The Head of the Bitcoin Robotics Corporation walked to the podium. It was a hot day and he had spent the last few hours listening to reports on a few bugs left. Now here he was, ready to convince the Bitcoin-frenzied media before him that Hardware Robots were the future of Human Resources for their Bitcoin world.

When he stopped, thousands of cameras started getting his photo. He was a rare man and the stock images of his face would sell well for these companies.

“Good morning ladies and gentlemen”, Simon Hakim started. He looked around at the reporters, all their hands raised up like eager school kids. “Jane”, he said, pointing, "you can go first”.

“I heard there are still bugs in the final robots. So why should we trust them or you?”.

How she had found out, he couldn't tell in that minute. But he didn't let it bother him for now. He pushed his hand into his coat and pulled out a flash disk hardware wallet.

“More than a hundred years ago, Bitcoiners built hardware wallets like this. However, there was a problem. Theft. Especially from the fiat minded amongst us. As statistics show, very few devoted Bitcoiners spend their developer hours trying to figure out how to steal from their brethren”.

“Theft remains the biggest problem, as we all know, and it starts at the top and trickles down. The advent of robotic assistants was good for our economy, and GDP 100xd in a few decades. But have you noticed that we are all still miserable? Because we are still robbed”

“Enters the Bitcoin Robotics Corporation onto the scene, to create the first robot that isn't merely a janitor, a cook or an educationally prosthesis without equal”

“Learning more things is fine. Losing the wealth that that knowledge brings us is the problem. Many ancient civilizations collapsed because they got poor, not stupid or less knowledgeable”.

A Bitcoin robot could be heard walking towards them. The first time they were all seeing one, except a few people who decidedly looked unimpressed. The crowd parted to give it way. It had a majestic walk but even more important was its “face”. It had “the face of Satoshi” as had come to be called. Cheeky.

“There are many variations to this bot. Some are humanoids like this one, some are dog bots. One thing they all have in common, however, is that they understand money better than financial analysts and traditional robots combined. Also, they protect it like nuclear bunkers for us”.

Hakim handed the mic to Ken Rickman, the lead engineer who immediately got into a joke where a tradfi guy looked stupid when a dog corrected their sentences mid speech. “With their sad coding and hardware design skills fueled by high time preference donuts and inadequate sleep. The fiat camp wont be a match for Bitcoin HRs”.

But even more important was the name, HR. Apparently, it could do the role of both recruitment and financial adviser in one.

Like a bratty know-it-all who cannot be bullied by their boss despite the tone of voice, coz they're not human, nor be coerced by tears from a weakling who would rather spend Bitcoin on weed and whores.

Months later, everybody wanted one. Even grandma. Tell her to run Linux to get one, and she gladly did. Because the HR could speak, could do all that fiat bot dogs did, but one better. It never accepted anybody to steal your Bitcoin. And it never let you go broke. Not on its watch.

If it had to spank you, it spanked you (usually if you had scheduled this, and had pressed “are you sure?” 21 times. You also had to be an adult and have a record of being a major league douche bag. A record it kept real nice and safe for you).

If you told it to time lock BTC for 4 years while only allowing you to stack and not spend, it gladly. In one interesting case, a user filed a lawsuit against BRC (Bitcoin Robotics Corporation) for not allowing them to terminate their contract and receive back their funds. They showed him that this particular part of the code was primitive layer 1 code since the hardfork of 2099, and hard forks to reverse this were hard to come by. Maybe they could wait another century.

The hard fork had been created both as a security measure against theft (timelocked BTC were impossible to steal. They used layered SHA-1024 hashes) and also, it gave time to Bitcoin-aligned law enforcement to form a quantum signature of these coins. So in case they were stolen after the time lock expired, they could be tracked for up to 1 year and retrieved easily no matter where they were sent. So there was no one to sue, as these HRs were essentially being designed on the OSH (Open Source Hardware) model. You break it, you fix it or you go bust. If you remember the seed phrase to the coins, no problem. You could still spend the coins. If they were timelocked, you got to wait. If you weren't sure of your survival over the time you had “accidentally pressed yes 21 times”, then you better tell some people you care about what that seed phrase is. Otherwise, bye bye coins. Into the void of lost coins. Now 11 million lost coins. What to do about that? Not a problem yet.

The HR dog could bite, it could bark, and it didn't poop. It called you out on your sloppy spending until you chased it silly around the house. Could it be stolen? Reprogrammed to be another human’s companion? No. Call it quasi-sentience arising from Bitcoin’s new OSS / OSH nature, call it clever engineering, but once the HR bonded with one human, that human was its wallet holder until it was recycled. It was a robot with a neural net deeply tied to the digital identity, online-work-history and financial-history of one individual. And it DGAF about individual’s tantrum. Only prayer and patience could help whoever timelocked. And boy did it coarse people to timelock.

“please timelock”. Woof.

Real dogs had competition. But humans had suffered AI takeover too. Dogs were finally sharing in the misery of their caretakers. The lens to the future was clear, except “How could we trust these dogs not to steal our BTC or be hacked or whatever?” many still asked. Bitcoin noobs with zk on the technical weeds of OSH. As it hadn't yet been years of the brand effect making its mark. But the better question was, how could we not. For decades, Bitcoiners had been the target of not just ridicule but serious theft. Digital world theft, State theft, $5 wrench theft, $1 social hack theft, name them. The progress to HR could in fact be better measured in broken finances, broken dreams, and even broken bones from the fiat camp. What is a little more patience to see the magic of HR, when people had been patient with fiat currency debasement for centuries?

A lovely paradox though, was that people hated robots getting too much autonomy, but when it made certain financial decisions on their behalf, without asking, they didn't mind it in the long run. So with time, people got used to massive timelocks. It soon became standard practice, decades later, to put one's children's trust fund in a time lock. The Bitcoin quantum OSH enforcement agency (of which Hakim was a major financer – coincidence?) had been trustworthy so far and theft over-all had decreased 20 fold, especially State theft (no politician could wait 10 years - election cycles. Also they would be thwarted by quantum OSH signatures when they finally confiscated BTC on some dumb charge). Low time preference had spiked to All Time Highs. Some people were becoming effective long termists, and charting a course to Mars for their grand grandchildren. Others were more attuned to nature and solving the fossil fuel scarcity problem, now that there were really dwindling amounts of it left. Solar power was on the rise, and some space based human habitats were also being modelled. 2400 would shine bright on the human race.

I know what you're finally thinking. Couldn't the timelocked BTC be hacked by fiat devs? No. Because Bitcoiners spent hundreds of years learning to code. Sealed off from the world and its fast-lane bs, they became unstoppable. OSH was no joke and rumor had it that Bitcoin OSH devs had learnt to code so well they could simply speak (via an AI interface), and their personal HR dogs would listen and be reprogrammed accordingly. Behavioral training on steroids. Noobs like me cannot relate. This shit is quantum physics merged with arcane software development merged with AI.

You won't believe it, but I saw one robot stop an accident just yesterday. These bots are even saving lives! Wow.