# Chapter Fifteen: Bao Reads the Book Herself

By [Lista DAO](https://blog.lista.org), 2026-11-12

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A stranger arrived on a Thursday and said the fruit seller owed him forty shells.

He was a thin grey dog with a good coat and a very certain voice, and he stood in the middle of the square and said it again, louder, and the market came apart down the middle inside about four minutes.

Nutsy was the loudest animal on the wrong side of it.

"FORTY SHELLS," he bellowed, to animals who were standing next to him. "I have always said it. I have said it for years. Have I not said it for years? There is something about that goat. There has always been something about that goat and now a dog has come and said so out loud."

"You have never said it," said Bao.

"I have THOUGHT it."

The fruit seller said nothing at all, which half the market decided was guilt, and the other half decided was a goat having a bad morning in front of four hundred animals.

Bao did not like the stranger's voice. She noticed that about herself, and then she noticed that not liking somebody's voice is not information.

So she walked to the end of the market and read the Book.

It took her four minutes.

There was no forty shells. There was no line anywhere in that book, any day, any season, between the dog and the goat. There was a line between the dog and a goat at the top of the market who had sold up and moved away two springs ago, and whose stall the fruit seller had taken over, and whose stall it still said on the sign because nobody had got round to repainting it.

Bao came back with the page number.

The dog read it. His ears went down, and he went rather quiet, and he said he had walked three days to get here.

"I know," said Bao.

She did not say anything else about it, and she did not let anybody else say anything else about it either. She stood next to him while he read it a second time, because she had once got a hat colour wrong and lost three plums over it in front of the entire market, and she remembered exactly how that had felt.

Then she walked him up to the top of the market and showed him where the old goat's stall had been.

Nutsy told everybody he had known all along.

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/8c819557bbdec128c8dc6442f22fe19fa17f2e58c0b5622990294c5f71e7e24b.jpg)

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**Margin Note:** Ask nobody. Read the Book.

**The Honest Bit:** You never have to take anybody's word for anything. Every transaction is public and permanent, and looking it up takes a few minutes and costs nothing. Most arguments in crypto are between animals who have not looked. Notice also how the dog was wrong: he was not lying, he had the right trade and the wrong counterparty, and the sign had not been repainted. Most of what looks like fraud is somebody being confidently mistaken.

**The Question of the Day:** Bao did not like the stranger's voice. Say why she did not treat that as evidence, and what she did instead.

**Try It:** Find an address on BscScan and read its history. Pick any claim somebody has made to you about a token this week, and go and check it yourself.

**Leave Your Feedback Here:** [https://forms.gle/HfRNH7uixagrm1dVA](https://forms.gle/HfRNH7uixagrm1dVA)

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*Originally published on [Lista DAO](https://blog.lista.org/chapter-fifteen-bao-reads-the-book-herself)*