The Forgotten LedgerNoah had spent years trading cryptocurrency, watching the markets rise and fall. He thought he had seen it all—until he found the ledger.The DiscoveryIt appeared in his cold wallet one morning, a transaction he didn’t recognize. A file named Genesis_Ledger_1.0 sat among his assets. There was no sender, no timestamp. Just a cryptic note in the metadata:“The first transaction was never recorded.”Curious, Noah opened the file. It contained a single Bitcoin address—one he had never seen before. When he checked its balance, his breath caught.It held exactly 21 million BTC.The MysteryImpossible. The total supply of Bitcoin was capped at 21 million, yet the blockchain had accounted for every coin. This address should not exist.As he scrolled through the ledger, he saw transactions that predated Bitcoin’s official launch—ones that shouldn’t be there. Names of early adopters, wallet keys leading to accounts that had long been lost or burned. And then, at the very bottom, his own wallet address appeared.Someone—or something—knew he had found it.The ChoiceA message flashed on his screen:“Claim the balance, and the chain resets. Leave it, and time moves forward.”Noah’s hands trembled. If he took the coins, would Bitcoin’s history rewrite itself? Would every trade, every fortune, every loss vanish in an instant?His cursor hovered over the “Transfer” button.Then his screen went black.The AftermathWhen it rebooted, the file was gone. The address no longer existed. But deep in the blockchain, in a place only the most skilled could reach, a new message had been inscribed:“You looked when no one else dared.”
