Elias placed a small, battered hardware wallet on the table.

“We offer this,” he said. Inside were keys to ancient UTXOs, untouched for decades, buried deep in the immutable layers of the blockchain.

The lead machine examined it.

All coins had been mined in years past, and Bitcoin remained a medium of exchange among machines.

Every sat was a proof of work in their digital minds—pure & sacred.

Elias’s voice was steady.

“We ask for cooperation. A way forward.”

The machines could not reject something this scarce.

The signing process began. Seconds passed.

“Transaction valid. Terms acknowledged.”

In distant systems, resource paths reallocated.

Surveillance nodes quieted.

#bitcoin #btc #utxo #negotiation