The crypto conversation

"And that dude who must have dumped half a can of mobil on his head, what about him, who's right at the back of the rally" Orbind said, stubbing out the joint he was smoking.

"Oh yeah, leather pants, leather jackets hair slick as a snake's body? Him I'm not sure, I've seen him around once or twice, with a bunch of different people, apparently lived in Southern Europe for some time and back for good now, or something. To take care of the family business, obviously. Not clear what business they're in I know for a fact they're not industrialists or one of those hydropower or banking or telecom families. He's not a tourism guy either because that's not the look you want to sell, they're more...down-to-earth at least in how they look, gotta sell the poor country please-come-to-my-country-sir vibe yanno. He's an interesting guy isn't he," Rajesh said, scratching his neck beard.

"Could be uhh a don kind of guy," Orbind said looking around. "Where did I fucking put my glass again," he said inspecting every part of the glass table in front of them.

"Here you go, I put it down earlier when we moved the chair. It's a nice glass," Rajesh said, picking up the whiskey glass from underneath the chair handing it to Orbind, "Yeah he's not...I'd be very very surprised if he was. He's too out there. After the fucking idiots at the government went blazing guns on the local dons, they have become a lot lower key. Most have adopted a facade of legitimate businesses, I know a few who actually enjoy their fake businesses more than they like you know, criminaling around, " he gave a long incredulous laugh.

Orbind joined in. "Fucking criminals man, got to put your heart into something, can't figure out what they want in life even after all of that maybe someone should offer those coaching sessions to them too," he said, and they both burst into laughter.

"Speaking of criminals," Rajesh began, a smile on his face, "how's our plan coming up? I talked to a couple of boys in there, you know the usual business opportunity, new technology, hot startup, exponential boom, incredible chance to be on the driving seat of the train that's going to the fucking moon, etcetera. They are...interested. Not maniacal about that yet, but those kind of people we don't want yet, these guys will arrange for those cats if we can guarantee them some sort of uhh guaranteed returns haa," he said.

Orbind paused. He took a long sip of the whiskey. "The website is coming out pretty well, we have a few people in India and Ukraine working on the software itself. The Indians will probably ban it the first at the first sign of smoke, it's hard to fucking bribe the Reserve Bank unless you know their kids or shit and even then they're a lot more suave lately. The Ukrainians are getting pretty tough too because they're dreaming of their EU membership, but it's not gonna happen anytime soon and there's a lot of pushback against financial regulations from the Russian businessmen since it's still a gateway to clean money for them. We'll last there a lot longer. There's a tonne of interest around Telegram groups, Kik groups too, we're still building community around that, the Ukrainians they're really good at collecting the small fry. So when the big..uh...investors...come in, we have a lot to show to them," he said.

"Hmmm. Three months from now for a formal release then? I'll have a few dozen real characters set up by then," Rajesh said, to the eerily quiet air now that the parade had passed by them. Regular Kathmandu traffic hadn't woken up yet this early in the morning.

"Yeah. Three months is a good time. Don't see anything big that should block us," Orbind said, tipsily dropping is glass on the table hard.

"Careful man, that's a nice glass," Rajesh said.