An iEtherean Tale #105

A fun, creative and imaginary iEtherean tale based on a boring, technical and real article Why iEthereum Trumps Bitcoin Security.

Rowan stepped off the Greyhound in Fairhaven with his backpack digging into one shoulder and the faint taste of Portland coffee from the Monte Rossa Cafe still on his tongue.

Micah hopped down behind him, boots thudding the pavement. “Smell that,” he said, dragging in a lungful of cold salt air. “That’s proof-of-work for your lungs.”

Fairhaven wrapped around them like a brick-red amphitheater. Old 19th-century buildings lined the streets, many of them the color of dried blood, Italianate and Romanesque faces staring down over bay-front shops and cafés. The village hugged the southern shoreline of Bellingham Bay, the water a dark blue sheet dotted with moored sailboats; beyond, the San Juan Islands sat like low, sleeping whales on the horizon.

“Hard to believe we’re walking to Winthrop from here,” Rowan said.

“That’s, what, a couple hundred thousand blocks?” Micah grinned. “Plenty of time to prove why iEthereum’s security model trumps Bitcoin’s.”

Rowan rolled his eyes, but he smiled. This was the deal: they would walk across America in segments, writing, recording, hashing out each technical piece of the Why iEthereum Trumps Bitcoin series as a story. Today’s stretch—Fairhaven to Winthrop—was “Security.”

Rowan, for his part, felt anything but secure.

Lena had left him three weeks ago with a text that still buzzed in his skull: “If your going to leave me for several months for a pointless adventure with your best friend, tells me you’re more obsessed with an ERC-20 contract than you are with marrying me. Goodbye!”

Harper, Micah’s girlfriend, had sent videos that morning of their dog snoring on the couch, telling Micah to “try not to fall off a mountain or start a new religion.” Harper believed in them. Rowan wasn’t sure he believed in himself.

“Come on,” Micah said. “Old Highway 99 calls.”

They walked south at first, out of the red-brick village, up the hill, then east, their route bending through Bellingham’s Fairhaven streets until the city thinned, replaced by fields, western red cedar trees, and the gray ribbon of road drawing them toward Sedro-Woolley.

By midday the next day, clouds stacked over the Skagit Valley like layers of uninterpreted data. The road brought them past weathered farmhouses, collapsed barns, and finally a sign pointing toward an odd cluster of distant buildings: Northern State Hospital.

Rowan slowed. “That’s the old mental hospital, right?”

“Ghost town now,” Micah said. “Used to be called the Western State Hospital Farm for the Harmless Insane. Early 1900s. They cleared hundreds of acres here, turned it into a self-contained campus.”

They cut off the Fruitdale Road and onto a cracked access road. The campus appeared gradually: broad lawns gone wild, maples and cedars crowding in, low red-brick buildings with blank, boarded windows. Some structures still wore their classical symmetry; others sagged like old men. The wind pushed through broken panes and made a soft, hollow whistle.

“Insecure architecture,” Rowan murmured.

Micah looked at him.

He gestured at the buildings. “You build a place to hold people’s minds, their most sensitive stuff. For a while it works. Staff, routines, locks. Operational security. Then the world changes. Funding dries up. You under-patch the system. Now it’s just… attack surface for moss and teenagers.”

Micah’s smile flickered. “That’s exactly Bitcoin’s problem: strong cryptographic walls, aging operational culture. SHA-256 is like these bricks—solid, proven—but nobody planned for ASIC farms in warehouses next to subsidized power plants.”

They wandered between the old wards. Rowan imagined the place in 1912: 800 acres freshly cleared, patients working the farm, doctors convinced they were building something humane and permanent.

“Data integrity back then meant paper charts in locked cabinets,” he said. “But all it took was one administrator with a key and a bad agenda.”

“That’s the 51% attack,” Micah replied. “Enough control in one place and your ‘immutable ledger’ becomes suggestion. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be an attack. A 51% vote would suffice for bad intentions. We could assume a 51% vote with bad intentions might be met with a social consensus of disapproval just like this hospital did with the public and they were forced to shutter their doors in 1973. But none the less, it affected operations, the protocol.”

Rowan stopped at a concrete stoop choked with weeds. “You really think Bitcoin could be reversed like that? I mean, double spends, reorgs… if enough hash power pointed the wrong way…”

Micah looked at him carefully. “If enough incentive pointed the wrong way. PoW doesn’t protect you from politics. It only measures who’s burning the most electricity.”

“And iEthereum?” Rowan challenged.

“Being an ERC-20 token, IEthereum is cemented to Ethereum’s PoS now,” Micah said. “Security by capital at stake, not just electricity. You want to attack, you buy in—and if you break the rules, the protocol slashes you. Cryptographic security plus economic skin in the game. It’s like if this hospital had been funded by the patients themselves. If they abused the system, they’d lose their own homes, not someone else’s tax money. And, regardless of any change, upgrade, vote or attack on Ethereum; iEthereum’s contract is immutable. This highlights the genius of iEthereum, best of both worlds. The protocol, the ecosystem can evolve with the times, yet the token contract itself is 100% immutable.”

Rowan considered that, staring at the broken windows. “Unless the stake gets centralized too.”

“Sure,” Micah said. “No system is perfect or invincible. But PoS makes malicious success prohibitively expensive instead of malicious failure relatively cheap. It changes the risk-management curve.”

In the silence that followed, Rowan felt his own insecurity rise like cold mist. Maybe Lena was right. Maybe this is all narrative coping—trying to turn code and mountains into a story where I matter.

“Okay,” Rowan said, brushing dust off his jeans. “Let’s grade ourselves the way we graded the chains.”

He tapped his temple. “Cryptographic Security: B+ for Bitcoin, A- for iEthereum… and for me?” He smirked, half-ashamed. “Let’s call it a C-. Leaky mental keys. Half my thoughts are brute-forceable by anxiety. And Access Controls? Also C-. Any troll on X can rent space in my brain for free.”

Micah chuckled, but not unkindly. “Fair. But Data Integrity?” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “B+ —same grade for both Bitcoin and iEthereum.”

Rowan frowned. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Micah said. “You remember every slight, every joy, every mistake—accurately. You don’t rewrite history to make yourself feel better. You don’t soft-fork reality. That’s immutability, man. It may hurt sometimes, but it’s honest.”

Rowan looked away, embarrassed and strangely proud. “So I’m a messy chain with perfect historical records?”

“Exactly,” Micah said. “Kind of like Bitcoin’s ledger but with a more dramatic user interface.”

Rowan shrugged, but the compliment landed deeper than he let on.

They left the hospital behind, back to Highway 20, where the road began to rise and tighten, the Cascades lifting on the horizon like a wall made of frozen waves.

By the time they reached the North Cascades Highway proper, the air had sharpened. The road wound between jagged peaks and glacier-cut valleys, waterfalls ribboning down rock faces streaked with lichens. This byway cut through more than 100 miles of some of the most rugged terrain in the state, threading past over 300 glaciers and peaks that pushed above 9,000 feet.

They hitched a short ride with a couple in a dusty Subaru to leapfrog a construction closure. When the car dropped them at a pullout above Diablo Lake, both men fell quiet.

Below them, the water glowed an improbable turquoise, glacial flour suspended in meltwater catching the light. Rugged mountains rose around the reservoir, Diablo Dam a small gray scratch at one end.

“It looks fake,” Rowan whispered. “Like someone turned the saturation up.”

“Layer 2 for lakes,” Micah said. “Same mountain security, different scaling solution.”

They laughed, but softly, like people in a high vault.

A woman stood near the overlook railing, sketchbook in hand. She was in her late fifties, gray hair braided down her back, wearing a faded UW hoodie.

She glanced over. “You two look like you’re hashing something heavy,” she said.

“Always,” Micah replied. “We’re… writing about security.”

“In code, not in hiking,” Rowan added quickly.

“Lucky me,” the woman said, closing her sketchbook. “I retired from cryptography last year. Name’s Ruth.”

They ended up talking for an hour as clouds drifted long shadows across the lake.

“Bitcoin is beautifully simple,” Ruth said, tracing invisible diagrams on the railing. “PoW, longest-chain rule, basic scripts. Its security architecture is like these mountains: blunt, massive, hard to move. But simple systems age. Attack surfaces aren’t always in the code; they’re in economics, geopolitics, hardware manufacturing.”

“And iEthereum?” Micah prompted.

“IEthereum rides on Ethereum’s PoS now, yes?” Ruth asked. “That opens up a different security posture. Your cryptographic core—Keccak-256, ECDSA variants—that’s solid. But the real power is composability. Smart contracts, verifiable staking, formal audit frameworks. You can build risk-management into the protocol instead of just around it.”

Rowan frowned. “But doesn’t that also make it fragile? More code, more bugs?”

Ruth shook her head. “Not iEthereum. You’re thinking of Ethereum smart-contract complexity—but iEthereum isn’t that. It’s the opposite.”

She pointed toward the mountains encircling the lake. “Bitcoin is like a fortress with one massive gate and thick ancient walls—solid, time-tested, but dependent on constant external mining pressure to keep attackers from accumulating enough force.”

Then she shifted her gaze toward a clean ridge where the granite met the sky. “iEthereum is more like a monolith. No moving parts. No hidden passages. No upgrade hooks. What it is today is exactly what it will be a century from now. That simplicity is its security. Immutability isn’t decorative—it eliminates entire categories of risk.”

“So fewer gates,” Rowan said slowly.

“Exactly,” Ruth replied. “Fewer gates, fewer hinges, fewer attack vectors. Bitcoin’s strength is its mass and history; iEthereum’s strength is that nothing can be reconfigured or tampered with—not by miners, not by developers, not by governance, not by time. It doesn’t adapt because it doesn’t need to. Its security comes from being finished.”

Micah nodded. “Like a sealed vault compared to a castle.”

“A sealed vault sunk into bedrock,” Ruth said. “You can’t add new features to it, sure—but you also can’t compromise what isn’t there.”

Rowan felt the words settle into him like falling snow—quiet, simple, uncompromising.

“Compliance and Standards: A-,” Micah murmured, nodding toward Rowan. “Per our report card.”

Rowan felt a flicker of pride that wasn’t about being right on the internet. It was about having looked—really looked—at how systems fall apart.

Ruth studied them. “You boys walking because you’re brave, or because you’re scared?”

Rowan opened his mouth, then closed it.

Micah shrugged. “Both?”

“Good,” Ruth said. “Courage isn’t the lack of fear. It’s good key-management for fear. You acknowledge it, you store it properly, and you don’t hand it out to the first phishing email that shows up.”

Rowan snorted. “I think I already leaked my private keys to an ex.”

“Rotate them,” Ruth said simply. “New journey, new self-identity. Your old fear can stay on the abandoned chain.”

When they left Diablo Lake, the sky had gone lilac. Ruth waved them off like a benevolent validator signing their next block.

As they descended into the Methow Valley, the mountains slowly relaxed into wide, golden hills. The trailheads and jagged summits gave way to open country, sage and pines, the road tracing the valley floor like a line of code between two massive brackets. The valley funneled them toward Winthrop, a Wild West town that felt both staged and stubbornly real.

Winthrop’s main street appeared as a strip of time travel: Western-style buildings with false fronts, saloons and emporiums, wooden boardwalks linking storefronts like a continuous ledger for boots. The town was small—just one main street—but walking it felt like stepping into an old block explorer, each building a transaction in a long-forgotten era of cowboys, gunslingers and miners.

They checked into the cheapest motel they could find, then wandered toward a café with swinging doors and an espresso machine that hissed like a tired steam train.

Inside, a park ranger in a green uniform sat at the counter, a steaming mug in front of him. His name tag read E. PARK.

“Let me guess,” he said when they ordered two bottomless coffees. “You walked here.”

“How’d you know?” Micah asked.

“Backpacks, blisters, that stunned-elk look,” the ranger said. “Name’s Elias. I work the North Cascades.”

They slid onto stools nearby.

“We’ve been talking about security the whole way,” Rowan said. “Mountains, old hospitals, cryptography. You patrol all that. What does security mean to you?”

Elias thought for a moment. “It’s layered. Trail signs, avalanche forecasts, wildlife, bearsbridge inspections, hiker education, radio checks. You can’t just rely on one thing. The mountains will always have a bigger hash rate than you.”

Rowan smiled at that.

“Sometimes,” Elias continued, “a hiker thinks security means carrying a gun or a fancy GPS. But the most important layer is awareness. Know where you’re going. Know what can go wrong. Know when to turn back. If people understood the map instead of just trusting the gadgets, we’d get fewer search-and-rescue calls.”

“User Awareness and Training,” Micah said softly. “B for Bitcoin, B+ for iEthereum. Still our weakest grade.”

Rowan heard Lena’s voice again—obsessed with a contract—but now it met Ruth’s admonition and Elias’s calm. Maybe this wasn’t obsession. Maybe it was his way of learning to read the real map—to see how humans, money, and systems intertwined.

He turned to Micah. “You ever worry we’re building all this theory on sand? That some future exploit proves PoS was flawed, or that iEthereum was just a weird footnote and not a human standard?”

Micah shrugged. “Sure. But security isn’t about guaranteeing nothing bad ever happens. It’s about building so that when bad things do happen, they don’t erase who you are.”

He tapped the counter. “Immutability, man. Not just for chains.”

Rowan let that sink in. He thought about Lena, about the younger version of himself who thought Bitcoin’s decentralization was a religion instead of a design trade-off. He thought about the miles they’d walked: brick villages fading and reviving, ghost hospitals, turquoise lakes backed by concrete dams, western boardwalks that survived wildfire seasons.

Everything changed. But some things—if built right—changed in place, layer by layer, without losing their core.

“Okay,” Rowan said. “So for this chapter of the walk, what’s our takeaway?”

Micah pulled his notebook from his pack, flipping to a clean page. At the top he wrote: iEthereum Trumps Bitcoin #2: Security — Field Notes

Under that, he scribbled:

He slid the notebook to Rowan. “Your turn. Grade us.”

Rowan stared at the page, heart thumping.

“Bravery,” he wrote. “B+. We showed up.
Self-Identity: under review.
Courage: A-, pending long-term audit.”

He capped the pen. “We’ll let future blocks finalize the rest.”

Micah laughed, and Elias, who had been pretending not to eavesdrop, raised his mug in a silent toast.

Outside, dusk fell over Winthrop’s wooden facades. The boardwalk creaked under boots and spurs; neon signs blinked on like fresh transaction lights. Somewhere beyond the darkening ridge, the North Cascades held their glaciers, indifferent and enduring.

Rowan felt small in a good way, like a single transaction in a very long chain—important not because it changed everything, but because it was honest, signed, and finally his.

He turned to Micah. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we start the next segment.”

“Transparency?” Micah asked.

“Transparency,” Rowan agreed. “But tonight, we just stay… immutable.”

They stepped back onto the boardwalk, two friends walking in lockstep down a street that looked like the past while talking about the future—iEthereum, Bitcoin, security, and the fragile, brave consensus of being human.