The gigantic room is a mess, though its layout is methodical. Remember when all the pools were mining empty blocks and clogging up the bitcoin network? Inside open notebooks, you find Vanderpoole’s designs for the backdoor sketched out in detail. You were right: It was all a lie, but one told not by a conniving villain but by a desperate believer in bitcoin whose company could no longer keep up with modern miners. In a last ditch effort, Vanderpool infected the pools with a virus.

The virus replaces a section of the code used by all the mining pools. It is the block building logic, the algorithm that assembles transactions into a block template that then gets combined with zillions of different nonces, looking for a valid hash. The template is still passed on to legitimate hashing code for proof-of-work, but by then the damage has been done.

—HOLOCAT: “What a loss. His family was once great. It’s so sad to see the Vanderpoole’s come to this.”

Investors will sell their BitRey shares en masse when the story drops, plummeting Vanderpoole’s net worth.