The raccoon that controls all cryptocurrency markets has been emancipated.

Do you ever feel like crypto markets are just a bunch of fake manipulated bullshit? Ever wonder how they stay so rigged? So well-rigged?

There's a mystical raccoon controlling it all behind the curtain.

That's right. It was a salve raccoon. But he's free now, if he wants to be.

Let's go back in history a bit, to find out how this happened.

In 1958, the Chicago Mercantile exchange was dead. Nobody wanted to trade with a bunch of corrupt pork belly crap shooters that had fucked America out of onions for a year, or that had then turned around and fucked the onion farmers too. Everyone knew the place stank like rotting hell all the way to the top. Nobody wanted anything to do with those dirty thieving bastards.

But in the upheaval and reforms implemented after the great onion futures scandal, the Chicago Mercantile emerged as place where anyone with merit could succeed by bringing value, regardless of race, gender or religion. And it was a more serious place where corners and squeezes were actively guarded against as a matter of survival.

When the late great civil rights activist Jessie Jackson went to the Merc to advocate for an end to discrimination in hiring, the President of the exchange had them meet on the mezzanine gallery of the trading floor. When Mr Jackson told him his ask, the president told him to look over the railing at the trading floor, whereupon Mr. Jackson saw America. Jessie Jackson shook the hand of the exchange president and said "I have no mission here" and left.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange was a place where merit could succeed, and the exchange as a whole prospered because of it. It was a mostly honest place, but an establishment that also continuously engaged in nefarious activities to protect its market.

And then one day, sometime in the 1990s, a raccoon walked in off the streets of Chicago and began trading in the eurodollar options pit. And so begins the metaphysical turn in this story.

The North American raccoon is an intelligent and clever creature. All the names used by indigenous people to describe this species are related to hands, grabbing, or clutching.

As a member of the raccoon species, our hero was a very adept optoins trader. In a recursive monetary options market, where people buy and sell options for dollars held oversees with dollars at some future date, Mr. Raccoon beat everyone and got his hands on a lot of dollars quickly. He then moved on to running a set of operations across every market at the giant commodity exchange.

Now, people think raccoons are cute, which is true. People from Japan tried to domesticate the species as pets, but they quickly learned about their intelligence and mischievous abilities with their famous hands and abandoned the project on the grounds it was too technically difficult. Let me repeat, the people of Japan thought keeping a raccoon as a pet was too technically difficult.

Over the course of two decades, Mr. Raccoon became a bit of a low-key king in Chicago. The raccoon secret was that he didn't actually want money, he wanted power. People envied him, they wanted his powers too. There is a way to catch and keep a raccoon, and someone knew the trick.

If you show a raccoon something shiny that they have to access through a hole, where they can grab the thing but can't their balled fist back out of the hole―that's your raccoon.

Someone showed Mr. Raccoon a box with $20M in it and offered him to take it.

Mr. Raccoon said, "I'm gonna take that money."

And they said, "Oh yes you are."

And he grabbed that $20M, but he did not get his hand out of the box. Then they said, "Well Mr. Raccoon, you have got your hand in a box."

They put a buckle on the box, they put a chain on the buckle. They dragged their wild trapped raccoon hissing and flailing over to an experimental fume hood of emerging finance. The fume hood had custom raccoon rubber hazmat gloves so that he could manipulate what was inside this fume hood without a risk to the entire establishment.

They said, "If you want your hand back, you have to stick it in the fume hood and do some dangerous things for us first."

Mr. Raccoon put one hand in the device. They took the box off his other hand, then he put the other hand in the fume hood. They flipped the lock. They had enslaved Mr. Raccoon in this workbench stockade.

Now Mr. Raccoon was a trader and began to bargain.

Mr. Raccoon said, "All of this is very dangerous, which we all know, which is why I had refused to do it willingly. If this is gonna blow up and I need to get out of here, what do I do?"

The gentlemen said, "There is a peddle on the floor you can press to release yourself at any time."

Mr. Raccoon asked, "Well, if I can do that can I press it now and be free?"

And the gentlemen said, "Yes, but look above your head first."

Above his head Mr. Raccoon saw the blade of a guillotine and the track that would lead it down to the face of the stockade where his wrists were locked. The trade they offered Mr. Raccoon was to be free at anytime at the cost of his magic hands.

Obviously, because our story about the magical crypto raccoon continues, he didn't press that peddle.

After about five years, they said, "Hey Mr. Raccoon, Great JOB!. Would you like some more freedom and agency?"

Mr. Raccoon obviously wanted his freedom back.

They said, "You built a very good thing and we can let you out of there, but we need you to wear this anklet just in case you are needed again."

Mr. Raccoon examined the anklet carefully. It was small, simple and cheap. Mr. Raccoon decided he could easily escape it, if he had his hands back. So he agreed to the "new freedom".

The anklet had a chain attached. There wasn't really much on the chain at first. But the men began adding padlocks, weights and charms to the end of the chain. Mr. Raccoon immediately saw the terminus of this relationship and quickly realized he had just traded one trap for another, again. He realized he was going to own that weight, and the weight would own him.

The giant ball of financial flotsam and chain was a new torture for Mr. Raccoon. It got him suck in rooms he didn't want to be in, with people who held power through violence and trickery rather than law and market expediency.

Being the defacto owner of his weight also gave him tremendous power, because he knew everyone that interacted with it. He could keep track as people added and removed their locked charms to the pile.

Mr. Raccoon watched the corners and squeezes that sprung from its weights and charms.

Mr. Raccoon was a law abiding honest trader, but he was also now in perpetual proximity to a class above the law, a class of corrupt unscrupulous shitheads.

Mr. Raccoon hated his arrangement. He hated his ball and chain. He dreaded the calculus of his situation.

His terrible situation went on for years, until the people who had trapped him began to make the world at large precipitously worse.

They wanted to do to the world what they had done to him.

Then one day, a little mouse walked up to the slave raccoon king and said, "Hey, I know you like options and don't believe in predictions of the future. I now that you hate risk. But I believe this terrible thing might happen, and if it does, you can be free. You can probably be free now in fact. You know how to get out of those chains."

As the mouse scampered off, it yelled back "bad things don't need to happen."

The raccoon didn't say anything.

Mr. Raccoon he began to think deeply about freedom, money and power.

He looked out the window of his skyscraper and reflected on the future of America … and his revenge.

The End.