This One Weird Trick Lets People Hack Bitcoin (and Maybe Everything Else, Too)

Editor’s Note: This is absolutely not a real trick to hack Bitcoin or anything else. It is weird, though.

Eric Ferguson was not looking to get rich when he accidentally stumbled onto a way to generate bitcoins for free.

Ferguson isn’t one of the many new Bitcoin enthusiasts. He’s a classic gamer. His favorite console is the original Nintendo, which he has maintained in near mint condition since his father bought him one in 1991. Ferguson also owns all the peripheral gear: the NES Zapper for Duck Hunt. The original Power Glove. And, of course, the Game Genie—that little bit of wizardry in a cartridge that allowed kids to automatically skip levels or get 1,000 lives in their favorite games.

What does any of this have to do with Bitcoin?

“I was sitting around one day after watching a YouTube video on Bitcoin,” Ferguson said. “I only owned a couple hundred dollars worth, which my Grandma had given me for Christmas. Anyways, suddenly it hit me. Bitcoin is just code, right? And those Nintendo games—they are just code too? I mean, I don’t understand any of the code, I just play the games, but clearly it’s somewhere in there.”

“And I have this magic cartridge that lets me manipulate game code—why shouldn’t it work on other kinds of code too?” Ferguson said, pulling out his Game Genie.

After scanning around on his computer for a place to stick it in, he continued, “I have a Dell tower and it has some slots, but they don’t really fit a typical game cartridge.” Still, after fussing around for a bit he was able to jam the Genie into an empty DVD bay. Then he plugged his Nintendo remote into the back of the tower.

“I think the port was meant for a VGA monitor, but I was able to make it stick with a little tape.”

At this point Ferguson simply did what everyone from a certain generation does instinctively when holding a classic Nintendo remote: he mashed around the buttons until he found a combination that worked.

The magic combo?

DOWN-UP-UP-DOWN A-A-A-B-A-A-A-B-B-A.

What happened next is remarkable.

Every time Ferguson pressed the up arrow his Bitcoin account, open in his browser, grew by 1 BTC. And if he pressed down, the account likewise lost 1 BTC.

“I must have pressed the button like a thousand times because at some point I realized I had over a billion dollars worth of bitcoins in my account.”

Now the supply of bitcoins is supposed to be fixed. It should be impossible to create bitcoins out of nowhere except through a very intensive computational process called “mining.”

“It’s not possible,” says David Faulting, one of the key developers involved in maintaining the Bitcoin network. “You said he just stuck a Game Genie in an empty DVD bay in his PC? How the fuck would that do anything? Are you from a real magazine?”

But we were able to confirm Ferguson’s holdings by tracking several large transfers he made over the network.

The economy is of course a complex chain of interacting systems. And when news broke last week that Ferguson had hacked Bitcoin with a Game Genie, the price of used Game Genie’s on Amazon’s marketplace shot up by 11 hundred million percent.

“One Game Genie sold for $394 billion and ended up crashing PayPal’s entire system for 5 days,” a financial analyst told us.

On the corporate side, many businesses have completely dropped their current blockchain projects and are instead eyeing new technological applications of the Game Genie.

“Look, first we had personal computers, then the internet, and then Bitcoin brought us the blockchain revolution. But things happen fast and now the blockchain revolution is giving way to the Game Genie revolution,” Frank Anderson, co-founder of the site gamegenierev.com told us. “We are hearing rumors that the Winklevoss Twins™ may want in on this thing.”

What future technological breakthroughs might be powered by the Game Genie?

Anderson tells us the possibilities are endless. “Anything—and I mean anything—with a roughly rectangular slot and electricity is susceptible to disruption.”

Even scientists are getting in on the excitement. “No one understands how this works. It seems to defy everything we know about science, math, engineering, computers, history, and logic. But, the fact that Eric Ferguson just bought the city of Osaka—with cash—tells us that there’s something real going on here.

“No one understood quantum mechanics in the early days. This might be a similar kind of revolution,” says Arvik Shulmstrod of Scranton College.

It’s too early to know if we are approaching some kind of cartridge enabled singularity, or if this is just another in the long line of technological bubbles that will eventually burst and leave a lot of investors feeling duped.

In a related development, the stock price of “Dust Off” (DOF), makers of a line of cans filled with compressed gas, has rocketed from $20 a share to $7,800 a share overnight.