"Is it a second helping if all it did was hurt the first time?" asks Tullus as he sits back down at the table.
Jim and Stacey look at each other.
"You do realize," Jim says, "that you left for seconds five days ago?"
"Seconds, days, what difference, eh?" asks Tullus. He pokes at his meat, quizzically. "By the looks of this meat, it could be the same day, or years later, for all I can tell."
Jim and Stacey sit in silence.
"Don't let me interrupt you, continue with whatever you were talking about," says Tullus, putting down his fork and knife, interlacing his fingers, and smiling.
"Well," says Stacey, "we were talking about FutureCoin, or whatever Jerald ends up naming it. We're guessing the reason people are still willing to invest in it, is the fact that it still looks like a solid project. The white paper has been peer-reviewed by crypo SMEs and they say it is very strong."
"I should hope so," says Tullus, attempting to coax his meat into something appetizing by moving it about his plate. He continues without looking up, "I wrote it."
Stacey smacks the table with her hands, "Hold up!"
Jim adds, "Don't you mean, hodl up?"
Stacey, turns to Jim, "Shut up!" She composes herself, "I mean, sorry, but..." She turns to Tullus, who is still more engrossed with the enigma of the meat to look up, "What do you mean you wrote it?"
"Well," says Tullus, "I actually wrote a white paper a few months before the one used for Logg. It was very rough, only had rudiments of what I later implemented. I published it somewhere, briefly, but then I took it down. You can still find it, though, on archive.org."
He writes down a url on a napkin.
"You can go to this website, which is used by professors to detect plagiarism in college essays. You'll see it's a pretty good match." He writes down another url. "And if you go here, you can actually find a tool which substitutes common phrases with other, similar meaning ones, and makes other small tweaks. It is often used by college students that plagiarize." He writes down this third url. "For fun, I went through the code of this site and found with 100 percent certainty that it can produce an exact duplicate of the FutureCoin white paper by using mine as a template."
Jim and Stacey are astonished.
Tullus continues, "I wrote other technical papers, based on this white paper, and it looks like they too have been completely followed in the development of FutureCoin. In a way, I'm a bit flattered."
Tullus passes the paper to Stacey.
"First of all," says Stacey, "I'm a little surprised you wrote a bunch of urls down on a piece of paper and handed it to me. But, I'm even more surprised you aren't mad as hell that someone else is profiting from your work."
"Eh, you get used to it. The main difference is with Logg is I got to put my name on it, but otherwise, not really much different. Still, it would be nice to move out of my studio apartment someday and maybe afford a house. I never expected to have so much in common with millennials." He smiles, pulls on his red suspenders, and straightens his brown bow tie. "Maybe I'm cooler than I think I am."
"Wait a minute," says Jim, leaning forward. "So, Mark Suleman owns half the coin, do you own any?"
"Nope," says Tullus.
"But," continues Jim, "you're still making money as the lead architect, no?"
"Oh, I left Logg long ago," says Tullus. "He probably still has me listed on the website. Looks good to investors, I suppose. But there's nothing more for me to do. Logg is a solved problem to me now. Those are boring." Tullus looks down at his hands. "I suppose I pay the price for not suffering boredom." Tullus looks back at them. "Anyway, that's why I left." He looks at their plates. "You two look like you got the right idea, I'll go get some salad instead." He starts to get up.
"Hold on," say Stacey. "At your current rate for getting seconds, the conference will probably before over before you come back to the table. One last question. Why did you take down the original white paper that was a precursor to Logg? The one you say is the basis for FutureCoin?"
"I realized something, and once I did, I just moved on. Hmm, I probably should have told someone about this... But, like I said, solved problems bore me." He gives one last disdainful to his meat and turns to walk away. Just before he's gone he says, "There's an exploit that, once discovered, can allow anyone to steal any and all coins instantly and completely undetected."
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