In this week's Mr Robot episode, Darlene sits on a park bench with Dom, and distributes the money she stole from the Deus Group to everybody, evenly. I timed the transaction as it happened in the show. It was 24 seconds, between her hitting return and seeing the following message on her screen: "*Transfers Complete. All Wallets Updated*" This processing time includes a message that says, "cleaning coins through crypto tumbler". It took 1 minute and 16 seconds for the transaction to tumble, process, and for the recipients to begin to get notices that they received money in their accounts.
If you have worked with bitcoin, you know that cryptocurrency does not work like this. Transferring money is a slow and sometimes expensive process, as transaction fees eat into every transaction. I know that eCoin isn't necissarily bitcoin, because it's controlled by eCorp, but it's fun to think about what happens if eCoin works like bitcoin does today...
How much money was transferred?
According to Forbes, the most wealthy people in the world are worth a combined $8.7 trillion, or $2.7 trillion. It depends on which Forbes list you are looking at. On the actual Forbes web site, they say the richest people in the world are worth $8.7 trillion, but they do not state how many of the richest people in the world are worth that much. If you look at sites like Victor Media, they publish a table of the 100 most wealthy people, and say they got the list from Forbes. They probably did purchase the list from Forbes. If I put the Victor Media list into excel, and add all the values in the net worth column, that number comes out to $2.7 trillion. So Forbes might be talking about a list that is more than the top 100 people, and sell the top 100 people list to sites like Victor Media? I don't know.
Either way, we are talking about somewhere between $2.7 and $8.7 trillion.
How many people did the money go to?
That's complicated. There was no global montage showing people celebrating all over the world (which I found a little surprising, even though I still love how this episode was shot). The only indication of a truly global transfer, to every individual in the world, is a TV screen in the airport saying that, "Global eCoin Payout... Deus group collapses as wealth spreads around the world." So Darlene could have sent the money to every individual with an eCoin wallet in the world, or she could be sending them to every American, or to everybody in the developed world. I doubt the average rice farmer in Indonesia is really using eCoin, but it's possible. If she only sent it to every American, our wealth tends to spread around the globe pretty fast, so that's possible, too.
Lets work with World Bank population numbers for all three of these possibilities...
World Population: 7.6 billion people
Global North (AKA the developed world): 1.24 billion people
United States: 327 million people
So we have 6 possibilities for how much money was sent to each person...
| People | Total Money | Money Per Capita | Satoshis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7.6 billion | $2.7 trillion | $355.53 | 4,739,471 |
| 1.21 billion | $2.7 trillion | $2230.82 | 29,741,808 |
| 327 million | $2.7 trillion | $8252.65 | 110,079,512 |
| 7.6 billion | $8.7 trillion | $1145.60 | 15,279,332 |
| 1.21 billion | $8.7 trillion | $7188.22 | 95,883,716 |
| 327 million | $8.7 trillion | $26591.89 | 355,275,242 |
How much would this transaction cost with bitcoin?
Aside from the fact that eCoin probably functions differently than bitcoin, this is a very complex question. I'm definitely not as sure about these numbers as the other numbers I have, but I'll do my best to come up with useful, realistic numbers. If you are more familiar with the block chain than me, please correct me.
The coins were taken from 100 different Deus Group accounts. Lets say each transaction launders through a bitcoin tumbler 1,000 times. I'm going to ignore transaction fees for the tumbling process, because I don't fully understand the details of tumbling, but 1,000 times seems reasonable to me.
That means that there are 100 x 1,000 = 10,000 inputs in any transaction that spends all the money from the Deus group.
For outputs... for simplicity's sake, I will make the conservative assumption that everybody has one eCoin wallet. That means somewhere between 327 million and 7.6 billion outputs. Accounting for everybody having multiple wallets would make the transaction even bigger, but this is a good starting point to get a feel for what this transaction would look like, in the real world.
How long will this transaction take to process?
There is a bidding process and a bit of politics involved in processing a cryptocurrency transaction. For simplicity, I'll assume we bid enough that this transaction gets priority treatment from the bitcoin miners.
According to blockchain.com, transactions happen on the block chain at a rate of roughly 3.5 transactions per second. At that rate, the tumbling would take roughly 48 minutes, rather than the few seconds it took for Darlene to tumble this money.
According to buybitcoinworldwide.com's fee calculator, here are the transaction sizes, the transaction fees involved (in US Dollars), and the time it would take at 3.5 transactions per second...
| Inputs | Outputs | Size | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | 7.6 billion | 240.4737 Gb | $38,884,280.55 | 68.85 years |
| 10,000 | 1.21 billion | 38.32587 Gb | $6,192,571.09 | 10.96 years |
| 10,000 | 327 million | 10.35582 Gb | $1,673,260.46 | 2.96 years |
So this transaction would take years to go through, and it pays Evil Corp somewhere between $1.6 and $38 million. In the real world, most of that money would go to Chinese bitcoin miners.
What would the impact be?
A one time windfall of $327 per capita would probably not trigger hyperinflation in America. The largest payout we calculated was $26.5k, and I doubt that would cause hyperinflation, either. Regular inflation? Yes. Hyperinflation? Probably not.
It might lead to hyperinflation in other countries, though, because of differences in purchasing power.
Purchasing power parity is a number that describes the differences in the cost of goods and services around the world. $5 in America will buy you a big mac, but if you go to, say, Indonesia, you can buy a lot more with that $5, because Indonesia is full of people who make something like 25 cents a week.
OECD.org publishes PPP (purchasing power parity) numbers for countries all around the world. If you want to know how far your dollar will stretch, on average, in a foreign country, consult this list. If you have $100 in America, you can expect it to be worth $100 worth of American goods and services, so on the OECD table, it has a PPP of 1.0. If you take that $100 to, say, the UK, where the PPP is 0.7, you can expect that $100 to be worth $70 worth of goods and services. If you take that $100 to Australia, where the PPP is 1.48, you can expect that $100 to buy roughly $148 worth of goods and services.
If Elliot and Darlene were genius economists, I might expect them to account for PPP in their payout. They would have to be geniuses, to predict what PPP is doing after events like the 5/9 hack, because their best data would be out of date, so they would have to use all kinds of fancy regressions and tricks to figure out how that would work in such a volatile world economy. They definitely aren't economists, though, so I'll assume they sent the same nominal amount to everybody.
So what's the range on how much purchasing power this transaction gives people around the world? In 2018, the highest PPP number on the OECD list is Indonesia, with a PPP of 4,245.613140. The lowest PPP on the list is Lithuania, with a PPP of 0.457582. Lets see how this shakes out in each of these countries...
| $ Per Capita | Lithuania (0.46) | Indonesia (4,245.61) |
|---|---|---|
| $355.53 | $162.68 | $1,509,442.84 |
| $2,230.82 | $1,020.78 | $9,471,198.70 |
| $8,252.65 | $3,776.26 | $35,037,559.28 |
| $1,145.60 | $524.20 | $4,863,774.41 |
| $7,188.22 | $3,289.20 | $30,518,401.29 |
| $26,591.89 | $12,167.97 | $112,898,877.60 |
What would this cause? People might predict a lot of different things. The Yang gang people probably strong opinions on this. I have a bachelor's degree in economics, so I believe I can predict that most mainstream economists would predict the following...
In Lithuania, when they get a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, they probably raise a pint to F Society, then put the rest towards a house or car payment, or buy themselves something nice. Minor inflation would happen, probably starting at the pubs, and that would worry financial types, but it would not cause any kind of major economic catastrophe.
In Indonesia, where everybody becomes an asset millionaire overnight, they will probably have hyperinflation, mass social upheaval, and violence.
In conclusion...
TL;DR: What Darlene did last night with eCoin isn't actually possible with bitcoin, and the impact in America might not be as great as you think, but the impact would be much bigger in poorer parts of the world.
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