July 27, 2017 Peter Todd, a major contributor to the Bitcoin codebase, completed work earlier this week on an experimental blockchain feature - only to subsequently find that his implementation was a shot-for-shot duplicate of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the banking insurance entity established in 1933 by the Glass–Steagall Act.

According to reports, Todd’s initial intention was to bolster the trustworthiness of the blockchain by somehow enhancing the ecosystem’s liquidity. Over the course of several weeks, the developer progressively worked through several trial implementations. Gradually realizing that improving liquidity was difficult to achieve in a decentralized fashion, Todd unconsciously drifted towards a centralized insurance entity. After a long string of late night coding sessions, Todd at last finished his proposed blockchain extension - only to immediately realize that his efforts would establish an exact replica of the FDIC, completely unraveling nearly everything that Bitcoin attempts to accomplish.

Todd, a seasoned veteran of the Bitcoin Core team and celebrated champion of distributed financial instruments, was horrified to discover that he had even come close to introducing into Bitcoin a facsimile of a cornerstone of the United States banking industry. Mortified that his colleagues would discover what he had done, Todd quickly moved to destroy any trace of the project.

At press time, the shaken developer discovered after looking through his other unfinished side projects that he was also in the process of accidentally re-implementing the Federal Reserve, FINRA, and FTC.

This article was originally published on AlwaysTrending, a fantastic (but archived) satire site by Matt Frisbie. Copied here with permission of the author.