provided straightforward, if
occasionally stilted, answers
to questions like, “Is Bitcoin
safe?” and “Why should I use
Bitcoin?” To answer the
latter, he cited the political
motivations:
Be safe from the
unfair monetary
policies of the
monopolistic central
banks and the other
risks of centralized
power over a money
supply. The limited
inflation of the
Bitcoin system’s
money supply is
distributed evenly (by
CPU power)
throughout the
network, not
monopolized to a
banking elite.
Satoshi
liked
the
document so much that Martti
was
quickly
given
full
credentials for the Bitcoin
website, allowing him to
make any improvements he
wanted. Satoshi particularly
encouraged Martti to help
make the site look more
professional and get users up
to speed.
WHEN MARTTI FOUND Bitcoin
in the spring of 2009, he was
in his second year at the
Helsinki
University
of
Technology. If Hal Finney
was the opposite of the
normal tech geek, Martti
lived up to type. Lanky, with
birdlike features, Martti shied
away from social contact. He
spoke in a slow, halting voice
that sounded almost as if it
were computer generated. He
was happiest in his room with
his computer, writing code,
which he had learned to do at
age twelve, or hammering
away at enemies in online
games, while listening to
heavy
metal
music
on
headphones.
Martti’s
reclusive,
computer-centric life led him
to the ideas behind Bitcoin,
and ultimately to Bitcoin
itself.
The
Internet
had
allowed a teenage Martti to
discover and explore political
ideas that were far from the
Finnish social democratic
consensus. The ideas of the
libertarian
economists
he
began
following,
which
encouraged people to create
their own destiny, aligned
with
Martti’s
lone-wolf
approach to life, even if it
ignored
the
incredible
education that Martti had
received thanks to Finland’s
strong government and high
taxes. Who needs the state
when you have talent and
ideas?
During his college years,
Martti had become fascinated
by the rise in Scandinavia of
the
Pirate
Party,
which
promoted technology over
political engagement as the
way to move society. Napster
and other music sharing
services hadn’t waited for
politics to reform copyright
law; they forced the world to
change. As Martti pondered
these
ideas
he
began
wondering whether money
might be the next thing
vulnerable to technological
disruption. After a brief
spasm
of
random
web
searches, Martti had found his
way to the primitive website
at Bitcoin.org.
Within a few weeks of his
initial
exchanges
with
Satoshi, Martti had totally
revamped
the
Bitcoin
website. In place of Satoshi’s
original
version,
which
presented
complicated
descriptions of the code,
Martti led off with a brief,
crisp description of the big
ideas, aimed at drawing in
anyone
with
similar
ideological interests.
“Be
safe
from
the
unstability
caused
by
fractional reserve banking
and the bad policies of the
central banks,” read the
newly designed site.
The onslaught of new
users was slow to arrive,
however. A few dozen people
downloaded
the
Bitcoin
program in June, to add to the
few
hundred
who
had
downloaded
it
since
its
original release. Most had
tried it once and then turned it
off. But Martti kept at it.
After releasing the new
website, Martti turned to the
software’s actual underlying
code. He did not know C++,
the programming language
that Satoshi had written
Bitcoin in, so Martti began
teaching himself.
Martti had time for all of
this because he failed to land
a summer programming job
—a failure that gave Bitcoin a
much-needed boost over the
next months. Martti got a
part-time job through a temp
agency, but he would spend
many of his days and nights
at the university computer lab
and find himself emerging at
dawn. As he learned C++,
Martti was going through the
laborious
process
of
compiling his own version of
the code that Satoshi had
written, so that he could
begin making changes to it.
He
and
Satoshi
communicated regularly and
fell into an easy rapport.
While
Satoshi
never
discussed anything personal
in these e-mails, he would
banter with Martti about little
things. In one e-mail, Satoshi
pointed to a recent exchange
on the Bitcoin e-mail list in
which a user referred to
Bitcoin
as
a
“cryptocurrency,” referring to
the cryptographic functions
that made it run.
“Maybe it’s a word we
should use when describing
Bitcoin. Do you like it?”
Satoshi asked.
“It sounds good,” Martti
replied. “A peer to peer
cryptocurrency could be the
slogan.”
As the year went on they
also worked out other details,
like the Bitcoin logo, which
they mocked up on their
computers and sent back and
forth, coming up, finally, with
a B with two lines coming out
of the bottom and top.
They also batted back and
forth potential improvements
to
the
software.
Martti
proposed
making
Bitcoin
launch automatically when
someone
turned
on
a
computer, an easy way to get
more nodes on the network.
Satoshi loved it: “Now
that I think about it, you’ve
put your finger on the most
important missing feature
right now that would make an
order of magnitude difference
in the number of nodes.”
Despite Martti’s relative
lack
of
programming
experience, Satoshi gave him
full permission to make
changes to the core Bitcoin
software on the server where
it
was
stored—something
that, to this point, only
Satoshi could do. Starting in
August, the log of changes to
the software showed that
Martti was now the main
actor. When the next version
of Bitcoin, 0.2, was released,
Satoshi gave credit for most
of
the
improvements
to
Martti.
But both Satoshi and
Martti were struggling with