the
virtual
currency
“cuts
across
international boundaries, can
be stored on your hard drive
instead of in a bank, and—
perhaps most importantly to
many of Bitcoin’s users—
isn’t
subject
to
the
inflationary
whim
of
whatever Federal Reserve
chief decides to print more
money.”
Until
very
recently,
Bitcoin had been kept alive
almost entirely by computer
programmers
who
played
around with the Bitcoin
software themselves. Now it
was attracting a new breed of
participant, like Roger Ver,
who could not understand the
code, but for whom the
political possibilities behind
Bitcoin were enough of a
draw.
SATOSHI NAKAMOTO PICKED
this
moment
to
finally
disappear for good. The
author of the Bitcoin software
hadn’t posted to the forums
since December, but he had
continued to e-mail with a
select number of developers,
including Gavin, Martti, and
Mike
Hearn,
a
programmer in Switzerland,
who got drawn into the
project after the WikiLeaks
blockade. In late April Hearn
politely asked how involved
Satoshi
intended
to
be
moving forward.
“Are you planning on
rejoining the community at
some point (e.g. for code
reviews), or is your plan to
permanently step back from
the limelight?” he asked.
“I’ve moved on to other
things,” Satoshi wrote back.
“It’s in good hands with
Gavin and everyone.”
A few days later, Satoshi
wrote a slightly peeved e-
mail to Gavin about an
interview he had recently
given to another online radio
show.
“I wish you wouldn’t
keep talking about me as a
mysterious shadowy figure,”
Satoshi wrote. “The press just
turns that into a pirate
currency angle.”
Gavin
wrote
back
acknowledging the point. He
also told Satoshi that he had
received from the CIA an
invitation to speak about
Bitcoin,
which
he
was
planning to accept.
“I hope that by talking
directly to them and, more
importantly, listening to their
questions/concerns, they will
think of Bitcoin the way I do
—as a just-plain-better, more
efficient,
less-subject-to-
political-whims money,” he
wrote.
Gavin
never
got
a
response and assumed that
Satoshi had been turned off
by the idea of Bitcoin
fraternizing with the most
intrusive arm of the American
government.
Satoshi’s final e-mails
went to Martti, whom Satoshi
asked to take full ownership
of the Bitcoin.org website.
“I’ve moved on to other
things and probably won’t be
around in the future,” Satoshi
wrote to Martti, in early May,
before transferring the site to
Martti and disappearing into
the ether.
Martti took responsibility
for the site, but he had
otherwise
almost
entirely
stopped his work on Bitcoin.
With the price rising, he sold
more than half of his twenty
thousand or so Bitcoins and
bought
himself
a
nice
apartment in Helsinki. Both
Martti and Satoshi seemed to
recognize that the community
had grown large enough that
it no longer needed either of
them.
THIS WAS THE moment that
many early adopters had been
waiting for. Bitcoin was
getting mainstream attention
and being taken seriously by
important people. By mid-
May, the price of a single
Bitcoin was approaching $10.
Thanks to Silk Road,
Bitcoin was being regularly
used for the first time as a
medium of exchange for real,
if illegal, things. This was not
enough to allow Bitcoin to
claim the mantle of money,
which had several properties
that Bitcoin lacked. But
Bitcoin could now meet some
definitions of a currency, a
label that had been purely
aspirational through 2009 and
2010.
“My wife isn’t calling it a
‘pretend
money
project’
anymore,” Gavin told the
others gathered on the Bitcoin
chat channel one morning.
But Gavin didn’t let this
go to his head. He avoided
the urge to buy Bitcoins and
speculate on their rising price,
as everyone else seemed to be
doing. He had promised his
wife that while he would
spend his time on the project,
he would never spend any of
the family’s money. At this
point, it was also evident to
Gavin that the price and
power of Bitcoin were no
longer reliant just on the
strength of the underlying
Bitcoin
protocol.
People
moving into and out of the
virtual currency were using
services that people had built
on top of the protocol, and it
was quickly becoming clear
that these services were not
equipped to deal with the
rapid growth.
In Tokyo Mark Karpeles
had to rush home from his
honeymoon with his new
Japanese wife—whom he had
met a few months earlier, not
at a bar, but in the office
building
where
he
was
working—to try to fend off
hackers who had launched a
denial-of-service attack on
Mt. Gox. The attackers said
they would relent only if
Mark paid a $5,000 ransom.
“This was—of course—
denied,” Mark explained to
his users. “We do not
negociate
with
internet
terrorists!”
But it took days for Mark
to
install
the
necessary
protections against what was
a fairly standard attack.
In Texas, Ross had shut
down his used book business
so that he could work on Silk
Road
full-time.
He
was
staying up late, furiously
trying to rewrite his site from
scratch so it would be able to
withstand both the traffic and
the hackers who were already
targeting him. Silk Road now
had over a thousand people
registered, ten times more
than it had just two months
earlier. In mid-May, to get the
new version online, Ross had
to shut the site down for a
few days, which turned into
one of the more stressful
periods he had endured.
“Updating a live site to a
whole new version is no easy
task,” he wrote in his diary.
“You don’t realize how many
little pieces lay on top of one
another so it works just right
(at least when you code
poorly like my amateur ass
was doing). So for about 48
hours it was stop and start on
the switch, but I finally got
there and it was working.”
While Silk Road was
down, the price of Bitcoin