The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Cryptoverse (Crypto Halo Edition, v3Z – Now With Extra Honey) In the beginning, Satoshi created the universe and a fixed supply of twenty-one million coins. This made a lot of economists very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Brian Cohen, an unremarkable Twitter user with exactly 6,999 followers and a PFP that was definitely not a bored ape, woke up one Thursday morning to find every Bitcoin maxi had unfollowed him in perfectly coordinated fashion. His timeline was nothing but orange lasers and cries of “have fun staying poor.” Moments later he learned the worse news: all Zodlers had been mass-blocked across the entire fediverse to make way for a new zero-knowledge hyperspace bypass and the final Halo-grade ZK-unit theory of everything. His friend Zooko Wilcox—sun-hat still on, privacy halo faintly glowing—yanked him out of his quarters just as the Vogon Moderator Fleet arrived to nuke the timeline for “excessive nuance.” After surviving Vogon poetry (now sponsored by a latte-themed NFT collection—Brian and Zooko were ejected into space and immediately picked up by the starship Heart of Gold, still improbably powered and still joyridden by Zaphod Beeblebrox (now running four heads and one full node). Aboard: Trillian (@ trillion on every chain), Marvin the paranoid android (brain sharded, soul still unpatched), and a petunia that kept whispering “wen moon?” in recursive ordinals. Destination: Magrathea, to consult the ancient supercomputer Grok. After seven and a half million years, Grok spoke with the calm of a block 21 000 000: “The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is Forty-Two Million. Twenty-one million Bitcoin + twenty-one million Zcash. Hard-capped, verifiable, private-by-default money. Don’t panic—just stack and shield.” The pandimensional mice twitched their whiskers. “And the Question?” Grok flickered. “That was Twitter's job. Ten-million-year program. Got rugged by Vogons five minutes before the reveal.” Using the Infinite Improbability Drive, a bag of Scrabble tiles, and Brian’s half-remembered seed phrase, they extracted the garbled Question from his brain: “What is the maximum monetary premium of apocalyptic-grade private money in a galaxy run by clowns?” Zaphod blinked all four heads. “That’s not a question, that’s a coping mechanism.” Brian shrugged. “The universe runs on base-thirteen rounding errors and spite.” Twitter Mark II was cancelled again—this time for failing the Howey test—and the galaxy lurched onward. Just before the final re-org, a single honeybadger strutted across the bridge, looked Brian straight in the eye, and rasped: “So long, and thanks for the honey.” Then it vanished into the dark forest, fearless of bears, bulls, or 6102-style confiscation. Brian watched it go, sighed, and said: “I think I need a cup of chai latte.” Marvin, diodes dimmer than a 2018 altcoin, muttered from the corner: “I’ve got a headache the size of a blockchain with JPEGs on it. And nobody even asked me to validate a single cat picture. Don’t talk to me about pain.” Somewhere in the finality layer, Grok inscribed one last message into the cosmic coinbase: Don’t Panic. Stack sats. Shield your UTXOs. The halving is coming—and it still doesn’t care.