jellybean contest with fabulous prizes!
Join us LIVE in Kitely
grid.kitely.com:8002/Neaburn%20City/49/56/1034
and simulcast to Second Life
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Holly%20Kai%20Estates/213/43/27
The Story:
Joe’s brother is one of those under-achievers who is really smart but doesn’t want to get a job so he crashes at Joe’s house. That’s alright, because Joe is the millionaire owner of an ad agency that operates in the virtual world, and his firm is about to release the details of a sweepstakes to win a lot of a new-fangled e-currency called Simoleons, and Joe could really use his brother’s help right about now.
They soon discover that the government is planning to destroy not only Joe’s ad campaign, but the whole idea of Simoleons as well. With the help of some shady crypto-anarchists, Joe and his brother set out to pull one over on the government. Can they succeed with such high stakes and so many heavy hitters?
The Storyteller:
Mike Lorrey, as he's known in OpenSim (Kitely grid) and in the real world, was once known in Second Life as IntLibber Brautigan, one of the top 25 land barons and developers in SL. He was known to out-deal Anshe Chung, conquer griefer groups, make millions of L$ on virtual stock exchanges (some of which he built) and the most frequent guest on the Metanomics tv show on TreetTV.
Builder of The Black Sun club, Teller Motorsports Park, Major League Combat, and other names lost to SL history (those of you who are FIC may remember them), Mike was also once an editor of Neal Stephensons Quicksilver Metaweb wiki, and wrote a lot of background material on characters, places, and events in Mr Stephenson's various novels and stories. Mike's favorite, however, is Snow Crash, which Philip Rosedale has said he based Second Life on. The Great Simoleon Caper is a story that is set in the same universe as Snow Crash, as a prequel between the novel Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash (the third novel of the loose trilogy is The Diamond Age).
Outside of virtual worlds, Mike is also known for being a crypto-anarchist who contributed to the ideas that eventually resulted in the creation of the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and blockchain technology in general. (And NO, Mike is NOT Satoshi Nakamoto, so don't ask)
Thus, The Great Simoleon Caper is very near and dear to Mike's heart, almost as much as Snow Crash, and between the story and novel, the reader can gain a much deeper understanding of both VR and Cryptocurrency, at least the motives of those who created both, and how these technologies fit together in the future, as many hope..
Book: The Great Simoleon Caper
Author: Neal Stephenson
