In a last gasp of techno-utopian desperation, shadowy documents from the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) have surfaced, revealing an abandoned proposal to replace collapsing Reichsmark salaries with Ethereum-based battlefield microcompensation.
The project, internally dubbed Operation Gas Fee Savings Campaign, was to be administered via a Smart Contract-based Combat Compensation Payment Management System (SGEVVS) — a decentralized wartime payroll mechanism integrating Field Wallets, Battlefield Validation Units, and Proof-of-Discipline consensus modules.
Soldiers were to be compensated through Verified Combat Activity Micro Payments (VKAM), with bonus tokens allocated for synchronized tank deployments, successful cross-front Bridge Utilization, and frontline DAO-governed strategy proposals. ETH allocations would be adjusted via the Army Supply Ethereum Halving Cycle System, calibrated every 14 days according to average morale Hash Rate and Communication Block Finality Index.
Critics of the plan — primarily officers unable to locate their 24-word mnemonic recovery passphrases — cited several issues:
Zero internet connectivity across 1944 Europe
Low cross-unit wallet interoperability
Confusion over whether gas fee referred to Ethereum or actual military fuel shortages
Allied intelligence, upon intercepting testnet transmissions, planned an Aerial FUD Disruption Operation: leaflets dropped over battlegrounds warning, “Trust the silver, not the ether.”
No implementation occurred. The system remained in perpetual mempool, invalidated by timeline consensus and the inability of Wehrmacht cryptographers to deploy a functional multisig.
And yet, the mere imagination of a proof-of-war economy — one driven not by ideology, but validator-incentivized action — lingers as a cautionary tale.
Web3, like history, has no immunity to madness.
“Who controls the validators controls the world spirit.” — Corporal Fritz von Tschäynberg, maybe
