If the distributed accounting technology had not been used to know the statistics in real time of the players, nobody would have imagined that on that Saturday Argentina and Portugal would be eliminated from the world at the same time. If the blockchain had not been used in the FIFA Cup that year, the pools would have gone to the bottom with results as surprising as those ...

Roberto was very excited. It was the first time in his fifty years that he had managed to go see the World Cup. The money had come almost magically, after he had made an Initial Offer of Currency ( ICO ) to finance his organic food company.

If someone else had told him that you could get money so easily, he would not have believed it. None of the years he had spent teaching organic chemistry in college could have given him such a performance. That food company had formed it as part of a project carried out with their students, and did not intend to achieve economic welfare with such activity.

The idea of ​​making an ICO came from his ex-wife. The woman was doing studies on distributed accounting technology and was the CEO of a recognized company. According to what Martha had discovered, people were so interested in buying tokens that it did not matter what the project was about behind them.

Copying and pasting the code of an already established cryptocurrency was relatively easy and also quite economical. You would not have to worry about code errors if it was all a ploy to get quick money.

So he had followed the instructions of the PhD in Computing and voila, in less than a year his bank account had been inflated. Of course, everything had been done with a false identity, so once I had obtained the money and given a good percentage to the woman, I did not have to answer to anyone. To Roberto these questions did not rob him of his sleep either because, after all, a stroke of luck can not be looked for a cause, but to enjoy its consequences.

Although the ICOs were not seen in a good way and the regulatory entities had them in their sights, the royalties for having carried out a successful campaign had allowed Roberto to fulfill several of his dreams, such as traveling in a Lamborghini (rented, because it was not a very ostentatious person), attend a Comic-Con with a VIP pass, travel on a cruise for 81 days through all the oceans of the world and have their own companion robot, which would replace the tasks that Martha would have done sometime.

Luckily, there were several places that accepted cryptocoins for the celebration of the world cup that year, so traveling with the airline CheapAir, Roberto had not had to purchase fiat coins to move to the European country where the World Cup would be held of Soccer of that year. In fact, since he had stayed at the Apartments Malina complex, he had been able to pay for it with cryptocurrencies so far. A great diversity of stores in the land of the Tsars had enabled their own wallets, and in addition to Bitcoin; Ethereum, Litecoin and Zcash were good options to buy a lunch and meet other needs.

Roberto, with a thick frame, was grateful that there were no long lines to enter the stadium, since he did not really enjoy the crowds, although he had already learned to hide his anger at the noise, only for the excitement of seeing the players court. As the tickets were verified as soon as he entered any area of ​​the facilities, in an instant he knew where he should sit and the authenticity of his pass was immediately verified.

FIFA had been part of the Maxiledger project two years ago and the tickets had been tokenized, a matter that completely eliminated the piracy and resale of tickets, by integrating a simple QR code into the tickets.

Once installed in his seat, the man verified the status of his artificial intelligence bot that collated the statistics of the players, their physical conditions and other data to predict the results of the games, information also stored in the FIFA blockchain, which any person could access by paying a relatively cheap subscription fee.

That day would face Mexico and Brazil, and as expected, the betting platforms were very popular. Roberto had bet 10 ETH to Mexico because with a high efficiency so far, the team promised to perform very well.

Until that day, Roberto had made about 400 ETH just making bets with his smartphone . To the right of his box were several former FIFA players, one of them still retained his characteristic yellow afro despite being a mature man.

Everything was ready to start the game and Roberto already had his favorite snacks at his fingertips and a full jug of root beer. However, some policemen wearing an INTERPOL uniform appeared at his side and a tall man who did not speak the Spanish language very well pronounced his name and the initials ICO ... Could it be that they found it so easily?