documents
or
recordings but some of the quotes are the best recollection of the participants, generally backed up by at least one other person in attendance. I was lucky
enough to be present for some of the events, such as the March 2014
gathering at Dan Morehead’s house on Lake Tahoe.
Most of the material that did not
come from interviews and personal emails sat in the digital treasure trove of public messages and chats that the
Bitcoin community has created over
time, and that various participants had the wisdom to maintain for posterity.
They will be referenced in the notes by
following abbreviations:
CYPH: Cypherpunk mailing list,
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/.
CRYP: The Cryptography and
Cryptography Policy Mailing List,
http://www.mail-
archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/.
DEV-LIST: Core Bitcoin
development discussion,
http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-development/.
BTCF: Bitcoin Forum,
https://bitcointalk.org.
IRC: #bitcoin-dev Internet Relay
Chat channel,
http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-
dev/logs/2014/01.
On Silk Road, there are two
remarkable online efforts to gather and catalog
all
available
information,
including legal documents and postings
from the now defunct marketplace. One
is available at http://antilop.cc/sr/. The other
is
at
http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road.
Many of the details in the book came from the Silk Road’s forums and Ross Ulbricht’s trial, which will be referred to in the notes by the following
abbreviations:
SRF: Silk Road forum archives,
http://antilop.cc/sr/download/stexo_sr_forum.zip.
RUTT: Ross Ulbricht trial
transcripts, United States of
America v. Ross William Ulbricht.
United States District Court
Southern District of New York. 14
CR 68 (KBF).
RUTE: Ross Ulbricht trial exhibits,
United States of America v. Ross
William Ulbricht. United States
District Court Southern District of
New York. 14 CR 68 (KBF).
The notes below will not contain
citations for material from the sources above when it is obvious in the text where the material came from.
All Bitcoin prices are taken from
CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index, which is
available
at
http://www.coindesk.com/price/, unless
I have stated otherwise. The numbers on Bitcoin trading volumes come from www.bitcoinmarkets.
com
and
www.bitcoinity.com/data.
For those looking to learn more
about the topics covered in this book there are several wonderful books. On the history of the Cypherpunks, there is Andy Greenberg’s This Machine Kills Secrets:
How
WikiLeakers,
Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information. For the history of cryptography I learned a great deal from Simon Singh’s The Code Book. For those eager to learn more about the evolution of money,
Felix Martin’s Money: An Authorized Biography and Jack Weatherford’s The History of Money are wonderful reads, and Nigel Dodd’s The Social Life is thought-provoking. Those looking to go
into greater depth can try A History of Money by Glyn Davies. I also benefited from Eileen Ormsby’s book Silk Road, the first of what I’m sure will be many
fascinating volumes about the online bazaar.
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your e-book
reader’s search tool.
INTRODUCTION
xiv
only 15 percent of the basic
Bitcoin computer code: Based on
calculations done for the author by
Gavin Andresen.
CHAPTER 1
4
this particular e-mail came from:
Satoshi Nakamoto to CRYP,
October 31, 2008.
4
the nine-page description: A later
version of the paper would be nine
pages, but the initial version Hal
reviewed was actually eight pages.
5
tied to an Internet provider in
California:
Hal’s
debug
log
showed that the IP addresse of the
other user was reached through a
Tor service that would have
obscured the real IP address. But
Tor generally routes users to
nodes in the same geographic
area, suggesting that the other user
on Bitcoin’s first day was
probably in California.
5
He said he’d been testing it
heavily: I have elected to use the pronoun “he” to refer to Satoshi,
but Satoshi could also be she or
they.
6
now recorded next to one of his
Bitcoin addresses: The address in
question
was
1AiBYt8XbsdyPAELFpcSwRpu45eb2bArMf.
12
Chaum’s effort would rub Hal and
others the wrong way: Hal Finney
to CYPH, August 22, 1993.
12
DigiCash went down with it: Tim
Clark, “DigiCash Files Chapter
11,” CNET, November 4, 1998,
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-
217527 .html.
13
Hal would calculate the maximum
bilclass="underline" This anecdote was recounted
by Hal’s college roommate and
later colleague, Yin Shih.
13
“The work we are doing here,
broadly speaking”: Hal Finney to
CYPH, November 15, 1992.
CHAPTER 2
16
As sociologist Nigel Dodd put it:
Nigel Dodd, The Social Life of
Money (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
17
“We could envisage proposals in
the near future”: Alan Greenspan,
Conference on Electric Money
and
Banking,
United
States
Treasury, September 19, 1996,
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/19960919.htm.
17
a British researcher named Adam
Back released his plan: Adam
Back to CYPH, March 28, 1997.
18
a concept called bit gold, was
invented by Nick Szabo: Nick
Szabo,
“Bit
Gold,”
Unenumerated, December 2005,
http://unenumerated.blogspot
.co.uk/2005/12/bit-gold.html.
19
Another, known as b-money,
came from an American named
Wei Dai: Wei Dai to CYPH, 1998.
19
Hal created his own variant, with
a decidedly less sexy name: Hal
Finney to CYPH, August 15,
2004.
20
The nine-page PDF attached to the
e-maiclass="underline" the current version is
available
at
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
22
modeled after the contest that
Adam Back: While this process
was modeled on Back’s program,
it also relied on the innovations of
several other cryptographers and
mathematicians, including Ralph
Merkle, Stuart Haber, and W.