by Bluestein | 2025-07-14 18:37:57+00:00
In one of these episodes we find out that they are in fact in a CIA shop, set up to track payments where they couldn't otherwise have done it.-

At first glance, it’s just another store in just another mall. Maybe Ohio. Maybe a mall that’s half-abandoned except for this strange office supply shop that nobody remembers opening. Or maybe it’s not called anything anymore. Maybe the sign fell down years ago and nobody noticed because the real customers never use the front door. The staff have that dead, knowing look of people who once held clearance levels they aren’t allowed to speak of.

The pens don’t work, the staplers are jammed on purpose, and the receipt printer feeds encrypted payloads through to Langley via what looks like a perfectly innocent DSL modem taped under the register. It’s all about payments, you see. Payment flows. Track the payments, and you track the people. Track the people, and you own the future.

Tether? You thought Tether was just a stablecoin company. In reality, it’s the most successful honeypot operation since BCCI. Only this time, the bait isn’t bad loans to arms dealers. It’s frictionless blockchain liquidity for people who think they’re clever. Offshore, sure. Caribbean, yes. But “Caribbean” in this case is a backroom in a Nassau CIA storefront, lit by one flickering fluorescent tube and a server rack named “Steve.”

The FBI’s in on it. Not officially. Officially, this entire operation doesn’t exist. But unofficially? There’s a memo somewhere titled “Operation OfficeMax” and it contains flowcharts that would make your eyes bleed. Every pig-butchering scam. Every ransomware payout. Every illicit casino that “somehow” only settles in USDT. All roads lead back to a ledger updated by a 53-year-old woman named Carol who thinks she’s working in accounts payable.

Why isn’t Tether regulated like a bank? Because if it were regulated like a bank, it would be harder to use it as a decentralized financial honeypot. Banks file reports. Tether files reports, too—but only the right ones. To the right inboxes. Under the right steganographic coversheets. Sometimes disguised as purchase orders for toner cartridges.

Governments allow it because governments built it. Not “government” as in “the thing you vote for.” Government as in: former CIA asset now embedded in Bermuda finance law advisory boards. Government as in: DHS contractors who only answer to PO boxes in Virginia. Government as in: three people from an extinct DARPA program who took their access keys home with them in 2008 and never came back.

Who owns the money? Nobody owns it. It’s a loop. A machine. A cycle. The money goes in from scammers, from criminals, from fools. It goes out to seizures, to forfeitures, to “recoveries.” Sometimes it goes out to buy actual printer ink because Carol really does have a budget.

Who's really behind it? Let’s say it started with someone in the 1980s whose Commodore terminal got plugged into the wrong mainframe one night. Let’s say that person now lives in a boat off the coast of Malta. Let’s say they communicate exclusively through changes in weather API response times. Let’s say Tether isn’t the product, but the side effect of a project about pattern recognition run wildly out of control.

And now the CIA shops are everywhere. Staples. Office Depot. The last functioning Fax World in suburban Denver. Somewhere deep underground, there’s a map. It shows every office supply store with a slightly higher-than-average sale rate on cash transactions and USB drives. The dots form a pattern. That pattern looks suspiciously like the logo of a defunct Yugoslavian intelligence agency.

These shops don’t make money. They lose money, spectacularly. But the losses are balanced on ledgers nobody audits, reconciled through transactions nobody verifies. The audits happen in rooms with no windows where people speak in phrases like “cross-jurisdictional monetary elasticity alignment” and “reverse-engineered consumer telemetry.”

Once, there was a meeting where someone suggested they just shut down Tether and seize everything at once. That person was quietly reassigned to an Antarctic weather station, where they now monitor ice thickness via Morse code.

What about the Caribbean? The Caribbean is essential because nowhere else still operates under the financial sovereignty loopholes carved out in the 1960s for banana republics and covert logistics. Somewhere on a beach in Saint Kitts, a man in linen pants is holding the only hard copy of the private keys to $40 billion, wrapped in plastic, buried beneath a sun lounger.

And when the DOJ announces another seizure, it’s theater. The wallets were constructed to be found. The transactions were traced by design. The criminals who think they’re being clever are actually unwitting participants in a human behavioral study about overconfidence and poorly written phishing emails.

The real money never moves. It’s theoretical. Backed by promises, whispers, and the threat of force. If you follow the trail far enough, you end up in a warehouse where pallets of cash are marked “Surplus - Shred” and the air smells faintly of toner and fear.

Somewhere, deep in the bowels of Langley, there’s a terminal blinking a single message in green text: “Ledger reconciled. Continue.”

And Carol, in Ohio, scans another pack of Post-It notes and smiles.-