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UTXO:Unspend Fury

Zhangmianmian
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Chapter 1 - Chapter 1: The Morning Star of the Convenience Store

Chapter 1: The Morning Star of the Convenience Store

Technical Enlightenment in the Downpour

Midnight on Singapore's Orchard Road. Neon lights flickered in the wind and rain, the cold glow of LED billboards casting mottled reflections that made the street seem awash in an electronic tide. The convenience store's automatic door slid open and shut at intervals, its sensor fooled by the humid air, emitting a shrill electrical buzz each time.

Lin Shen stood behind the register counter, gazing out at the fine strands of rain—they looked to him like chaotic binary code, endlessly refreshing the city's night. His fingers unconsciously tapped on the countertop, the rhythm gentle and measured, like the computational pulse of some hashing algorithm at work – a cryptographic process that generates unique digital fingerprints for each new transaction.

The air smelled of damp ozone and burnt electronics. Perhaps the store's UPS (uninterruptible power supply) was straining under the load, or maybe a nearby data center was churning through high-frequency trading computations. Lin Shen twisted open a bottle of water and took a sip. The moist tang of the downpour carried a faint metallic taste, reminiscent of the saline bite of an IV drip in a hospital. On his phone screen glowed his mother's medical record; the words "Malignant Glioma – Stage III" glared in red, burning into his eyes.

He shut off the screen and set the phone face-down on the counter. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the latest hospital bill: 148,000 Singapore dollars.

Inside the convenience store, everything ran as normal. The aroma of freshly cooked oden floated in the air. Ranks of cheap instant meals sat neatly on the shelves, their plastic packaging reflecting a cold sheen. Lin Shen's eyes fell to the register display—S$1,723. He didn't even have enough to cover his mother's next round of tests, let alone the surgery and targeted therapy to follow.

"Lin Shen."

He looked up at the sound of the manager's voice crackling in his earpiece. "Remember to count the cigarette stock. Don't let those night-shift rats steal any."

"Got it," he murmured in reply. He reached over and nudged the Marlboro cartons on the rack, making sure each barcode was facing outward.

The automatic door sensed a figure outside and hissed open, then slid shut again. A rush of cold wind snaked in, brushing past Lin Shen's fingertips.

The door opened again. A tall figure, shrouded in damp mist, strode into the store. The man wore a charcoal-grey trench coat with the brim of his hat pulled low. His footfalls were heavy and deliberate, each step landing with a steady cadence. At the moment his right foot hit the floor, Lin Shen caught the faintest metallic click. His pupils tightened slightly—that was the sound of a mechanical prosthetic limb.

He had heard a rhythm like this before, back in his father's lab. It came from the old mining rigs—those aging ASIC miners (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit machines built solely for cryptocurrency mining) that had been tortured to the brink of failure by overclocked computations. Even under protective liquid cooling, they still struggled to churn out one new hash after another, like neurons fiercely burning out in their final moments.

The man paused for a moment in front of the liquor shelves. His fingertips glided casually over the tops of a few imported spirits before he nonchalantly plucked five packs of Marlboro cigarettes. Then he headed to the counter.

Lin Shen's attention, however, stayed fixed on the copper heat sink peeking from the man's cuff. The scorched discoloration on it was something only a graphics card pushed past its limits would bear. Beads of condensation from a liquid cooling system were seeping through the fabric of his sleeve, slowly dripping onto the glass counter and leaving a tiny circular water stain.

This was no ordinary customer.

Lin Shen's heart gave a sudden thump.

The man reached into his pocket and produced a cobalt-blue USB flash drive, slapping it onto the counter. The low clack of metal on glass was deep and forceful—like the confirmation chime of a digital payment being approved.

"How much?" the man asked. His voice was rasping and low, carrying a gravelly distortion, as if threaded with electronic interference.

Lin Shen's fingers trembled almost imperceptibly, but he kept his expression bored and indifferent. He glanced down at the USB drive. Its surface showed slight traces of oxidation, but most striking was the embossed logo on the side—DBS Bank.

This couldn't be a normal USB drive.

He drew a slow breath and pressed the scan button. In an even tone he said, "Seven dollars twenty for the cigarettes. And for the flash drive… do you need a receipt?"

The man didn't answer. He simply tapped the counter lightly with his fingertip. The tapping came at a perfectly steady rhythm—was it some kind of code, or just a habit?

A second later, he pocketed the cigarette packs and murmured a string of numbers: "1°17′ N, 103°51′ E."

With that, he turned and walked out, disappearing into the storm.

Lin Shen stared after him, then down at the USB drive. He ran his finger gently over its metal casing, eyes narrowing. The rhythm at which the man had tapped the counter just now… it seemed to match one-quarter of Bitcoin's average block confirmation time—ten minutes—approximately 150 seconds.

This was no coincidence.

A Flash of Memory in the Rain

Lin Shen sat in the convenience store's employee break room, eyes glued to the security monitor. His fingertips had gone cold.

The three minutes and seventeen seconds after the man left had become a complete blank on the surveillance footage—as if that interval of time had never existed at all.

The data had been wiped. Only a skilled hacker could have pulled that off: remotely injecting code to overwrite the footage—filling it with zeros or random static—so the original video could never be recovered.

Lin Shen's breathing quickened. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver pocket watch. He clicked it open, and inside the cover was an engraving of a set of coordinates:

1°17′ N, 103°51′ E.

He snapped the watch shut, a surge of unease roiling in his chest—he knew these coordinates far too well.

March 12, 2015. In the news photos of the DBS Bank data center explosion, firefighters were dragging charred server wreckage from the ruins at that very location.

The origin of the USB drive now seemed glaringly obvious.

A Father–Son Cipher in the Mining Farm's Heat

He remembered that day—his twelfth birthday—when his father had taken him to that place: an abandoned Bitcoin mining farm on Jurong Island.

The roar of diesel generators was deafening. The cooling fans of the mining rigs droned in the night air like a flock of electronic albatrosses that had lost their way.

His father stood among the hulking Antminer S7 machines, wearing a lab coat, his palms etched with burn scars. Holding up a circuit board and pointing at the data pattern on it labeled "UTXO," he spoke in a solemn, steady voice to Lin Shen:

"Encryption isn't about fighting regulation; it's about ensuring goodwill can't be tampered with."

At the time, Lin Shen couldn't grasp what those words meant.

His father's hand came down over his eyes, the scarred palm rough against his eyelids, like sandpaper polishing the blockchain's genesis block.

"This," his father continued, "is called the UTXO model." He fired up a welding torch and began etching into a sheet-metal wall, sparks flying into Lin Shen's vision. "It's like the $50 red envelope your mom gave you for your birthday—you spend $30 on game credits, leaving $20. Then you buy a cup of milk tea with that $20 and get $5 back in change… Every bit of change becomes a brand-new transaction, each with its own unique timestamp. That's how Bitcoin keeps track of things. UTXO stands for Unspent Transaction Output – instead of simply updating one account balance, every transaction creates a new output entry, which means you can trace every cent as it moves."

Lin Shen would only understand years later the full significance of his father's lesson. The UTXO model in Bitcoin indeed ensures that rather than altering an original amount, each transaction generates new outputs, making the flow of funds traceable.

Back in the present, Lin Shen found himself gazing at the USB drive in his hand, his breathing gradually steadying.

Now he could be certain—this was not some random convenience-store transaction at all, but the prelude to a war hidden deep in the digital world.

Chapter Summary

Lin Shen received a mysterious USB drive at a convenience store and discovered that it was connected to his father's research and a data-center explosion three years prior. A water stain on the drive's casing concealed a Bitcoin Merkle tree code, and the enigmatic man who left those coordinates seemed to possess crucial information about the conspiracy.

Real-World Case References

Bitcoin ATM Money Laundering Case: Inspired by a 2023 case in Singapore where illegal cryptocurrency ATMs were seized, exposing techniques for laundering money through UTXO-based microtransactions.

Hacker Data Erasure: Inspired by a 2022 case of a Southeast Asian hacker group that used remote code injection to tamper with surveillance footage, effectively deleting video evidence beyond recovery.