But, Gavin wrote on the
forums, “I want the Bitcoin
project to succeed, and I think
it is more likely to be a
success if people can get a
handful of coins to try it out.
It can be frustrating to wait
until your node generates
some coins (and that will get
more
frustrating
in
the
future), and buying Bitcoins
is still a little bit clunky.”
Gavin, a trim forty-four-
year-old with the anodyne
looks of a suburban soccer
dad, had time for the project
because he, his two children,
and his wife—a geology
professor—had
recently
returned from his wife’s
sabbatical in Australia. Gavin
had quit his job as a
researcher at the University
of Massachusetts before they
had gone to Australia and he
was now trying to figure out
what to do next from his
home office, just off the
family mudroom.
When he first read about
Bitcoin, he had immediately
ferreted out Satoshi’s original
Bitcoin article, now known as
the Bitcoin white paper, as
well as the Bitcoin forum, all
of which he read in a few
hours. The concept appealed
to him, in part, for the same
political reasons that drew in
Martti. After growing up in a
liberal West Coast household,
Gavin had moved toward
libertarianism during his first
programming job, swayed by
a persistent coworker. These
politics gave him a natural
interest in a free-market
currency like Bitcoin.
But politics didn’t occupy
the center of Gavin’s life and,
unlike many libertarians, he
didn’t particularly think the
gold standard was a great
idea. For Gavin, one of the
primary attractions of this
technology
was
the
conceptual elegance of the
decentralized network and the
open source software, which
was updated and maintained
by all of its users instead of
one
author.
Gavin’s
programming career thus far
had
given
him
an
appreciation for decentralized
systems that had nothing to
do with any suspicion of the
government
or
corporate
America. For Gavin, the
power
of
decentralized
technology came from the
more workaday benefits of
software and networks that
didn’t rely on a single person
or company to keep them
running.
Decentralized
systems
like
the
Internet
and
Wikipedia could harness the
expertise of all their users,
unlike the AOL network or
Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
Decision making could take
longer,
but
the
ultimate
decisions would incorporate
more
information.
The
participants in decentralized
networks
also
had
an
incentive to help keep the
system up and running. If the
original author was away on
vacation or asleep when a
crisis hit, other users could
chip in. As it was frequently
put, systems were stronger
when there was no single
point
of
failure.
These
arguments were, to some
degree,
technological
analogues of the political
arguments that libertarians
made for taking power away
from central governments:
political power worked better
when it was in the hands of
lots of people rather than a
single political authority. But
the advocates for open source
software tended to put things
in less ideological terms.
Decentralized technology
was a rather natural fit for
Gavin, who had little in the
way of an ego. Despite going
to Princeton, he had been
happy serving as something
of a journeyman programmer,
working on 3-D graphics at
one
point,
and
Internet
telephony
software
at
another. For Gavin, the jobs
had always been about what
he found interesting, not what
promised the most money or
success.
To start participating in
the Bitcoin project, Gavin
quickly began e-mailing with
Satoshi to suggest his own
improvements to the code
and, in short order, became
the first person other than
Satoshi or Martti to officially
make a change to the Bitcoin
code.
More
valuable
than
Gavin’s programming chops
were
his
goodwill
and
integrity, both of which
Bitcoin desperately needed at
this point to win the trust of
new users, given that Satoshi
remained a shadowy figure.
Satoshi
had,
of
course,
designed his software to be
open source so that users
wouldn’t have to trust him.
But people were not showing
much willingness to entrust
real money to a network that
was run by a bunch of
anonymous malcontents.
Gavin attached a real and
trustworthy
face
to
the
technology. He was one of
the first people on the forum
to use his real identity, taking
the
screen
name
gavinandresen,
and
he
included, on the forum, a
small picture of himself in a
hiking backpack, giving a
slightly dorky but entirely
disarming smile. He served
on the forums as a sort of
good-natured
high
school
teacher, answering, in plain
terms, questions that came
up. He would also mediate in
the
political
fights
that
occasionally
broke
out
between those early users
with strident political beliefs.
Gavin was used to this sort of
thing.
In
Amherst,
Massachusetts, he served on
the
240-member
Town
Committee,
a
grassroots
deliberative body that he had
been elected to a number of
times. Amherst, a college
town, was famously liberal
and so Gavin had plenty of
disagreements over matters of
principle. But he had learned
to avoid fights and find
compromises—something
that was about to prove
critical
to
the
fledgling
Bitcoin community.
HEADPHONES ON AND an
oversize can of MadCroc
energy drink by his side,
Martti sat at his dorm room
desk, giddy. Slashdot, a go-to
news site for computer geeks
the world over, was going to
post an article about Martti’s
pet project. Bitcoin, largely
ignored over the last year,
was on the verge of receiving
global attention.
The campaign to get
Bitcoin real press coverage
had begun a few weeks
earlier, not long after Martti
finished
his
three-month
internship at Siemens. A new
version of Bitcoin, version