Once a Bitcoin Miner by Lou Ethan;

Author:Lou, Ethan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2020-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Oleum’s office was airy and looked even more so because of its glass doors. Anyone outside could see everything inside with all its yellowy tinge. The space could fit far more than Oleum’s core staff, no more than half a dozen people, and sometimes the company would hold public events there with wine and cheese. It was prime real estate, and Oleum’s office was on the seventeenth floor. Looking out of his window, Steve could see no people, only the shifting sun upon the fancy hotels all around. Up so high, a man might feel unassailable, like a sharpshooter in a hilltop rifle pit. Yet trouble knocked all the same. That Stampede, just three days after the Bitcoin Rodeo had begun, Steve got a visitor.

“Gifted, unpredictable,” and a “demon,” as described by sports publications, the man had been a professional hockey player and he was built like one, almost six feet tall and 180 pounds of pure muscle. The 36-year-old visitor was actually three months younger than Steve, but he was taller by almost a full head. If he wanted, he could have been an imposing man.

When Steve looked at the visitor, he might have felt a certain familiarity. While Steve had never met the man before him, he’d seen that powerful jaw, those wide shoulders, and that trunk-like neck on another man — one with whom Steve had worked closely on Oleum before falling out. The visitor’s name was Jade Galbraith, and he held in his hand a lawsuit from the oilman Dale Galbraith that he was to serve on the Oleum founder. The son bore the feud of the father, and he had come to deliver it unto Steve.

In Oleum’s early days, Dale had come to believe Steve unprofessional in running a business and ignorant about oil. Steve denied the allegations and instead accused Dale of not delivering on promised funding and corporate support, saying it was the oilman who had been difficult. Whatever the case, the two men had clashed, and that clash escalated. In Dale’s lawsuit –– disputed by Oleum and untested before court — he claimed about half a million dollars, saying Steve and his team had used “elusive and damaging tactics” to kick him out of the company “in an unlawful manner by secretly and subversively” altering Oleum’s corporate documents.

Earlier that day, a short walk away at a barbecue by a local Bitcoin exchange platform, where there was a lucky draw for Ultimate Fighting Championship tickets, Dale’s son Jade had served Steve’s business partner Dave Bradley with the same lawsuit. Unlike for Steve, that was done publicly, and Dave was left explaining to everyone what had just happened.

Delivering a lawsuit is awkward for both sides, so much so that the job is often outsourced to professional process servers. “You need to understand: you’re not exactly bringing them the winnings of the Lotto 6/49,” one server told Vice. In fact, many try to avoid that, and serving a lawsuit is often a quest in itself.

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