The Wind Does Not Name You, by Harper Greendale.
Chapter 1.
The quiet of Almagro was disturbed at this late hour only by the distant hum of car horns and the occasional clatter of garbage bins. Early June had taken a sharp turn for the worse, and there were rumors of a night frost in Buenos Aires. To Emilia, the neighborhood felt frayed but enduring—like Pepe’s old knitted sweater. She wore it despite the gaping hole at the left elbow: it was too full of memories of her father to discard.
With her cold fingers, she switched on the sleek, Austrian-made Bitcoin heater—a remarkable gift from one of Pepe’s countless friends who had quietly supported them over the past decade. At first, the concept baffled her. “Heating Bitcoin?” she had thought, the idea sounding as absurd as it was intriguing. But the device wasn’t about creating Bitcoin in the usual sense. It was a mini-miner, using the computational process of Bitcoin mining to generate warmth—allowing them to mint small amounts of Bitcoin while heating their home.
A small desk lamp cast shadows over the crowded walls of the small apartment. Books and papers were stacked on every available surface, squeezed onto wooden shelves Pepe had built decades ago. Faded pictures hung from the walls, showing their little family in happier times. In the most recent image – taken just before it all happened – Emilia stood between her parents, her smile showing off her braces. It had been only months after she’d started studying math at the University of Buenos Aires in 2014 that Pepe’s sudden disappearance sent a shockwave through their lives. Without money to find a place of her own in the crumbling city, at twenty-nine she was still living at home, working from her father’s old workroom. She didn’t mind working late when everything was quiet. Quiet was good; especially now, with Mumi unwell and asleep in the next room.
Emilia’s eyes shifted back to the screen. She wasn’t supposed to be doing this: her actual assignment for HashyMcHashFace—a ridiculously overfunded crypto news startup from NYC, with a name as absurd as its budget—sat untouched in a minimized tab.
“Write an overview of the frozen fortune of Bitcoin’s illusive founder,” the editor’s email had instructed. Emilia stared at the email header, emblazoned with the garish neon logo of HashyMcHashFace—"Your Blockchain News Authority (™)." Authority? Please. Their assignments had all the depth of a kiddie pool. The piece was supposed to ‘analyze’ the 36,000 dormant wallets Satoshi Nakamoto apparently left untouched since Bitcoin’s earliest days. The kind of article that would get a few clicks but ultimately blend into the endless churn of crypto content.
Instead, she had redirected her energy toward something more interesting. Another window on her screen displayed the output from her custom script, which ran on the full, uncompressed Bitcoin node housed in a battered desktop tower beside her desk. The script scanned the blockchain for transactions from wallets that had been dormant for at least fourteen years. With a new block every ten minutes, that would amount to at least 750,000 blocks of Bitcoin history. This method allowed her to dig up data no ordinary blockchain explorer would bother with. Explorers filtered out noise, especially non-economic activity like OP_RETURN fields — basically a kind of post-it notes stuck to a ledger entry. But how could you decide if something was noise upfront? The fact that she now had sold her soul to the system – working for HashyMcWhatever to get some badly needed dollars in – didn’t mean she had to downgrade her brain capacity to their level on day one.
Via her headphones, her ex-boyfriend Gabriel's favorite band Keane mimicked her feelings, and not for the first time. “You say you wander your own land, But when I think about it, I don't see how you can.”
She did miss him. Badly. The fight, which had happened after he’d treated her to a dinner they both knew he couldn’t afford. Gabriel had disclosed that he’d finally managed to secure a job at the UNDP in NYC. To Emilia’s surprise, he had asked her to go with him. Surely, he knew she couldn’t leave Mumi? And why should she admit defeat and join the endless parade of educated people leaving the mother country that had given them everything? He had looked so hurt when she told him so. “Look, Emilia, I am completely with you on that — I do want to see the changes take effect here. But the best way to accomplish that, is to work on debt relief for the Global South, where the decisions are actually made.”
Hearing of his plans had been a terrible blow, and she had refused to answer his calls and texts. Her best friend Sofia had told her that he’d flown out the next week. Good for him, thought Emilia, determined not to miss him.
But it seemed her mind was playing tricks on her. Previously, she had thought of Keane as an overrated, annoying band. Yet now she somehow kept returning to their songs again and again since the night she had ended things with Gabriel.
Blinking and shaking her head to clear her mind, she decided to refocus on the task at hand and write a few lines on her main assignment. Meanwhile, her script was left to efficiently sift through millions of Bitcoin transactions.
After several minutes of fruitless attempts to craft a decent opening for the article, a chat window popped up. It was Sofia. Losing Gabriel had been hard enough, but now Sofia had moved to Chile for a temporary job, hoping to save some money while finishing her thesis.
Sofia: how r u doing?
Emilia: trying to make a move just to stay in the game
Sofia: is it so bad that you have to quote Gabriel’s favorite song?
Emilia: not what you think. Just trying to stay awake and remember my name
Sofia: yeah, right. Good to hear you’re not drowning in melancholy! How is HashyMcFashy going?
Emilia: HashyMcHashFace, what a name, right? So far, not bad. Of course, they gave me a shitty assignment to test me, but I’m up for it. How’s Santiago?
Sofia: it’s fine, beautiful this time of the year. And the girls are nice. Being an au pair isn’t that hard - basically, you just need to be around. It is only for a few months. I’ll be back home in time for your birthday!
Emilia: Thanks, you’re the best!
Her monitor beeped, flagging a Bitcoin dust transaction that matched the criteria.
Emilia: Sorry, it seems I need to continue working on this article, speak soon!
Sofia: Go girl!
Emilia frowned as she examined the transaction. Strangely enough, just one Satoshi had been sent, one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin. But it came from a wallet so old it might have been forged in Bitcoin’s first days. Emilia leaned forward.
“What are you doing?” she murmured, staring at the OP_RETURN field. It displayed a seemingly random, 50-byte hex string. Clearly there was no economic reason for this transaction, but it had to mean something. Could it be nothing more than random blockchain graffiti? She stared at the meaningless hex string. What was going on?
She copied ‘80589EAB18817B86F5672C0CE0F60A387A1B9CD0AF47319A05’ into her script and ran it through a conversion tool to decode it into decimal. The output flooded her screen: a scatter of meaningless decimal numbers with no pattern.
Okay. Next step. She converted the hex to binary, turning it into a 200-bit-long string that was anything but random. What did it mean? Her next instinct was to try ASCII, the standard encoding for most modern text. She parsed the binary into 8-bit chunks, running it through a decoder. The output spat garbled nonsense: €Xž«\x18\x81{\x86õg,\x0càö\n8z\x1b\x9cЯG1\x9A\x05, with some characters undefined.
Emilia leaned back in her chair. Whoever sent this had something to hide—that much was clear. If ASCII wasn’t the answer, it may not have been an 8-bit encoding, but one that was older. Simpler.
She thought about the puzzles her father had given her years ago, explaining cryptographic history while she cracked codes to uncover hidden presents around the house. They’d shaped her understanding. She grabbed Richard W. Hamming’s Coding and Information Theory from Pepe’s shelf and thumbed through it, transported to a time of teletypes, telegraphs, and Morse code. Early systems prioritized efficiency, squeezing meaning into limited bandwidth. With only 5-bit encoding—just 32 possibilities—they met the constraints of the era. The newer 8-bit encodings, offering 256 possibilities, had been unimaginable luxuries back then.
She applied a bot to divide the binary into 5-bit chunks instead of 8. The results fragmented into incomplete pieces, like a half-decoded message. But patterns began to appear. Repeated phrases stood out. She wrote a script to cross-reference chunk frequencies with English letter patterns, uncovering hints of structure. Still, the limited text kept it speculative and unresolved. It wasn’t readable yet, but she was close to cracking it. The message was there—she had to learn its language.
Emilia found a section on the Baudot code, a 5-bit telegraph encoding system from 1874. Incorporated into International Telegraph Union (ITU) standards, it had unified global telegraph communication in the early 20th century. Though obsolete, its straightforward design had influenced later systems—and its deliberate nature caught her attention.
“Could it really be this old?” she muttered, wiping her slightly damp hands on her lap. Adjusting her script, she configured it to decode the hex string using a Baudot-based table. The output resembled English, but several characters were clearly misinterpreted. After a few tweaks, she switched to the slightly newer Baudot-Murray protocol, and the screen finally filled with readable text.
tendxrootsxofxjusticextruexequityxawaits
Her eyes widened. Tend roots of justice. True equity awaits. What? Her hand hovered over her keyboard as the realization settled in. This wasn’t just a random experiment or some troll encoding truncated haiku into OP_RETURN fields just for the fun of it. Whoever had written this was drawing from the oldest cryptographic systems to encode a message of profound simplicity.
“Why would someone go this far?” she muttered, leaning back. She felt both exhilarated and haunted. Baudot. Binary. Mini-haiku. A new thought occurred in her mind. How could she be the only one to have figured this out? The transaction was registered on-chain a mere 22 days ago. Not ancient, but someone must have seen this, right? Sure, as she was running her own full node, she had an advantage over people that used blockchain explorers. And almost everybody was interested in the big balances, ignoring the crumbs for simplicity. But the true meaning of this transaction, wasn’t it’s financial weight, not even the haiku itself, but the wallet it came from. Dormant since 2009, could this even be the founder, or one of the founders, of Bitcoin themselves?
Wow, Emilia Gonzales, junior-researcher at HashyMcHashFace, finding a genuine Satoshi, such an explosive item! What is she, he, they, trying to tell? And why in such a complicated way? Could this be because blockchain graffiti might be the only safe way available for someone on everybody’s watch list? But what is the real message, true equity awaits, and what are the roots of justice? Point them out to me, and I’d happily water them!
Who compiled this elegant message, could it be the founder, or at least someone close to the founder or founders of Bitcoin? Her thoughts turned to Pepe’s disappearance. Her father had published hundreds of articles about early decentralized currencies, arguing they could protect nations like Argentina from economic collapse. Cypherpunk communities embraced his ideas, but in Argentina, people saw him as a radical undermining an already collapsing financial system. When Bitcoin emerged, his ideas—and their proximity to key concepts in its white paper—made him an inevitable target in the hunt for Satoshi. In Bitcoin’s early days, this was just a minor nuisance. But as its value skyrocketed, the stakes changed. Suddenly, secret services, tax authorities, regulators, and even criminals were all hunting for a piece of the pie. Until he vanished. With no note. No message. Nothing. Emilia hadn’t heard from him since 2014. She hoped he wasn’t in some jail cell somewhere. Could this message has been originated by people who might know more about Pepe?
On impulse, Emilia encoded her own haiku using the same method. When she tried decoding it, she got gibberish. After some experimenting, the problem became clear: hexadecimal is base 16, while Baudot uses base 5 (5 bits per character). To avoid padding bits during encoding, her message needed a character count divisible by 20. Only then would the 5-bit characters align with the 4-bit groups needed for hexadecimal conversion.
She adjusted her message and pasted FFFFF4E15C1B21F563102FD989FCB032BF3A63F3A18B60A8BFC85811C29F8503F2E0D2FFFFF into an OP_RETURN transaction, attaching a low-priority Bitcoin fee. After entering her PIN on the hardware wallet powered by the Bitcoin heater, she closed her eyes and pressed both buttons on the small device to approve the transaction.
Her eyelids grew heavy despite the rush of excitement. Sleep first—the world could wait. She turned off the study light and tiptoed into the hallway, careful not to disturb Mumi. On the monitor, the OP_RETURN input lingered on-screen for a while before the system powered down.
Dormant roots now stir. Who whispers beneath the soil?