After reading the nine-page description, contained in what looked like an academic paper, Hal responded enthusiastically:
“When Wikipedia started I never thought it would work, but it has proven to be a great success for some of the same reasons,” he wrote to the group.
In the face of skepticism from others on the e-mail list, Hal had urged Satoshi to write up some actual code for the system he had described. A few months later, on this Saturday in January, Hal downloaded Satoshi’s code from the Bitcoin website. A simple .exe file installed the Bitcoin program and automatically opened up a crisp-looking window on his computer desktop.
When the program opened for the first time it automatically generated a list of Bitcoin addresses that would be Hal’s account numbers in the system and the password, or private key, that gave him access to each address. Beyond that, the program had only a few functions. The main one, “Send Coins,” didn’t seem like much of an option for Hal given that he didn’t have any coins to send. But before he could poke around further the program crashed.
It didn’t deter Hal. After looking at his computer logs, he wrote to Satoshi to explain what had happened when his computer had tried to link up with other computers on the network. Apart from Hal, the log showed that there were only two other computers on the network and both of those were from a single IP address, presumably Satoshi’s, tied to an Internet provider in California.
Within an hour, Satoshi had written back, expressing disappointment with the failure. He said he’d been testing it heavily and never encountered any trouble. But he told Hal that he had trimmed down the program to make it easier to download, which must have introduced the problem.
“I guess I made the wrong decision,” Satoshi wrote with palpable frustration.
Satoshi sent Hal a new version of the program, with some of the old material restored, and thanked Hal for his help. When it, too, crashed, Hal kept at it. He finally got it running using a program that operated outside Microsoft Windows. Once it was up, he clicked on the most exciting-sounding function in the drop-down menu: “Generate Coins.” When he did this, the processor in his computer audibly clicked into gear at a high clip.
With everything running, Hal could take a break and attend to his familial duties, including a family dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant and a small birthday party for his son. The instructions Satoshi had included with the software said that actually generating coins could take “days or months, depending on the speed of your computer and the competition on the network.”
Hal dashed off a quick note telling Satoshi that everything was working: “I have to go out but I’ll leave this version running for a while.”
Hal had already read enough to understand the basic work his computer was doing. Once the Bitcoin program was running, it logged into a designated chat channel to find other computers running the software—basically just Satoshi’s computers at this point. All the computers were trying to capture new Bitcoins, which were released into the system in bundles of fifty coins. Each new block of Bitcoin was assigned to the address of one user who linked into the network and won a race of sorts to solve a computational puzzle. When a computer won one round of the race and captured new coins, all the other machines on the network updated their shared record of the number of Bitcoins owned by that computer’s Bitcoin address. Then the computers on the network would automatically begin racing to solve a new problem to unlock the next batch of fifty coins.
When Hal returned to his computer in the evening, he immediately saw that it had made him 50 Bitcoins, now recorded next to one of his Bitcoin addresses and also recorded on the public ledger that kept track of all Bitcoins. These, the seventy-eighth block of coins generated, were among the first 4,000 Bitcoins to make it into the real world. At the time they were worth exactly nothing, but that didn’t dampen Hal’s enthusiasm. In a congratulatory e-mail to Satoshi that he sent to the entire mailing list, he allowed himself a flight of fancy.
“Imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world,” he wrote. “Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world.”
By his own calculations, that would make each Bitcoin worth some $10 million.
“Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about,” he wrote before signing off.
HAL FINNEY HAD long been preoccupied by how, in look and texture, the future would be different from the present.
One of four children of an itinerant petroleum engineer, Hal had worked his way through the classics of science fiction, but he also read calculus books for fun and eventually attended the California Institute of Technology. He never backed down from an intellectual challenge. During his freshman year he took a course on gravitational field theory that was designed for graduate students.
But he wasn’t a typical nerd. A big, athletic guy who loved to ski in the California mountains, he had none of the social awkwardness common among Cal Tech students. This active spirit carried over into his intellectual pursuits. When he read the novels of Larry Niven, which discussed the possibility of cryogenically freezing humans and later bringing them back to life, Hal didn’t just ponder the potential in his dorm room. He located a foundation dedicated to making this process a reality and signed up to receive the Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s magazine. Eventually he would pay to have his and his family’s bodies put into Alcor’s frozen vaults near Los Angeles.
The advent of the Internet had been a boon for Hal, allowing him to connect with other people in far-flung places who were thinking about similarly obscure but radical ideas. Even before the invention of the first web browser, Hal joined some of the earliest online communities, with names like the Cypherpunks and Extropians, where he jumped into debates about how new technology could be harnessed to shape the future they all were dreaming up.
Few questions obsessed these groups more than the matter of how technology would alter the balance of power between corporations and governments on one hand and individuals on the other. Technology clearly gave individuals unprecedented new powers. The nascent Internet allowed these people to communicate with kindred spirits and spread their ideas in ways that had previously been impossible. But there was constant discussion of how the creeping digitization of life also gave governments and companies more command over perhaps the most valuable and dangerous commodity in the information age: information.
In the days before computers, governments certainly kept records about their citizens, but most people lived in ways that made it impossible to glean much information about them. In the 1990s, though—long before the National Security Agency was discovered to be snooping on the cell phones of ordinary citizens and Facebook’s privacy policies became a matter for national debate—the Cypherpunks saw that the digitization of life made it much easier for the authorities to harvest data about citizens, making the data vulnerable to capture by nefarious actors. The Cypherpunks became consumed by the question of how people could protect their personal information and maintain their privacy. The Cypherpunk Manifesto, delivered to the mailing list in 1993 by the Berkeley mathematician Eric Hughes, began: “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.”
This line of thinking was, in part, an outgrowth of the libertarian politics that had become popular in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Suspicion regarding government had a natural appeal for programmers like Hal, who were at work creating a new world through code, without needing to rely on anyone else. Hal had imbibed these ideas at Cal Tech and in his reading of the novels of Ayn Rand. But the issue of privacy in the Internet age had an appeal beyond libertarian circles, among human rights activists and other protest movements.
None of the Cypherpunks saw a solution to the problem in running away from technology. Instead, Hal and the others aimed to find answers in technology and particularly in t
he science of encrypting information. Encryption technologies had historically been a privilege largely reserved for only the most powerful institutions. Private individuals could try to encode their communications, but governments and armed forces almost always had the power to crack such codes. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, mathematicians at Stanford and MIT made a series of breakthroughs that made it possible, for the first time, for ordinary people to encrypt, or scramble, messages in a way that could be decrypted only by the intended recipient and not cracked even by the most powerful supercomputers.
Every user of the new technology, known as public-key cryptography, would receive a public key—a unique jumble of letters and numbers that serves as a sort of address that could be distributed freely—and a corresponding private key, which is supposed to be known only by the user. The two keys are related, mathematically, in a way that ensures that only the user—let’s call her Alice, as cryptographers often did—with her private key, can unlock messages sent to her public key, and only she can sign off on messages associated with her public key. The unique relationship between each public and private key was determined by complicated math equations that were constructed so cleverly that no one with a particular public key would ever be able to work backward to figure out the corresponding private key—not even the most powerful supercomputer. This whole setup would later play a central role in the Bitcoin software.
Hal was introduced to the potential of public-key cryptography in 1991 by the pathbreaking cryptographer David Chaum, who had been experimenting with ways to use public-key cryptography to protect individual privacy.
“It seemed so obvious to me,” Hal told the other Cypherpunks of his first encounter with Chaum’s writing. “Here we are faced with the problems of loss of privacy, creeping computerization, massive databases, more centralization—and Chaum offers a completely different direction to go in, one which puts power into the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations.”
As usual, when Hal found something exciting, he didn’t just passively read up on it. On nights and weekends, after his job as a software developer, he began helping with a volunteer project, referred to as Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, which allowed people to send each other messages that could be encrypted using public-key cryptography. The founder of the project, Phil Zimmerman, was an antinuclear activist who wanted to give dissidents a way to communicate outside the purview of governments. Before long, Zimmerman brought Hal on as the first employee at PGP.
Idealistic projects like PGP generally had a small audience. But the potential import of the technology became apparent when federal prosecutors launched a criminal investigation into PGP and Zimmerman. The government categorized encryption technology, such as PGP, as weapon-grade munitions, and this designation made it illegal to export. While the case was eventually dropped, Hal had to lie low with his own involvement in PGP for years and could never take credit for some of his important contributions to the project.
THE EXTROPIANS AND Cypherpunks were working on several different experiments that could help empower individuals against traditional sources of authority. But money was, from the beginning, at the center of their efforts to reimagine the future.
Money is to any market economy what water, fire, or blood is to the human ecosystem—a basic substance needed for everything else to work. For programmers, existing currencies, which were valid only within particular national borders and subject to technologically incompetent banks, seemed unnecessarily constrained. The science fiction that Hal and others had grown up on almost always featured some kind of universal money that could span galaxies—in Star Wars it was the galactic credit standard; in the Night’s Dawn trilogy it was Jovian credit.
Beyond these more fanciful ambitions, the existing financial system was viewed by the Cypherpunks as one of the biggest threats to individual privacy. Few types of information reveal as much about a person like Alice, the cryptographers’ favorite, as her financial transactions. If snoopers get access to her credit card statements they can follow her movements over the course of a day. It’s no accident that financial records are one of the primary ways that fugitives are tracked down. Eric Hughes’s Cypherpunk Manifesto had dwelled on this problem at great length: “When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself,” Hughes wrote.
“Privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems,” he added.
Cold, hard cash had long provided an anonymous way of making payments, but this cash did not make the transition over to the digital realm. As soon as money became digital, some third party, such as a bank, was always involved and therefore able to trace the transaction. What Hal, Chaum, and the Cypherpunks wanted was a cash for the digital age that could be secure and uncounterfeitable without sacrificing the privacy of its users. The same year as Hughes’s manifesto, Hal wrote an e-mail to the group imagining a kind of digital cash for which “no records are kept of where I spend my money. All the bank knows is how much I have withdrawn each month.”
A month later, Hal even came up with a cheeky moniker for it: “I thought of a new name today for digital cash: CRASH, taken from CRypto cASH.”
Chaum himself had already come up with his own version of this by the time the Cypherpunks got interested. Working out of an institute in Amsterdam, he had created DigiCash, an online money that could be spent anywhere in the world without requiring users to hand over any personal information. The system harnessed public-key cryptography to allow for what Chaum called blind digital signatures, which allowed people to sign off on transactions without providing any identifying information. When Mark Twain Bank in the United States began experimenting with DigiCash, Hal signed up for an account.
But Chaum’s effort would rub Hal and others the wrong way. With DigiCash, a central organization, namely Chaum’s company, needed to confirm every digital signature. This meant that a certain degree of trust needed to be placed in that central organization not to tinker with balances or go out of business. Indeed, when Chaum’s company went bankrupt in 1998, DigiCash went down with it. These concerns pushed Hal and others to work toward a digital cash that wouldn’t rely on any central institution. The problem, of course, was that someone needed to check that people weren’t simply copying and pasting their digital money and spending it twice. Some of the Cypherpunks simply gave up on the project, but Hal wasn’t one to fold so easily.
Ironically for a person so eager to create new money, Hal’s interest wasn’t primarily financial. The programs he was writing, like PGP, were explicitly designed to be available to anyone, free. His political distrust of government, meanwhile, was not driven by selfish resentment about paying taxes. During the 1990s Hal would calculate the maximum bill for his tax bracket and send in a check for that amount, so as to avoid the hassle of actually filling out a return. He bought his modest home on the outskirts of Santa Barbara and stuck with it over the years. He didn’t seem to mind that he had to work out of his living room or that the blue recliners in front of his desk were wearing thin. Instead of being motivated by self-interest, his work seemed driven by an intellectual curiosity that bubbled over in each e-mail he wrote, and by his sense of what he thought other people deserved.
“The work we are doing here, broadly speaking, is dedicated to this goal of making Big Brother obsolete. It’s important work,” Hal would write to his fellow travelers. “If things work out well, we may be able to look back and see that it was the most important work we have ever done.”
CHAPTER 2
1997
The notion of creating a new kind of money would seem, to many, a rather odd and even pointless endeavor. To most modern people, money is always and everywhere bills and coins issued by countries. The right to mint money is one of the defining powers of a nation, even one as small as the Vatican City or Micronesia.
But that is actually a relatively recent
state of affairs. Until the Civil War, a majority of the money in circulation in the United States was issued by private banks, creating a crazy patchwork of competing bills that could become worth nothing if the issuing bank went down. Many countries at that time relied on circulating coins from other countries.
This was the continuation of a much longer state of affairs in which humans engaged in a seemingly ceaseless effort to find better forms of money, trying out gold, shells, stone disks, and mulberry bark along the way.
The search for a better form of money has always been about finding a more trustworthy and uniform way of valuing the things around us—a single metric that allows a reliable comparison between the value of a block of wood, an hour of carpentry work, and a painting of a forest. As sociologist Nigel Dodd put it, good money is “able to convert qualitative differences between things into quantitative differences that enable them to be exchanged.”
The money imagined by the Cypherpunks looked to take the standardizing character of money to its logical extreme, allowing for a universal money that could be spent anywhere, unlike the constrained national currencies we currently carry around and exchange at each border.
Digital Gold Page 2
