“none of them could wrap
their head around it.” That
provoked her to look more
deeply, and as she did, she
slowly came to understand
the
potentially
enormous
implications
of
the
technology:
“We all hear the store of
value. Here’s a way to move
money and to buy things
outside the law. Maybe it’s a
competitor to fiat currency. Is
it a disrupter to the traditional
banking sector; an enabler of
e-commerce and remittances;
a superior internal ledger
system for multinationals?
That’s not what all the
reporters are asking about but
that’s another possibility that
we see.
“By the time I felt like I
really understood it I was
really excited to share that
knowledge, and discuss it
with a wider audience,” she
said. “You want everyone to
understand it too so that
they’ll really appreciate the
really massiveness of this
innovation.
“It’s not just a thing, it’s a
phenomenon.”
GAVIN ANDRESEN HAD been
invited to Dan Morehead’s
house in Lake Tahoe, but he
had elected to stay home in
Amherst. He was receiving
many invitations to swanky
gatherings
and
turning
essentially all of them down
—though he did accept an
invitation to speak to the local
Rotary Club. When he had
been asked to attend the
prestigious Aspen Institute, a
friend had urged him to go.
“It will change your life,”
the friend told him.
“I don’t want my life to
change,” he responded. “I
like my life.”
He had certainly profited
from Bitcoin’s rise: he had
been paid by the foundation
in Bitcoins since 2012 when
each Bitcoin was worth $10.
His wife had pushed him to
use some of the money to get
his own office in downtown
Amherst, and a second car for
the family. But the car they
chose was a modest black
Nissan Leaf. And for an
extravagant family vacation,
he planned a trip to visit his
mother in Washington State
for a Women’s Auxiliary
ceremony. For the first time,
Gavin hadn’t worried about
the prices of the hotels he was
booking, and he planned a
helicopter trip for his family
to see Mount Hood.
Gavin
was
similarly
understated about Bitcoin. He
still lived for the project, but
like other developers he was
deeply aware of the flaws that
still existed. He called the
software that Satoshi had
created
a
“hairball”
containing lots of different
things stuck together. As he
saw
it,
the
volunteer
developers were still trying to
untangle
it.
He
was
particularly focused on the
limited
number
of
transactions that were being
confirmed and recorded on
the blockchain with each new
block. On average, there were
only about four hundred
transactions
getting
confirmed every ten minutes
in
mid-2014.
If
Bitcoin
wanted to compete with
payment networks like Visa,
which
processed
two
thousand transactions each
second, the software was
going to need to change
significantly.
Among
the
broader
community
of
Bitcoin
programmers
there
was
constant griping about the
increasing centralization of
the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
The
network
had
been
designed to encourage all of
its users to participate. But
now, only people with access
to super-powered computer
chips and cheap energy were
able to take part in the mining
and
transaction
recording
process—something that a
small handful of companies
were dominating. As had
happened
with
several
previous
decentralized
systems,
this
one
had
naturally
tended
toward
greater centralization because
of
the
efficiency
made
possible by specialization.
This looked, increasingly,
like Napster giving way to
iTunes. In that case, the old
power brokers—the record
labels—were destroyed, but
they
were
mostly
just
replaced by a new set of
power players.
Gavin rarely brought it up
publicly,
but
there
was
another,
more
frightening
problem that didn’t appear to
have any immediate solution.
There
were
a
growing
number
of
examples
of
Bitcoin
being
used
by
criminals to demand and
collect ransom, which was
much easier with Bitcoin than
with traditional means of
payment. When criminals
accepted cash for ransom
they had to physically collect
the money at some point,
which
provided
some
indication of their location. If
ransom was sent digitally via
PayPal, it didn’t require a
physical handoff, but the
payment
could
later
be
reversed.
With
Bitcoin,
criminals could demand that a
victim send money remotely,
and once it was sent, there
was no reversing it. The
previous fall, a malware
program
known
as
CryptoLocker had surfaced,
which had the ability to seize
computers and lock the hard
drive until a Bitcoin ransom
was paid. The fears about
ransom were a large part of
the
reason
that
many
Bitcoiners had been angry at
Newsweek
for
“outing”
Dorian Nakamoto. If he had
really been Satoshi, his outing
would have made all of his
family members unusually
vulnerable to kidnapping and
demands
for
payoffs
of
various sorts.
Gavin didn’t know it, but
for
months,
a
hacker
demanding
ransom
was
targeting Hal Finney and his
family, despite the fact that
Finney had been rendered
almost entirely unable to
move or communicate by his
disease. The attack came to a
terrifying climax when the
hacker called the police and
reported that a murder was
taking place at Hal’s house;
this forced the local police
and
fire
department
to
evacuate Hal and his family,
a taxing experience that came
just a few months before his
death. Roger Ver had dealt
with what appeared to be the
same hacker, but beat him off
after offering a public bounty
for his capture. The best
solution to this threat seemed
to be wallets that were
programmed to allow for