Dísa wasn’t sure that she completely understood this bitcoin, or that it was completely legal, but she knew her father. She could see how much this meant to him. How important it was to his pride, which had taken such a battering over the last few years.
To reject the bitcoin would be to reject him.
And that was something Dísa was determined not to do.
‘All right, Dad. I’ll take it. Thank you,’ she said. ‘It means a lot to me that you would do this for me.’
Dad beamed. He took out another USB stick, this one pink. Dísa flinched at the colour. He must have got one specially for his little girl. But she decided not to make a fuss.
‘This is your cold wallet. It’s called a cold wallet because it’s offline — a hot wallet is online. Your wallet address and your private key are on here. I’ll email you instructions for how to get access to your bitcoin.’
‘OK.’
‘Be very careful with that. Your wallet address doesn’t matter so much. It’s like your address on the blockchain or your bank account details; you give it to people to tell them where to pay you. But if you lose the private key, you lose the bitcoin.’
‘Can’t I ask for another one?’
‘No. Remember, no one is in charge of bitcoin. It’s all down to you. Without the private key, no one can access your coin. Ever. So I suggest you make a paper copy of the key and hide that somewhere in case you lose the wallet — it’s like a super-cold wallet. I’ve hidden mine at the summer house.’ He chuckled. ‘The hidden people can look after it.’
The summer house was a tiny cabin on the shore of Apavatn, a lake an hour and a half to the east of Reykjavík, which Dad had bought in the good days before the crash.
‘Figure out a hiding place for the wallet and the paper back-up. You can password-protect the wallet; just hide the paper copy well.’
‘I will.’
‘And lastly, don’t tell Helga.’
‘But — Dad! I hate keeping stuff from her. Just like I hate keeping stuff from you.’
‘I know, my love. But I simply don’t trust her.’
‘Seriously? Don’t trust her? With what? The bitcoin?’
‘Yes,’ said Dad, nodding. ‘It’s a condition of me giving this to you. You must promise me.’
Dísa almost threw the USB stick back at him. A condition. Conditional love. Family distrust.
God, she was sick of it.
But it was five thousand dollars — half a million krónur — and that could come in very handy.
Dad was worried. He knew she might reject his gift. Reject him.
‘OK,’ said Dísa. ‘But I have one condition of my own.’
‘Yes?’
She held up the pink USB stick, the ‘cold wallet’ as Dad called it. ‘Next time we meet you get me one of these in silver. Or gold.’
That evening, Dísa spent several hours on her computer getting to grips with bitcoin. There were a number of websites on which you could trade bitcoin, known as exchanges, and its price seemed to jump up and down wildly. Mostly up.
There were other coins too, known as ‘cryptocurrencies’. These were even more volatile than bitcoin, and went up in price even faster. And there was a community of bitcoin enthusiasts all over the internet — more than enthusiasts: bitcoin lovers. According to their posts, they loved the cryptocurrency for one of two reasons — either because it was making them a lot of money, or because it demonstrated that individuals could now use a currency completely free of government interference.
Dísa was fascinated. She watched the price of her bitcoin spike up and then down every evening after school — mostly up. She read up on trading strategies: moving averages, trends, Fibonacci numbers, relative strength indices. All these indicators suggested that bitcoin was going up, up, up and would continue to do so.
But there were other cryptocurrencies that were moving up in price even faster. There was one called Ethereum, which people said was going to become just as important as bitcoin; it might even take over from it. In February she sold her bitcoin on an exchange and bought Ethereum, for a price of about thirteen dollars per Ethereum coin. Within a month, the price had doubled, and it kept shooting up. Dísa checked her phone several times a day, watching the price, cheering it on. By late spring the price of one Ethereum coin had risen to almost two hundred dollars.
That was literally fifteen times the price she had paid for it not even four months before. Fifteen times! Her Ethereum was now worth over eighty thousand dollars.
Dísa was transfixed. She watched the Ethereum price on her phone at school and then on her laptop in the evening when she got home. Some mornings she would wake up and the price had gone up 10 per cent overnight, and the whole day was good. Until, in the evening, the price plummeted 5 per cent. She could easily make or lose a thousand dollars between Mathematics first lesson in the morning and English last lesson in the afternoon.
The school year ended at the end of May. Her mother was disappointed with her report card, and so was she. Her mother and grandparents commented on how much time she spent on her phone, but, like most parents, they had no idea what she was doing on it.
In June, Dísa decided to take back some control of her life. She sold the Ethereum, and bought back the staid old bitcoin, vowing to limit herself to checking the price once a day, twice max. To her dismay, the Ethereum price continued to rise, breaking three hundred dollars, before slumping down to the price she had sold it for.
Thanks to the profits from her foray into Ethereum, her five bitcoin had now become thirty-two. The notional value of the digital codes stored on her little patch of blockchain was now approaching a hundred thousand dollars.
Which was a massive amount of money for a sixteen-year-old girl. She was rich!
But although she had enjoyed watching the value of her bitcoin grow — had become obsessed with it — she didn’t really believe in it. Despite what the enthusiasts proclaimed, it wasn’t like it was real money. You couldn’t buy anything with it.
She didn’t even know how she could turn it into krónur. Although the government had repealed the law about Icelanders transferring assets abroad, it was still technically illegal to buy or sell bitcoin.
So over the summer she still did a stint behind the counter at the petrol station. Earning fifteen hundred krónur an hour.
But while she was serving hot dogs, the price of her bitcoin was powering ahead. It broke four thousand dollars in the middle of August when she returned to school and six thousand at the end of October. It looked like it would reach ten thousand by December.
So yes, Dísa could save the family farm.
If only she could figure out how to turn the bitcoin into real money.
Three
Inspector Magnús Ragnarsson looked up at the open window, ten feet above the ground, and marvelled. How could people be so stupid?
He was standing at the back of a hangar-like building on the old US Naval Air Station right next to the international airport at Keflavík, which had been converted into a data centre. With its cheap geothermal energy and its even cheaper cold air for cooling, Iceland was developing a niche for itself as a place to store the ever-growing data produced by billions of smartphones and computers around the world. A video of baby Chung’s first steps, an analysis of Jorge’s browsing history, back-ups of Bloomfield Weiss’s foreign exchange trades were all stored in sheds like these.
But this particular unit had housed 104 computers that were devoted to an altogether different purpose: mining bitcoin. Until the night before, when someone had driven out to this bleak spot, avoided disturbing the security guard playing solitaire on his phone, spotted a window open to let in air to cool the machines, found a ladder propped against a wall around the corner, climbed into the building and removed the servers. All 104 of them.