help
billions
of
people.
Andreessen Horowitz had
recently closed a $1.5 billion
fund, and the partners said
privately that they wanted to
spend as much as $200
million of that on Bitcoin and
blockchain startups, if they
could find deserving ones.
But the week in Austin
couldn’t
help
fueling
suspicion that perhaps, as in
the old way of doing things,
the economic benefits of all
the new technology were, at
least so far, accruing to only a
small elite, while the 99
percent that Occupy Wall
Street had worried about were
left reading about it at home
on
and
Twitter.
Bitcoin itself faced the same
concerns.
Years
earlier,
Bitcoin had promised that it
would spread its benefits to
all its users, but by 2014 large
chunks
of
the
Bitcoin
economy were owned by a
few people who had been
wealthy
enough
before
Bitcoin came along to invest
in this new system. Most of
the new coins being released
each day were collected by a
few large mining syndicates.
If this was the new world, it
didn’t seem all that different
from the old one—at least not
yet.
CHAPTER 31
March 21, 2014
Many of the early adopters
who had managed to stick
around and make something
of themselves flew out for the
second occurrence of Bitcoin
Pacifica at Dan Morehead’s
vacation home on Lake
Tahoe, where a large staff
catered to the crowd’s every
desire, allowing Morehead to
play the relaxed host in his
elegant black loafers and a
pinkish red shirt that set off
his perfect tan.
Among the guests was
Jed McCaleb, the founder of
Mt. Gox, who had recently
been
helping
Morehead’s
firm look for new Bitcoin
investments. Jed spent a lot of
time at Morehead’s house
talking to Jesse Powell,
someone he had first met at
the 2011 Bitcoin conference
in New York. Jesse, who was
sporting
sweatpants
and
athletic
socks,
was
still
working on the exchange that
he had begun building after
traveling to Tokyo in 2011
and seeing what a mess Mt.
Gox was. Three of the young
men who ran the successor to
Mt. Gox, Bitstamp, had flown
in from Slovenia and were
buzzing about the matching
Teslas they had recently
purchased with some of the
profits from their business.
Roger Ver couldn’t make
it to Tahoe. He had recently
renounced
his
American
citizenship and become a
citizen of Saint Kitts-Nevis,
which offers passports to
people who buy at least
$450,000 of real estate on the
island. Roger had applied for
a visa to come to Morehead’s
event, but the American
government had denied the
request. Roger’s old friend
Erik Voorhees was in Tahoe,
up from Panama where he
was spending his time dealing
with
the
Securities
and
Exchange
Commission
investigation of the shares he
had sold in SatoshiDice. Erik
had come to be viewed as one
of the few people who
managed
to
remain
ideologically
engaged
without
letting
ideology
totally
overwhelm
their
business
instincts.
The
company that Erik founded
after leaving Charlie Shrem’s
BitInstant, Coinapult, was
aiming to make it easier to
send Bitcoin by e-mail and
text message. But the conflict
between
ideology
and
commerce
had,
in
fact,
become too much for Erik to
bear. The investigation by the
Securities
and
Exchange
Commission had forced him
to sell some of his Bitcoin
holdings to pay for a lawyer.
He
worried
that
if
he
continued
to
speak
out
politically
his
company
would become a target of
government officials. Rather
than drawing back from the
politics, he had decided to
leave his company and move
with his fiancée back to
Colorado.
“The way I felt I could
contribute best is by being a
very outspoken advocate for
what Bitcoin stands for,” he
said.
For
many
of
the
attendees, though, the biggest
celebrity at the gathering was
a reclusive man who was
essentially unknown to the
outside world. Nick Szabo
had been deeply involved
with the Cypherpunks back in
the early days and in 1998
had invented bit gold, one of
the most commonly cited
forerunners of Bitcoin. More
recently he had become, for
many Bitcoin insiders, the
most likely candidate for
Satoshi Nakamoto.
Nick
was
nearly
as
mysterious
as
Satoshi
himself. He kept a blog where
he occasionally wrote learned
essays on topics like online
security, monetary history,
and property law. But there
was no public record of
where he worked and lived,
and some people questioned
whether he was a real person.
Nick’s writing, though, would
put him on anyone’s short list
for Satoshi. Back in the
1990s, he wrote more than
just
about
any
other
Cypherpunk
about
the
promise of digital money,
culminating in his proposal
for bit gold. Just a few
months before Bitcoin was
released, in April 2008, Nick
had posted on his blog an
item in which he talked about
creating a trial model of bit
gold and asked if anyone
wanted to help him “code one
up.” In August of that year, at
the same time that Satoshi
was
privately
e-mailing
Adam Back about Bitcoin for
the first time, Nick offered on
his blog to sell some old
collectible private banknotes,
to help deal with “personal
cash flow needs.” At about
the same time, he wrote a
burst of blog posts about the
history of money, smart
contracts, and bit gold, and
said that if he could make bit
gold work it would be the
“first online currency based
on highly distributed trust and
unforgeable costliness rather
than trust in a single entity
and traditional accounting
controls.”
When Satoshi’s white
paper came out publicly three
months later, it cited two
other obvious forerunners of
Bitcoin—b-money
and
hashcash—but did not cite
Nick’s work. During this
period, Nick maintained what
many people later came to
think was a rather suspicious