followers found their way to
the chat channel Martti had
set up. Now, the Bitcoin
channel on Internet relay
chat, or IRC, became a sort of
twenty-four-hour
global
coffeehouse where the new
users could gather and marvel
at this experiment they were
all taking part in.
Around
midnight
on
September 26, one new
Bitcoiner wrote: “gosh I can’t
sleep ! I keep thinking about
this great stuff. To me Bitcoin
is the ‘cyberspace gold.’ I’m
just amazed.”
The
next
afternoon
another new user spoke of
spending ten hours reading
everything he could find
about the network.
“I did the same thing
when I first heard about
Bitcoin,” Gavin wrote back.
The appeal of Bitcoin
varied from person to person,
but most were in love with
the basic idea of a digital cash
that each user could control
and move around the world
with nothing more than a
private key. The users, at this
point, were mostly young
men
whose
lives
were
untethered to anything other
than their laptops, in constant
communication with people
on the other side of the world.
For them, moving money
around the globe with a paper
check or an old-fashioned
wire transfer seemed absurdly
backward.
Satoshi chimed in on the
forums to note that the
Bitcoin
software
was
designed to do more than just
move coins. The software
also had the capability to
attach specific instructions to
each coin so that the coins
could behave in a particular
way, according to the users’
wishes. A coin on the
blockchain
could,
for
example, be programmed to
move from one address to
another only if it was signed
off on by three or four
different
private
keys,
enabling its use in the types
of legal transactions that
currently
required
cumbersome and expensive
middlemen.
“The design supports a
tremendous
variety
of
possible transaction types that
I designed years ago,” Satoshi
wrote. “Escrow transactions,
bonded contracts, third party
arbitration,
multiparty
signature, etc. If Bitcoin
catches on in a big way, these
are things we’ll want to
explore in the future, but they
all had to be designed at the
beginning to make sure they
would be possible later.”
Satoshi had advertised
Bitcoin as a trustless system
that didn’t require its users to
rely on any central authority.
But like all forms of money,
Bitcoin did rely on its users’
trusting
the
ideas
and
integrity
of
the
system
supporting it—in this case,
code and math—and the
small elite of cosmopolitan
coders was more than willing
to do that. These new
converts,
in
turn,
were
providing
not
just
enthusiasm, but also fresh
sets of eyes to examine the
code
with
a
level
of
programming experience that
had been scarce up to this
point.
In late July Gavin and
Satoshi got an e-mail from
one such user, a programmer
from Germany going by the
screen name ArtForz, who
had
found
a
previously
undiscovered weakness in the
code
that
governed
transactions on the network.
The flaw made it possible to
spend Bitcoins in someone
else’s wallet.
Gavin
and
Satoshi
immediately realized this was
not just a bug but a fatal flaw
that could doom the entire
project. If someone else could
spend your coins the whole
system was all but useless.
Satoshi
quickly
put
together a fix—the flaw was
not
actually
difficult
to
correct. But in the meantime,
Gavin and Satoshi agreed to
keep the flaw secret until they
got everyone on the network
using new, repaired code, for
fear that someone would take
advantage of it.
“For now, don’t call it the
‘1 RETURN’ bug to anyone
who doesn’t already know
about it,” Satoshi wrote to
Gavin.
Because
the
patched
software
“has
a
dozen
changes in it,” Satoshi wrote,
“it won’t necessarily be
obvious
what
the
worst
vulnerability was. That may
give people a head start to
upgrading if any attackers are
looking for the vulnerability
in the changes.”
That ArtForz had not
taken advantage of the bug
himself was a minor miracle.
But it was also what the
incentives in the Bitcoin
system were designed to
encourage. ArtForz had been
mining coins himself—using
the GPU technology that
Laszlo had first pioneered—
and
he
knew
that
if
confidence in the system was
undercut his coins would be
worthless.
The
market
incentives were working as
they were supposed to work.
This turn of events also
confirmed
Gavin’s
confidence in the power of
decentralized
systems.
ArtForz was a part of the
network, and as such, he
didn’t just passively use the
network. He and Gavin, and
all the others, were helping to
build this thing.
A FEW MONTHS earlier the big
concern plaguing the Bitcoin
forum was how to attract new
users, but now the problem
was how to deal with the
influx of new users, their
potentially
malicious
behavior, and their competing
interests.
These problems became
particularly pronounced after
Bitcoin’s next big jump into
the spotlight. In November,
WikiLeaks, the organization
founded
by
a
regular
participant
in
the
old
Cypherpunk
movement,
Julian Assange, released a
vast trove of confidential
American
diplomatic
documents
that
revealed
previously secret operations
around the world. The large
credit card companies and
PayPal
came
under
immediate political pressure
to cut off donations to
WikiLeaks, which they did in
early December, in what
became
known
as
the
WikiLeaks blockade.
This move pointed to the
potentially troubling nexus
between the financial industry
and
the
government.
If
politicians didn’t like the
ideas of a particular group,
government officials could
ask banks and credit card
networks
to
deny
the
unpopular group access to the
financial
system,
often