Gancor's Chronicle: Digital Border Reiver
Here is how living in a constant state of in-between - liminality - carried me from wagecage despair to millionaire NEETdom.
Noob Spawn
I was born on the literal furthest edge of the Roman Empire in a hospital built directly on top of Hadrian’s Wall; the frontier that separated civilisation from barbarity. Since both the streets I grew up on were named after Roman emperors, this fact was hammered home.
Eight years later, still living atop the Wall, my dad bought our first household computer - a pre-built TinyPC - and installed 56k dial-up internet. From that moment onwards I would forever live on the threshold: IRL and the online frontier. Late at night in my bedroom I’d be gibbing noobs in Unreal Tournament, trolling WWF wrestling chatrooms, and browsing the rotten corners of the fledgling internet.
The Y2K fever-dream futurism of my childhood ended abruptly when I watched the towers come down live right after school and the War on Terror began, although I still managed to find a safe escape in MMORPGs. The username ‘Gancor’ was spat out by the Star Wars Galaxies name generator.
The second rupture came with the Great Financial Crisis. Northern Rock, whose headquarters sat in my hometown, like the towers before it also collapsed. I witnessed the first British bank run since 1866 as queues of boomers snaked along Northumberland Street, desperate to withdraw their pensions and life savings. I did not know then that mere months later on the 3 January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto would be mining the Bitcoin genesis block.
Border Reiver
Not far from those panicked Northern Rock queues lay the medieval Anglo-Scottish borderlands once a lawless zone resembling Helmand Province. For centuries the Border Marches had been devastated by wars, and the people that lived there - the Border Reivers, from whom I am heavily descended, were forged in uncertainty. Everything they held dear was fragile, and out of necessity they carved out life beyond the reach of the state.
Too far from either Edinburgh or London for centralised authority to exercise control, the border folk of the two kingdoms were forced to adapt to a clan-based system of blood feuds and tit-for-tat raids, often against their own countrymen as much as across the line. They were proto-Hell’s Angels; loyal to kin that they could trust for protection, not to Crowns.
The Crowns did try to impose centralised order with March Wardens. Some of them, like Sir Edward Musgrave, were my ancestors. Wardens often joined the very raids they were meant to police; like a regulator front-running insider trades. Governance failed.
Centuries later marked a pivotal moment of these people: Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Billy Graham, all bearing Reiver surnames, stood together as another Reiver lad of Clan Armstrong became the first human to step foot onto another world (assuming you aren’t moon hoax psyop pilled).
Dread Pirate Meow
Under moonlight on horseback, the Reivers drove stolen cattle across windswept terrain they knew well. Cattle was money: fungible, transportable, easy to lift. My ancestral raiding tune played its first note one moonlit night on the imageboard frontier, when Bitcoin threads started to filter through Swagbucks, MTurk hustles and endless ‘how to make money’ scams. Soon, a new peel tower rose: the Silk Road.
I was halfway through university. Mephedrone (mkat or meow meow) had flooded campuses, imported by the kilo from Chinese suppliers and dealt out from student flats. It was legal, and every drum & bass, dubstep and deep house night reeked of cat piss because of it.
Deep into a multi-night mephedrone-fuelled session in 2010, a collective sigh washed across my student kitchen when someone read out the announcement that Gordon Brown had outlawed it. Stockpiles dwindled, but the Silk Road quickly filled the void, ensuring there was still ample supply on campus on the day I walked through the British franchise of an Occupy Wall Street encampment in the city to hand in my thesis.
Ragie Wagie Stomps His Feet
By 2013 and deep in wagie purgatory, I sat on another moonlit Sunday night in Cambridge in dread for the Monday morning return to the cage. Bitcoin was making a run, and Coinbase had just launched in the UK. I registered in a fit of FOMO. That raid ended quickly when the price topped out at $1,147 a month later.
The following years blurred into shitposting by night and corporate drudgery by day. The 9 to 5 was not improving my lot by much; constant talk of austerity dominated the UK and the bankers that had caused the GFC had been bailed out.
At an audit meeting, I was left in the room with an equally disillusioned middle-aged accountant that wanted to IRL-shitpost more than discuss accounts. After telling me his client had appointed their son to head the company, and that it will soon be run into the ground, he leant over and said, “Saying that though, our jobs will be obsolete soon anyway. Blockchain will see to that”.
He lit the spark for me to start raiding again. Perfect timing: an insurance payment was about to land after I had been knocked off my bike by a Jag whilst cycling home from the wagecage. This would be my degen seed money. A £4,000 airdrop hit my tradbank wallet and I moved back north with my girlfriend, closer to the borderlands.
By 2017, moonlit raids began in earnest. ICO mania energised the herds and clans formed around shitcoins. Copypastas, schizo FUD threads, and wall of text shill theories read like Reiver ballads on /biz/. One night a big haul, the next the Bogdanoffs made the call to dump it.
Bitbean degens mocked Antshares incels, VeChain baggies laughed at salty Walties. And then there was my clan; the stinky linkies. Entire manifestos on why Chainlink would be the future, wedged between SIBOs toilet-flush posts and pregnant Sergey Big Mac memes.
Every day without fail there would be a thread: “Tonight... it’s happening, TONIGHT. Visualise it in your mind’s eye” followed by another linkie replying “Dude you are INSANE. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”.
The taste of this insanity was sublime, my micro-portfolio was mooning 10% an hour at times. Then whilst I was sitting at another audit in some side office refreshing Delta over and over and seeing it touch £35,000 I thought I was going to make it. The altcoin cycle top was the same day: 8 January 2018.
After the top there was a migration from open imageboards to Discord servers so that deluded bagholders could retreat to safety, like a town being swarmed by Reivers and retreating to their fortified bastle house.
NEET Eats Tendies, Sauce & Fries
This glimpse into euphoria made it clear to me that I couldn’t remain a corporate herbivore. Through the 2018-2019 bear market I shoved every spare wage shekel into Chainlink.
As I walked through London on a training event, symbolically after a burger, Chainlink mooned and I called my dad the moment I broke six figures. I handed in my notice at £200k, spending my notice period mostly hiding in the toilet pretending to take a dump while trading Chainlink on margin on Binance.
On my final walk home from the wagecage, with Aphex Twin’s ‘Lichen’ in my ears, I paused for a moment and looked over the city lights and breathed in the frosty November night air. Like many of the Reivers setting off on their mount, I was hit by a wave of euphoric nervous anticipation of what was to come. I did not know then but it was my last day in the wagecage.
A few months later, half-pissed in Prague with my dad and uncle, I had half a million in longs open. The next big fracture was soon to hit. Cases of COVID were breaking headlines. In the airport on the way home signs had already been hung warning people to watch out for symptoms. Traditional markets had took a hit from the news, but crypto had continued rising. Back home near Reiver territory, a Chainlink talk in Durham was livestreamed into our Discord by a clan member. All still comfy.
Then it cracked. Markets puked, pink Wojaks were everywhere. I was forced to panic-sell all my LINK, narrowly avoiding total liquidation. We all got drunk on voicechat, thinking it was all over.
Pink Wojak Flu Season
I sat for hours daily trying rage-trade my stack back during lockdowns. My capital had taken a big hit, and I was burning through yet more fighting against the market that just kept endlessly dumping. I was down to my last $40k from $300k and I even did the unthinkable and considered crawling wounded back to the cage.
I larped at being a normie during a job interview and passed to the second round. Then one of my fellow raiders shilled me Kleros at 1 cent. I paused the margin trading and went all-in.
It didn’t take long until it mooned to 11 cents. My stack restored, I didn’t bother turning up to the second interview. I was back in the saddle but some others of our number were not so lucky.
DeFi Summer Syn-Drome
DeFi summer of 2020 and 2021 rolled in. With the same LINK clan of 2017, we rotated into token launches, we farmed and dumped DeFi shitters and the abundance of loot returned. One moonlit night, my portfolio touched $1 million. I called my dad ecstatic, only annoyed it was at 31 instead of 30 thanks to the COVID dump (Later I discovered via Debank that it had ticked over earlier at 30).
In 2022, quarantined in a hotel suite in the Dubai marina with my infected fiancée, I sat on the balcony during another pivotal raid. To accompany the huge bags of food piling up that the hotel staff kept bringing to our door, I also held huge bags of veDAO.
Solidly was entering its first epoch. Once midnight hit and everyone realised Solidex’s contracts were broke, everything dumped. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and crashed the market some more. I flew back home, but these hiccups were just precursors to an even bigger collapse on the horizon – FTX.
From Solidly’s implosion on Fantom to Andre rage-quitting in March, it was gut-punch after bollocks-slap. Some of us had mentally capitulated into thinking there was no way forward. Then came an ambitious idea: fork Solidly, fix the bug-riddled code, deploy on the new L2 Optimism. Copium surged back and Billy Herrington, melancholically smoking at a bar alone, became our unofficial mascot.
Later, en route to Santiago de Compostela, I picked up a copy of the Financial Times in an Edinburgh airport lounge the morning after Tether had depegged. That same day I converted my now near-worthless veDAO tokens for VELO for the next big raid to claw it all back. The initial APRs were silly and each time I got back to the hotel room I claimed thousands of farmed VELO. Velodrome was disliked by the incumbents – an upstart raider clan that had galloped its way onto long-held pastures. But I staked my spear and shitpost meme ballads with them.
In 2023 I lay on a Mexican sun-lounger on another threshold. The border guard was a forest nymph entity that took my hand and walked me into infinite planes of geometric pulsating fractals as an Aztec shaman peppered me with scented water. Alex Cutler was lying on the lounger to my left with his hood up, and other team members were scattered around in varying states of psilocybin cosmic brain defragmentation.
The night before on the terrace dinner table, prototypes of Aerodrome branding were unveiled to gauge opinions. Months later, Aerodrome NFTs were airdropped to loyal Velodrome kinsmen. That was the turning point of me finally detaching from pure dopamine and despair market cycles of capital gains and losses.
Back in 2017, LINK maxis thought they would be living from passive node fees. Along the way we had flown other banners too of projects that promised the same – BZRX, Synthetix, DMG (“clankercoin”, based on subprime car loans) to name a few. Both BZRX and DMG ended up being sued by the SEC.
Aerodrome was different. Here I earned my first million in pure revenue.
The Yookay King Rugpull
The Reivers’ end came with the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603. With no border, the king had no use for a militaristic mesh of clans and no longer turned a blind eye to them. Brutal crackdowns followed: hangings; deportations to Ulster and Appalachia. The Graham name itself was outlawed.
And here lies the danger. The UK of my childhood feels alien now – the streets are the same, the places are familiar, but liminal and distorted due to demographic shifts and disjointed aesthetics. “Yookay” is the term for this Sartre-tier, nausea-inducing monstrosity.
The hostility of the Yookay to its citizens may see it lash out with another Graham moment: digital IDs (Funnily enough, as I was editing this the British government has just announced on 25 September 2025 confirmed mandatory Digital ID’s for people in the UK), internet censorship, wrongthink arrests, CBDCs. I chose to cross the border into self-exile. Elsewhere, borders blur the other way, with regulatory easing and nation-states buying Bitcoin.
The Reivers were destroyed, but their names echo across the Anglosphere. One planted a boot on the Moon long after the marches were pacified. Crypto feels similar. The outlawed Silk Road eventually saw Ross Ulbricht being pardoned and released this year. Derivatives of the memes that were born from anon imageboard shitposting of yesteryear are now posted by new coiners to whom the degen origin has little meaning.
I’m a bit more comfy now than at the start. But normies will never understand what I do. I am still stuck between thresholds. The raid still calls.
Remember: you’re here forever.