reversible transactions. In the
meantime,
many
Bitcoin
developers
emphasized,
whenever possible, that they
did not keep most of their
money in Bitcoins.
The developers, though,
appeared to have a staying
power that eluded many of
the other early adopters of
Bitcoin, in large part because
of
their
more
practical
approach to the project. Jeff
Garzik, the programmer in
North Carolina who had
gotten involved back in 2010,
had been hired by Bitpay to
work on the Bitcoin protocol
full-time. Martti Malmi had
recently quit his job in
Helsinki
after
a
new
payments startup invited him
to come on board, knowing
about
his
history
with
Bitcoin. Adam Back, the
creator of hashcash back in
1997, had recently started
working with an investor on a
bold new project that aimed
to make it possible to take
Bitcoins
off
the
main
blockchain and on to so-
called sidechains, where new
applications could be built.
The small team of core
developers
working
with
Gavin was made up of people
who had gotten involved back
in 2010 or 2011 and managed
to stay out of the spotlight
almost entirely—men like
Gregory
Maxwell
and
Wladimir J. van der Laan.
The person responsible for
writing the majority of the
updated Bitcoin core protocol
was a thirty-year-old Belgian
whom many Bitcoiners had
never heard of, Pieter Wuille.
It came to seem that the
people who wanted Bitcoin to
do the least for them were the
ones who were managing to
do the most for Bitcoin.
WENCES CASARES WASN’T
looking for Bitcoin to change
his life, but he was still
imagining that Bitcoin would
change the world. His passion
for the project had continued
to win over important new
supporters. Max Levchin, the
cofounder of PayPal, and one
of the skeptics back at the
Allen & Co. conference in
Arizona in 2013, had been
brought around by Wences at
the 2014 version of the
conference and was now
coming on board as an
investor in Xapo. Wences
also knew from his friend
David Marcus that PayPal
was
moving
toward
integrating Bitcoin into all of
its online products, making
the virtual currency available
to a much broader audience.
But the day-to-day work
of moving his own Bitcoin
company forward was going
much more slowly than
Wences had expected, largely
because of the continued
skepticism in the traditional
financial world. In April,
Wences announced that Xapo
would be releasing the first
Bitcoin
debit
card
with
MasterCard, but almost as
soon as the announcement
went out, MasterCard called
and told Wences that the
project
had
not
been
approved at the highest levels
and was now being killed—a
public relations snafu for
Xapo. Wences himself was
constantly flying around to
appease the latest bank to
decide that it was going to
close down the accounts of
Xapo or some other Bitcoin
company that Wences was
helping out.
In the midst of all this, in
June, Wences took one of his
periodic trips to visit Xapo’s
operations in Buenos Aires
and the old friend who
oversaw it all, Fede.
As on every trip home,
Wences had to confront the
frustrations of Argentina’s
broken financial system. This
time around, he wanted to
buy a car so that he could
travel to and from a property
he’d recently purchased in
Patagonia. As with most big-
ticket items in Argentina, the
seller would accept only cash.
Because Wences still didn’t
have an Argentinian bank
account, he had to go to a
specialized money changer
who had a bank account in
the United States and could
accept a transfer of dollars
from Wences’s American
bank account and pay out to
Wences in wads of cash. This
served
as
yet
another
reminder of why he was
working on Bitcoin.
The scale of Wences’s
ambitions was evident inside
the Xapo offices, which were
packed
with
young
programmers.
One
was
working on a Hindi-language
site, which would make
Bitcoin available to people in
India, widely seen as one of
the biggest potential markets
given the Indians’ levels of
computer literacy and the
amount of remittances that
were
sent
from
Indians
abroad. Another programmer
was building an application
that would allow people
anywhere in the world to find
people near them looking to
buy or sell Bitcoins. At this
point Xapo was still primarily
used by big institutional
investors who wanted the best
possible security for their
millions of dollars of coins.
But the Xapo team was trying
to make the service more
accessible to smaller holders,
and many people were eager
for secure storage after the
collapse of Mt. Gox.
On one of the first
mornings Wences was in
Buenos Aires, the team of
programmers
had
a
videoconference
with
the
Xapo staff in Palo Alto. The
team in California had just
moved to much larger offices
above a bank. These staffers
now had a whole floor to
themselves, with windows
wrapping around the entire
office. The Americans, who
generally dealt with the
business side of the operation,
rather than programming, ran
through
all
the
new
agreements
they
were
working
on.
They
were
talking
with
AIG
about
insuring all the coins in the
vault against losses, and with
three different banks about
taking
deposits
from
customers.
“We’re in a really good
position in comparison to a
lot of people in the industry
in
respect
to
banking
relationships. Most people are
just hoping to get one,” one
of
the
employees
in
California said.
They also were working
with a debit card issuer in
Gibraltar after the problem
with MasterCard earlier in the
spring, and were hopeful that
they would be able to
distribute
the
cards
worldwide.
After lunch, Fede got the
keys for the Buenos Aires
staff’s new, larger office,
which was two flights down
and occupied an entire floor,
with big conference rooms
and a Ping-Pong table. While