Money and other Fairy Tales

A North Korean Hacker learns about Fiat Currency

Kim Jong-su's first memory is watching his mother boil tree bark. Not for medicine or craft, but for soup. The Arduous March, they called it later, when admitting it happened at all. The famine of the mid-90s that killed somewhere between 600,000 and 3 million people, depending on who's counting and whether they care about accuracy.

His father had been a mid-level apparatchik in the Ministry of Railways, which meant they got Class 43 rations: 700 grams of grain per day when the distribution system worked, which it didn't. His mother was a teacher, which meant she got 300 grams, theoretically. By 1996, nobody was getting anything.

Jong-su remembers the arithmetic of starvation. One bowl of bark soup equals four hours of energy. Two grasshoppers equal an extra thirty minutes of consciousness. A rat, if you could catch one, was worth killing your neighbor over, and some did.

His sister died first. Eight years old, she simply stopped waking up one morning. They couldn't bury her properly; the ground was frozen and they didn't have the strength to dig. His parents wrapped her in a sheet and left her with the others at the collection point, where bodies stacked like cordwood waited for mass burial.

The irony that saved his life: his father stole a sack of rice from a train bound for Pyongyang. Not for the family, initially, but to bribe his superior for a better position. But watching Jong-su’s ribs jutting through his skin like a xylophone, his father made a choice. They ate the rice. All of it. Three days of feeling human again.

His father was shot the following week. Not for stealing the rice – that was just survival, too common to merit a public execution. He was shot for failing to report another official caught listening to Chinese radio. The association was enough. They made Jong-su watch, standard practice to prevent revenge fantasies.

Here's what he learned at age seven: the state will kill your father for someone else's crime, but first it will make sure you understand that this is love. The execution squad leader explained, patiently, that his father's death was a gift, freeing Jong-su from the burden of a disloyal parent. Jong-su nodded and thanked him. What else could he do?

The orphanage recognized his gifts not as genius, but as a scar. He didn't learn math; he survived it. His mind, honed by the constant, desperate calculus of calories versus hours, saw everything as a system of inputs and outputs. One bowl of bark soup equals four hours of energy. Two grasshoppers equal thirty minutes of consciousness. His entire childhood was an optimization problem with a single variable: life. When the teacher posed a problem meant to occupy the class for an hour, Jong-su solved it in thirty seconds.

The problem: if the Great Leader's train travels 120 kilometers per hour and the American imperialist pig's missiles travel 1000 kilometers per hour, how much time does the Great Leader have to activate our glorious defenses if the enemy launches from Seoul, 195 kilometers away?

Jong-su not only solved it but pointed out the math was flawed. It assumed the missiles flew straight, when they would follow a ballistic arc, adding crucial seconds. He wasn't being clever; he was just running the variables as he saw them. The teacher stared at him, then made a phone call. Within a week, Jong-su was in Pyongyang, enrolled in the First Junior Computer Academy.

They fed him there. Real food. Rice every day, meat twice a week, vegetables that weren't grass. The price: turning the arithmetic of starvation into the arithmetic of war.

The Education of Delusion

The Pyongyang University of Computer Science doesn't appear on any maps. Officially, it doesn't exist. Unofficially, it's where North Korea trains the hackers who've stolen more money than most countries' GDP.

Jong-su's professor, Dr. Moon, had studied at Moscow State University before the Soviet Union collapsed. He taught them programming through ideology: "Every line of code is a bullet. Every function is a platoon. Every program is an army. You are generals in the digital war."

But privately, Dr. Moon taught them something else. After classes, in sessions that definitely didn't happen, he'd show them the real internet. Not the sanitized intranet North Korea called Kwangmyong, but the actual, chaotic, beautiful, terrifying world wide web.

"Look," he'd say, showing them YouTube videos of Americans fighting over toilet paper during COVID. "They call us brainwashed, but they'll kill each other for the privilege of wiping their asses with processed trees."

He showed them the 2008 financial crisis, executives getting bonuses after destroying the economy. The dot-com bubble, where companies with no revenue were worth billions until they weren't. The tulip mania of 1637, where a single bulb cost more than a house until someone remembered it was just a flower.

"Every society runs on collective delusion," Dr. Moon explained. "Theirs is that paper has value. Ours is that the Kim family are gods. Both are equally absurd. The difference is they can afford their delusion. For now. You are not just fighting their armies; you are fighting their fictions. And the best way to fight a fiction is to expose its costs."

Dr. Moon disappeared one day. No explanation. His replacement never mentioned him, and neither did the students. But his lessons remained, coded deep in Jong-su's understanding: everyone lives in a fiction, but some fictions pay better than others. And some fictions are more brutally enforced.

The Lazarus Method and the Pig Butchering Floor

By 2013, Jong-su was operational. His unit, part of what the West called Lazarus Group, had a simple mandate: steal everything, from everyone, all the time.

Their first major score was the Bangladesh Bank heist. The planning took two years. They didn't just hack the bank; they studied it like anthropologists studying a lost civilization. They knew that Friday was the best day to initiate transfers because Bangladesh's weekend started then while New York's was still two days away. They knew the SWIFT operators' shift patterns, their coffee breaks, their bathroom schedules.

The malware they deployed was beautiful in its simplicity. It didn't try to steal passwords or hijack sessions. It just sat there, patient as a spider, learning the bank's legitimate transaction patterns. When it finally acted, it mimicked those patterns perfectly. The only mistake was a typo: "fandation" instead of "foundation", probably because the North Korean keyboard Jong-su was using had a sticky 'u' key.

$81 million made it through before the typo raised suspicions. The money flew from New York to Manila in milliseconds, then dispersed through casinos where Chinese high-rollers and North Korean operatives played baccarat with stolen Bangladeshi reserves.

Jong-su watched from a hotel room as his colleague, whom we'll call Mr. Park, converted digital theft into physical chips at Solaire Resort. The casino knew something was off. Nobody wins that consistently at baccarat, but they took their 5% commission and asked no questions.

"Look at this," Park said, holding up a $100,000 chip. "This was a teacher's pension in Dhaka this morning. Now it's plastic. Tomorrow it'll be cognac. The next day it'll be in Kim Jong-un's bloodstream, then his bladder, then a golden toilet. The circle of life."

Jong-su wanted to laugh but couldn't. The chip wasn't funny. It was someone's future, transformed into someone else's piss. But then again, what was a pension anyway? A promise that numbers in a computer would be worth something in thirty years. At least the chip was honest about being arbitrary.

The Bangladesh Bank heist was a masterpiece of external assault, but it was noisy. A typo almost blew the whole operation. They learned. The new doctrine, whispered down from Bureau 121, was infiltration. Why pick the lock when you can get a key? Why be a robber when you can be an employee? The weakest link in any system isn't the code; it's the people who trust it. The goal was no longer to hack a company, but to become it. They would be the most diligent, quiet, and unassuming software engineers in the world, until the day they weren't.

This required a new skillset: pretending to be a vapid, overpaid Westerner. For Jong-su, it was harder than reverse-engineering assembly code. It meant faking an enthusiasm for "company culture" and nodding along during Zoom calls about "disrupting verticals."

Pig Butchering

The Cambodian compound where he upgraded their infrastructure looked like a tech campus from outside. Inside, it was a slave ship with WiFi. Jong-su provided the technical expertise, hating every minute. He watched Wei, a former accountant from Guangzhou, type love letters to Robert in Ohio. Wei had been there eighteen months. He'd answered an ad for a financial analyst position, flew to Phnom Penh, had his passport confiscated the moment he landed. Now he was "Jessica," a 28-year-old cryptocurrency trader looking for love.

"The worst part," Wei told Jong-su over weak tea, "is that I know everything about him. His wife died of cancer. His son has autism. His daughter won't talk to him. He's so lonely he'd believe anything just to feel connected to someone."

"So why do it?"

Wei showed him a scar on his neck. "First escape attempt, they used a box cutter. Second attempt, they said they'd harvest a kidney. There is no third attempt."

The platform Wei used to con Robert was sophisticated. Real-time price feeds from legitimate exchanges, professional UI, even customer service (staffed by other slaves). Robert started with $5,000, watched it "grow" to $8,000, then invested his entire 401k. The numbers on his screen showed $500,000 in profits.

"When he tries to withdraw," Wei explained, "we'll tell him there's a tax. 20% for capital gains. He'll pay it. Then there's a processing fee. Then a verification fee. We'll milk him until he either runs out of money or kills himself."

"And if he kills himself?"

"Then we move to the next one. There's always a next one."

Jong-su upgraded their system to include a feature that detected when marks were getting suspicious. Sentiment analysis on their messages, frequency of withdrawal attempts, keywords suggesting doubt. When the algorithm detected wavering faith, it would trigger "bonus" events, sudden profits that restored belief just long enough for one more extraction. It was exactly like slot machines, he realized. The near-misses programmed to trigger dopamine. The small wins that convince you the big win is coming. The house edge hidden in the excitement.

Paul Le Roux

The meeting with Paul Le Roux happened in Manila, 2014, in a hotel that rented rooms by the hour but had surprisingly good encryption on its WiFi.

Le Roux was everything Jong-su expected and nothing like it. Six foot four, 300 pounds, speaking in a South African accent thick as blood pudding. He'd started as a programmer, created the legendary E4M encryption software, then realized crime paid better than code. By the time they met, he was running a global operation spanning online pharmacies, gold smuggling, arms dealing, and money laundering.

"You know what I love about North Korea?" Le Roux said, eating a room service burger that cost more than Jong-su's monthly salary. "You're honest. You steal because you need to. Everyone else steals and calls it business."

He explained his pharmaceutical operation. Doctors in America writing prescriptions for patients they'd never met. Pharmacies in India shipping pills made from god-knows-what. Customers dying from fentanyl-laced Xanax. All legal, technically, because the prescriptions were real and the websites had terms of service.

"I made $400 million selling painkillers to housewives," Le Roux said. "Your people made $80 million stealing from banks. Who's the real criminal? The difference is simply who has the biggest gun, or rather, the biggest legal department, to define the crime."

Le Roux showed them his network. Shell companies in Hong Kong owning ships registered in Liberia carrying gold from Ghana to buyers in Dubai who paid in Bitcoin mined in Iceland using electricity stolen from the grid. Every transaction legal in isolation, criminal in aggregate.

"Money is just permission," Le Roux explained. "Permission to move value from here to there. You hack computers to get permission. I incorporate in Delaware. Same thing, different method."

He offered to sell North Korea seven tons of methamphetamine precursors and a connection to Brazilian arms dealers. The payment: half in gold, half in Bitcoin, delivered to accounts in Macau that didn't exist until the moment of transfer and wouldn't exist five minutes after.

"Why help us?" Jong-su asked.

Le Roux laughed. "Because chaos is profitable. Every sanction you trigger, every hack you pull, every missile you test makes the world less stable. Instability means volatility. Volatility means opportunity. I'm not helping you; I'm investing in entropy."

Two years later, Le Roux was arrested by the DEA and became an informant. He gave up his entire network to avoid the death penalty. The man who understood everything about crime didn't understand the most basic rule: everyone flips eventually. He thought he was outside the system, but the system merely widened its embrace to include him as an asset. His ultimate sellout, his transformation into a tool for the very state he scorned, proved Dr. Moon’s point: the more fiercely you resist the collective delusion, the more likely you are to be crushed or co-opted by it. Even the grand architect of chaos still had to play by someone else's rules.

The Soros Protocol

On his laptop, Jong-su watches old footage of Black Wednesday, September 16, 1992. George Soros, a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust by pretending to be Christian, made a billion pounds in a single day by betting against the Bank of England.

Jong-su felt a strange kinship with the man. Soros had survived one totalitarian fiction by hiding inside another, a Jew passing as Gentile to evade the Nazis. When you spend your formative years navigating a system of totalizing lies, you develop a nose for them everywhere. The skill set for surviving the Gestapo was not so different from the one required to bankrupt a central bank: you had to see the lie that everyone else accepted as truth.

The mechanics were simple. The UK had pegged the pound to the Deutsche Mark, requiring them to maintain high interest rates during a recession. Economic suicide for political convenience. Soros recognized the contradiction. So he borrowed billions of pounds and sold them, knowing reality would eventually overwhelm politics. The Bank of England spent £27 billion defending the fiction. Soros kept selling. At 7:30 PM, the UK surrendered. The pound collapsed. Soros made his billion.

He didn't create the weakness; he revealed it. Just as Jong-su doesn't create security flaws; he exploits them. The vulnerability exists whether anyone acts on it or not.

But there was a difference. When Soros broke the pound, the West lauded him as a financial genius. When Jong-su breaks an exchange, they call him a terrorist. The distinction, Jong-su decided, was permission. Soros had permission from "the market." Jong-su only had permission from the Workers' Party of Korea.

The basis hack

There was the even more fundamental hack: the central bank's control over the very value of money. Jong-su came to see the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and others not as guardians, but as the ultimate, sanctioned hackers.

When a central bank lowers interest rates, or engages in quantitative easing, it's like opening a digital spigot. They aren't printing physical money, but they are expanding the money supply with keystrokes. Money is created out of thin air, released into the system. This new money dilutes the value of all existing money. For the Western reader, their savings in a bank account, their pension fund, their 401k, these numbers don't visibly shrink. Instead, the cost of everything else goes up. It's an invisible tax, a stealth expropriation of wealth.

It was the ultimate hack, perfected over centuries: making people's money vanish not through theft, but through policy. No malware needed, no typo to catch. Just the quiet manipulation of a number, a shift in a percentage point, and trillions in purchasing power could be transferred or vaporized. All legitimate. All called "monetary policy." But the outcome was eerily similar to a Lazarus group hack: a sudden, often unexpected, transfer of value from the many to the few, or simply its evaporation. The numbers on the screen remained, but their ability to buy food, or housing, or a future, slowly, imperceptibly, withered away.

The Casino Theory of Everything

Back in Manila, watching the money laundering at Solaire, Jong-su has an epiphany about casino chips.

A Solaire chip only has value inside Solaire. Take it to City of Dreams across the street, and it's worthless plastic. Take it to Vegas, and security might detain you for possession of a foreign gaming instrument. But inside Solaire, that plastic disc is as good as cash. Better, actually, because cash can be traced and chips can't.

Every casino creates its own currency, backed by nothing except the casino's promise to exchange it back for "real" money. But the "real" money, Philippine pesos, are also just tokens, backed by the Philippine government's promise to accept them for taxes. And what backs that promise? The government's ability to put you in jail if you don't pay taxes in pesos.

So it's force all the way down. The chip is backed by pesos, backed by laws, backed by guns. Remove the guns, and the whole system collapses into what it really is: elaborate make-believe.

Everyone knows this, and nobody cares. The gamblers know the chips are arbitrary. The casino knows the pesos are fiat. The government knows its authority rests on violence. But as long as everyone keeps pretending, the system works.

It's exactly like North Korea, Jong-su realizes. Everyone knows the Kims aren't gods. Everyone knows the propaganda is lies. Everyone knows the system is broken. But as long as everyone pretends to believe, it continues.

The Yahoo Boys' Juju and the Weimar Warning

In Lagos, Jong-su meets Prince, who runs a "business acceleration incubator" that's actually a training center for internet fraud.

Prince's boys aren't just scammers; they're believers. Before each score, they visit the babalawo for rituals. Today's ceremony involves a chicken, palm wine, and a Dell laptop that's seen better days.

"You think this is primitive," Prince says, watching the babalawo sprinkle chicken blood on the keyboard. "But it works."

"Magic works?"

"Belief works. The boy who's done the ritual believes he cannot fail. That belief makes him confident. Confidence makes him convincing. Being convincing makes him successful. The chicken didn't do it, but without the chicken, it doesn't happen."

Prince shows him the operation. Dozens of young men typing romance emails, each convinced their juju protections make them unstoppable. One of them, David, is working three different marks simultaneously: a widow in Dallas, a divorcee in Manchester, and a retiree in Sydney.

"The Americans are easiest," David explains. "They believe in love at first sight, soulmates, destiny. Tell them God brought you together, and they'll empty their savings."

"You believe in God?"

David laughs. "I believe in Western Union."

But then he shows Jong-su his shrine: candles, bones, a printout of his most successful score ($450,000 from a California real estate agent). He prays to it every morning, thanking the spirits for their assistance.

It's absurd. It's also no more absurd than a Federal Reserve chairman burning incense to "market confidence" or a day trader checking his horoscope. Everyone has their rituals. The only difference is which ones society calls legitimate.

Weimar

Jong-su reads about Germany, 1923. A loaf of bread costs 200 billion marks. Workers are paid twice a day because prices double between breakfast and dinner. Someone robs a bank and leaves the money, taking only the cloth sack it came in because fabric has actual value.

There's a photo that haunts him: children playing with blocks made of bundled marks. Billions of marks, worthless as toys, because toys at least entertain. The money can't even do that; it just sits there, a monument to broken promises.

He reads about a German middle manager named Friedrich who saved for thirty years. Every month, 20% of his salary into the bank. He was going to buy a house, retire comfortable, maybe travel. By 1923, his life savings couldn't buy a newspaper.

Friedrich didn't understand what happened. He'd done everything right. Worked hard, saved diligently, trusted the system. The system responded by vaporizing his entire adult life's accumulated effort in eighteen months. This wasn't a hack; it was a systemic collapse, a consequence of the very financial levers Jong-su now understood. The fiction of the Mark simply collapsed under its own weight.

Friedrich killed himself in 1924. His suicide note: "I cannot live in a world where everything I believed was a lie."

The thing Friedrich didn't understand was that it was always a lie. The only thing that changed was the speed of the revelation. Usually, inflation steals slowly, 2-3% a year, barely noticeable. In Weimar, it stole everything at once. The crime was identical; only the tempo changed.

Japanese lessons in Venezuela

Mrs. Takahashi bought her apartment in Shibuya in 1989 for ¥100 million with a 100-year mortgage. This seemed reasonable because the apartment had doubled in value in the previous three years. By the time her grandchildren inherited it, it would be worth billions.

The loan documents were works of art. Actuarial tables showing appreciation rates. Graphs proving Tokyo real estate only goes up. Testimonials from economists about Japan's permanent prosperity. Mrs. Takahashi signed, confident she was securing her family's future.

Her neighbor, Mr. Yamamoto, went further. He mortgaged his apartment to buy stocks. Then mortgaged the stocks to buy a golf membership. Then leveraged the golf membership to buy more apartments. It was financial origami, paper folded into paper folded into paper, each fold creating "value" from nothing.

December 29, 1989: The Nikkei peaks at 38,916. January 2, 1990: It begins to fall. By 1992: Down 60%. By 2003: Down 80%.

Mrs. Takahashi's apartment is now worth ¥30 million. She owes ¥97 million. Her son inherited the debt when she died. Her grandson will inherit it from him. Three generations paying for one woman's faith in ever-rising prices, a faith cultivated by a system that encouraged leverage and promised endless growth. Her savings weren't stolen by a hack, but eroded by a burst bubble, another consequence of the "legitimate" financial fictions.

Mr. Yamamoto lost everything in six months. The apartments, the stocks, the golf membership, all repossessed. He took a job as a janitor in the building he used to own. Every night, he cleaned the offices of the bank that had lent him the money, encouraged him to leverage up, then seized his assets when the music stopped.

In Caracas, 2018, inflation hits 1,700,000%. People paper their walls with bolívares because wallpaper costs more. A beer costs 14 million bolívares. By the time you finish drinking it, it costs 15 million.

María, a petroleum engineer, tells her story: "My grandmother saved bolívares in a mattress for fifty years. Didn't trust banks. When she died, we found 500,000 bolívares. It was her life savings. We couldn't buy a Coke with it."

The government prints larger denominations to keep up. First 1,000 bolívares notes, then 10,000, then 100,000, then they just start removing zeros and pretending it's a new currency. The bolívar becomes the bolívar fuerte becomes the bolívar soberano becomes the bolívar digital. Same worthlessness, different name.

Venezuelans switch to dollars, but dollars are illegal. So they trade in "credits", digital dollars in foreign accounts accessed through VPNs. The entire economy goes underground, escaping into cryptocurrencies and barter. Eggs become currency. Cigarettes become currency. Anything but the official currency becomes currency.

The government insists the bolívar is strong. The minimum wage is raised to 18 million bolívares a month, approximately $7. Victory is declared. Nobody believes it, but everybody pretends because the alternative is admitting the entire nation is bankrupt. These were not hacks but the slow, deliberate self-immolation of a currency, an act of monetary policy so destructive it made Jong-su's own thefts seem almost quaint in their scale.

The Return to Pyongyang

After each foreign mission, Jong-su returns to his apartment in Pyongyang. Two rooms, concrete walls, a portrait of the Kims that must be cleaned daily. Luxury by local standards.

His mother lives with him now. She's fifty but looks seventy, body broken by decades of malnutrition. She spends her days at a factory that supposedly makes textiles but actually makes nothing. The workers show up, pretend to work, go home. The factory pretends to pay them. Everyone pretends the system functions.

"I saw your father yesterday," she tells him one evening.

Jong-su's father has been dead for twenty years.

"He was young again. Handsome. He said he's proud of you."

She's losing her mind. Malnutrition, trauma, age, who knows? But she seems happy in her delusion, so Jong-su plays along.

"What else did he say?"

"That the Marshal will lead us to victory. That the Americans will soon beg for mercy. That you're doing important work."

She believes it. Actually believes it. After everything; the famine, the execution, the decades of suffering. She still believes. It was a profound, almost terrifying, testament to the human capacity for self-deception, or perhaps, for survival through belief.

To be sure, to be sure...

Jong-su was "Patrick O'Sullivan" from Dublin today, a persona he'd curated for six months with a fake LinkedIn profile celebrating "synergistic blockchain solutions." His target: a FinTech startup called "Veriditas," Latin for truth, which was the first joke. The CEO, a twenty-five-year-old named Brad who looked like he was grown in a lab to wear Patagonia vests, was explaining their mission.

"We're not just building a platform, Patrick, we're building the future of money," Brad said, his voice brimming with the unearned confidence of a man who has never had to count grasshoppers for their protein. "It's programmable, decentralized, and completely trustless."

Trustless, Jong-su thought. He'd heard the word from his handlers. It meant a system where you didn't need to trust people because the code was law. An interesting idea from a man who was interviewing a state-sponsored thief to manage his code.

"Fascinatin'," Jong-su said, his practiced, terrible Irish accent making the word sound like 'feh-cin-ay-tin'. Brad, who had likely never been west of California, beamed.

"Right? It's about disintermediating legacy institutions."

Jong-su mentally translated: We want to be the new bank, without the boring regulations.

"Our tokenomics are revolutionary," Brad continued, pulling up a slide that was a firework display of arrows. "It's not about the tech, really. It's about the narrative. If enough people believe our token has value, then it does."

Jong-su almost smiled. At least this one was honest. This was the Party's logic applied to currency. Believe the Great Leader is a god, and he is. Believe this string of characters is worth $50, and it is. Brad was a priest in a new religion, and just as clueless as the old ones. The architecture of delusion was just being rebuilt with shinier parts.

Near the end, Brad leaned in conspiratorially. "Okay, Patrick, culture-fit question. Super informal. We had this weird thing with a developer who turned out to be... let's just say, 'state-aligned.' Couldn't take a joke. So, hit me with one. Any world leader. Show me you're a free thinker."

Jong-su's blood ran cold. The test. It was becoming standard. A piece of corporate lore passed between VCs: 'Ask them to make fun of Kim Jong-un. The North Koreans literally can't do it.' It was a human CAPTCHA, designed to detect the brainwashed.

"Well," Jong-su started, the air in the room suddenly as thin as it was in the orphanage. "Kim Jong-un walks into a bar..."

He could see the punchline. He had a dozen memorized from Western websites. The bartender says, 'What'll you have?' Kim says, 'A missile test and a cognac, and make sure the people pay for both.' It was simple. It was just words. Words that would get him the job, the access, the millions.

"Kim Jong-un..."

His throat closed. It was the same mechanism that made him thank the man who executed his father. A circuit deep in his brain, forged in famine and fear, that physically prevented dissent. It was not a choice. It was a biological fact.

Brad’s smile faltered. "Dude? You okay?"

"Technical... difficulties," Jong-su croaked, and slammed the disconnect button. He sat shaking in his cubicle, a failure. But then a thought came: Could Brad stand before his investors and say, "Money is fake"? Could he admit his tokens were a collective delusion with no intrinsic value? No. Brad was as programmed as Jong-su. Everyone has their unsayable truth. The only difference is the design of the cage. The Western one offered more brands of cereal, but it was a cage all the same, built on unexamined fictions.

The Arithmetic of Rice

Jong-su's last successful hack nets $63 million from a DeFi protocol. The vulnerability was a reentrancy bug a first-year student at the Academy would have caught. Amateurs. It took him four minutes. The protocol's team tweets about the "unfortunate exploit" and promises to make users whole. They can't. They raised $20 million and lost $63 million. The math doesn't work. But they promise anyway because that's what you do.

He thinks about the protocol's users. Retail investors, probably, people who believed in "decentralized finance," who thought they were escaping the old system. Instead, they got robbed by a North Korean in a bunker, their innovative new money just as stealable as the old kind. The money flows through mixers, becomes Monero, becomes yuan, becomes weapons and luxury goods for the men in the portraits.

A week later, his handler delivers his reward. Not a wire transfer, not a briefcase of cash. A sack. White, coarse, stenciled with characters he cannot read. Inside is ten kilograms of rice.

$63 million becomes ten kilograms of rice. The exchange rate is brutal.

He lugs it back to his two-room concrete apartment. His mother is there, staring at the mandatory portrait of the Kims, humming a song from her youth, before the March.

"I saw your father again," she says, her eyes milky with cataracts and memories. "He said you were a good son."

Jong-su says nothing. He opens the sack. The smell of uncooked grains fills the room. It is the same smell from twenty-five years ago. The smell of the rice his father stole from a train. The rice that gave them three days of feeling human before it cost him his life.

His father stole one sack of rice to save his son, a crime of love. Jong-su steals hundreds of millions of dollars to serve the state, a crime of obedience. His father’s crime earned him a bullet in the head. Jong-su’s crime earns him this. The same sack of rice. The circle is complete.

He thinks about the world he loots. The capitalists with their golden cages, the communists with their concrete ones. They say capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others. Perhaps. Only a fool would say the cages are the same size. But only a bigger fool would call the golden one "freedom." It's just a more comfortable prison, with better food and the illusion of choice between fifty brands of cereal. In Pyongyang, you get one brand of cereal, when available, and no illusions. The fiction is just more transparent.

The state he lives in, the perfect communist paradise, has achieved its goals. No taxes, because there's no real income. No inequality; everyone is equally poor except the gods in the portraits. Full employment at jobs that produce nothing. It's so perfect that his entire country's economy runs on what he can steal from people who believe in fictions like "pensions" and "401ks. Those Westerners living in their own comfortable, self-imposed fictions that are just as fragile, just as susceptible to the whims of unseen forces, be they hackers in bunkers or central bankers in ivory towers.

He stares at the portrait on the wall. The smiling, fat face of the man he cannot mock. The son of the man who starved his sister. The state that executed his father. This is the real cage. Not the concrete walls, but the one inside his skull, forged by the arithmetic of starvation.

The dance continues, whether he watches or not. In Manila, the casino still converts stolen money into chips. In Cambodia, Wei still types love letters to new Roberts who will lose everything. In Lagos, Prince's boys still sprinkle chicken blood on keyboards. In Tokyo, Mrs. Takahashi's grandson still pays the mortgage on a ghost. In Washington, someone at the Federal Reserve is deciding how many billions to create, manipulating the invisible spigot, making the value of Western savings slowly vanish. In Pyongyang, Jong-su stares at his screen, preparing to become "William Thompson" from Seattle.

Everyone knows their role. Everyone plays their part. The entire system, every system runs on the same fuel: belief in fictions that become true only because we believe them. It continues because stopping would mean admitting that we've organized civilization around elaborate hallucinations. That money is no more real than Kim Jong-un's divinity.

Jong-su can't say Kim Jong-un is mortal. We can't say money is fiction. Both are true. Neither can be spoken.

So we code, we steal, we save, we spend, we pretend. The Hennessy flows into Pyongyang. The pension funds flow into nothing. The lies flow in all directions.

And somewhere, a child in North Korea is learning to code, believing he'll be a soldier in the struggle for reunification. And somewhere, a child in America is learning to save, believing compound interest will set her free. Both are wrong. Both are right. Both will spend their lives moving numbers on screens, calling it different names, believing different stories, ending up in the same place.

Older, tired, wondering if any of it mattered.

It didn't. It does. It's all we have.