by Andrew Barisser

When Joe and Sally went into couple’s therapy to address their trust issues, they were looking for help. Their marriage was faltering. “I felt that my messages weren’t getting through,” Sally reported, “It could take 10–20 minutes, or even more, for him to acknowledge me. I needed faster confirmation.”

Joe acknowledged his latency to respond. But he too felt frustrated. “There’s just not enough throughput. When we got married, I thought we would keep scaling as before. But we’ve hit a wall. I feel like I have to pay an enormous fee just to get through to her.”

At one point Sally almost walked out on Joe. She yelled, “You just can’t commit, even when I pull and request you to. I don’t feel like this is a peer-to-peer relationship anymore.”

So they went to Dr. Motonako, who understood their problem immediately. “This couple has severe trust issues. So I immediately prescribed a trustless blockchain solution.”

The new blockchain implementation of their marriage has been working out great. Conversations, agreements, issues of consent, and the delegation of household tasks are all managed on a cryptographically secure public ledger. “I feel so relieved now that I can prove, in a mathematically self-evident way (and based on the infeasibility of solving the discrete logarithm problem), that Joe agreed to do the laundry at Block #314,712, but failed to do so by Block # 314,897” Sally mentioned. “Now I can call him out on his bullsh&t cryptographically.”

Their Blockchain Vows are literally inalterable

Joe also expressed satisfaction at the new, blockchain-based approach to managing their relationship. “Sally cannot go back on what she agreed to in Block #315,326, even though it is encrypted and only known to the two of us. She knows what it says.” he intoned. “And thankfully, I can provide a homomorphic proof that I possess the preimage of a provably timestamped hash demonstrating that I am a cosigner of that agreement.”

Sally reiterated the success of the new arrangement. “It’s not just that our marriage has become a decentralized, trustless arbitration mechanism, a transformative technology that will shake the marriage-certificate monopoly to its existential core,” she advised, “it’s that now I can really see his proof of work. I know he has a stake; he provides a signed proof every 60 seconds.” She was moved visibly to tears, “I know he is putting in the work for this relationship. I’ve confirmed the hashes myself. I can tell you they are really hard sometimes.”

Happily, the blockchain solution to their marriage has spawned other benefits as well. Some time later, a beaming Joe and Sally stood side by side as they announced that they are now expecting and that it will be an ICO. Asked whether they knew the token, they replied, “It’s an ERC20!”. Before the launch, slated 9 months hence, Sally will be hosting a pre-sale. “This is not merely a fork of the original,” she explained, “This is a cherry-pick of the best features of both.”

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