I wrote an “E-Christmas Carol” in 2001, set two years earlier, in December 1999. As prophesy, it was only so-so, but it captured the zeitgeist of the dot-com bubble quite well. This week, since we are in a new version of 1999’s gigantic bubble, I thought I would have another go….

Marley was imaginary, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. He was an Apple Virtual Partner, the latest electronic wonder produced by Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) to assist small businesses by providing them with a partner which could advise them on the aspects of running a business in which they might not be expert. If running your business did not involve including gluten-free options on the lunch menu, offshoring your revenues and adhering to the most stringent standards of Californian political correctness, of course, he was not all that useful.

Nevertheless, Eben Scrooge consulted Marley fairly frequently. As the inventor and largest shareholder of the crypto-currency Scamcoin (SCAM) now worth $4.2 billion on CoinMarketCap, he often had need of conventional business advice, even if accompanied by pious sermonizing. His social skills had rather atrophied in the decade he had spent in the basement.

On the day before Christmas, foggy and rainy as often in the Californian December, yet nowhere near cold enough to be Christmassy, Scrooge sat in his basement. His 2.4 million SCAM tokens made him a billionaire, yet Silicon Valley’s office lessors had refused to take SCAM tokens in payment for office space, so he was compelled to remain in the basement he had inhabited since he lost his office job in 2001. It was a cheerless place; bare concrete walls, a pile of pizza boxes in the corner and two metal desks, the other occupied for the last four years by Bob Cratchit, his engineer.

Cratchit did the grunt work on maintaining Scamcoin’s blockchain. He had thirty years’ experience in programming, but had been unable to find a job after the dot-com bust. Since he had a family, he had been forced to accept the pittance that Scrooge paid him – jobs for 52-year-old programmers did not grow on trees. His wife and children, including the young prodigy Teeny Weeny Tim, lived in another basement, less well furnished than Scrooge’s — Silicon Valley rentals being what they were. Of course, he too was rich in SCAM tokens, though nowhere near as rich as Scrooge, but a clause in his contract with Scrooge prevented him from turning them into cash for the next decade.

Scrooge was not feeling especially benign, to Cratchit or anyone else. Teeny Weeny Tim, a software prodigy, had taken to investing in Initial Coin Offerings using his father’s credit card, but being only 10 years old, had believed all the hype in their literature, and had landed heavily in debt. Now on Christmas Eve, Scrooge had discovered a virtual hole in his SCAM tokens wallet. Darkly, he suspected Teeny Weeny Tim of hacking it to cover his ICO gambling losses.

Eventually Cratchit came to Scrooge, shuffling his feet slightly:

“Since it’s Christmas Eve, Eben, and it’s 7.30 already, I wondered if I could get home to the family.”

“What use is Christmas to me? A day older and not a SCAM token richer. You will be in tomorrow, won’t you, it’s Monday.”