币圈半边天
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In the midnight rental house of the urban village, Li Jianjun adjusted the printer settings for the 37th time, beads of sweat sliding from his gold-rimmed glasses onto the keyboard. This second-hand Epson printer was churning out special "works"—20 yuan denominations of banknotes, each with an error of no more than 0.3 millimeters. His wife, Wang Hui, held the freshly printed "products" under the desk lamp, the lotus in the watermark stretching in the warm light, and she suddenly recalled the real lotus flowers her husband bought with half a month's salary three years ago when their son turned one month old.
This couple, graduates from a certain 985 university's materials engineering department, were once the "other people's children" who were highly regarded in their hometown county. The turning point of their fate began with a failed startup three years ago; their newly developed printing consumables were plagiarized by a large manufacturer, and after failing to protect their rights, they fell into 600,000 yuan of debt. When the debt collection calls scared their sleeping daughter for the third time, Li Jianjun discovered a PDF document on a dark web forum that would change their fate—"A Complete Guide to the Production of Civilian-grade Anti-counterfeiting Paper."
Their counterfeiting workshop could be described as magical realism: using their daughter's discarded electronic scale to calibrate paper weight, adjusting ink color with the child's watercolor paints, and even developing a unique technique for aging banknotes quickly in a microwave. Before each "shipment," Wang Hui would wear medical gloves and carefully trim the burrs on the edges of the banknotes with an eyebrow razor, as devoutly as she had polished samples in the lab back in the day.
However, this precision technological celebration was always overshadowed by absurdity. They dared not use counterfeit bills of 50 yuan or above, keeping each transaction within the daily routine of buying bottled water at convenience stores and weighing potatoes at the market. Ironically, when their daughter took the "homework money" they created to donate, that counterfeit bill passed the test under the bill validator without a hitch.
When the police broke in, scattered across the workbench were 37 versions of failed experiments that had not been destroyed, each marked with detailed temperature and humidity records. In the criminal appraisal department, the realism of these "works" took the breath away from an experienced economic investigator of 20 years: "What a pity for this skill..." In the meeting room of the detention center, Wang Hui asked her husband if he remembered the slogan on the wall of their university lab, and Li Jianjun smiled at the moths outside the iron bars: "Yes, 'Technology is Innocent'..."
This couple, graduates from a certain 985 university's materials engineering department, were once the "other people's children" who were highly regarded in their hometown county. The turning point of their fate began with a failed startup three years ago; their newly developed printing consumables were plagiarized by a large manufacturer, and after failing to protect their rights, they fell into 600,000 yuan of debt. When the debt collection calls scared their sleeping daughter for the third time, Li Jianjun discovered a PDF document on a dark web forum that would change their fate—"A Complete Guide to the Production of Civilian-grade Anti-counterfeiting Paper."
Their counterfeiting workshop could be described as magical realism: using their daughter's discarded electronic scale to calibrate paper weight, adjusting ink color with the child's watercolor paints, and even developing a unique technique for aging banknotes quickly in a microwave. Before each "shipment," Wang Hui would wear medical gloves and carefully trim the burrs on the edges of the banknotes with an eyebrow razor, as devoutly as she had polished samples in the lab back in the day.
However, this precision technological celebration was always overshadowed by absurdity. They dared not use counterfeit bills of 50 yuan or above, keeping each transaction within the daily routine of buying bottled water at convenience stores and weighing potatoes at the market. Ironically, when their daughter took the "homework money" they created to donate, that counterfeit bill passed the test under the bill validator without a hitch.
When the police broke in, scattered across the workbench were 37 versions of failed experiments that had not been destroyed, each marked with detailed temperature and humidity records. In the criminal appraisal department, the realism of these "works" took the breath away from an experienced economic investigator of 20 years: "What a pity for this skill..." In the meeting room of the detention center, Wang Hui asked her husband if he remembered the slogan on the wall of their university lab, and Li Jianjun smiled at the moths outside the iron bars: "Yes, 'Technology is Innocent'..."
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