his
computer work. But with this
one, where would he even
begin? Honey, I’m going to
try to make a new kind of
money.
That, in essence, was his
intention when, after a long
morning run, he sat down in
his modest home office: a
corner of his living room with
an old sectional desk, taken
up
primarily
by
four
computer screens of different
shape and make, all wired to
the separate computers he
used for work and personal
pursuits. Any space that
wasn’t occupied by computer
equipment was covered in a
jumble of papers, exercise
books, and old programming
manuals. It wasn’t much to
look at. But sitting there, Hal
could see his patio on the
other side of his living room,
bathed in California sun, even
in the middle of January. On
the carpet to his left lay Arky,
his
faithful
Rhodesian
ridgeback, named after a star
in the constellation Boötes.
This was where he felt at
home, and where he had done
much of his most creative
work as a programmer.
He fired up his hulking
IBM ThinkCentre, settled in,
and clicked on the website
he’d gotten in an e-mail the
previous day while he was at
work: www.bitcoin.org.
Bitcoin had first crossed
his screen a few months
earlier, in a message sent to
one of the many mailing lists
he subscribed to. The back-
and-forth
was
usually
between
the
familiar
personalities
he’d
been
talking to for years who
inhabited
the
relatively
specialized corner of coding
where he worked. But this
particular e-mail came from
an unfamiliar name—Satoshi
Nakamoto—and it described
what was referred to as an “e-
cash” with the catchy name
Bitcoin. Digital money was
something
Hal
had
experimented with for a long
time, enough to make him
skeptical about whether it
could
ever
work.
But
something jumped out in this
e-mail. Satoshi promised a
kind of cash that wouldn’t
need a bank or any other third
party to manage it. It was a
system that could live entirely
in the collective computing
memory of the people who
used it. Hal was particularly
drawn to Satoshi’s claim that
users could own and trade
Bitcoins without providing
identifying information to any
central authorities. Hal had
spent most of his professional
life working on programs that
allowed people to elude the
ever-watchful gaze of the
government.
After reading the nine-
page description, contained in
what looked like an academic
paper,
Hal
responded
enthusiastically:
“When Wikipedia started
I never thought it would
work, but it has proven to be
a great success for some of
the same reasons,” he wrote
to the group.
In the face of skepticism
from others on the e-mail list,
Hal had urged Satoshi to
write up some actual code for
the system he had described.
A few months later, on this
Saturday in January, Hal
downloaded Satoshi’s code
from the Bitcoin website. A
simple .exe file installed the
Bitcoin
program
and
automatically opened up a
crisp-looking window on his
computer desktop.
When
the
program
opened for the first time it
automatically generated a list
of Bitcoin addresses that
would be Hal’s account
numbers in the system and
the password, or private key,
that gave him access to each
address. Beyond that, the
program had only a few
functions. The main one,
“Send Coins,” didn’t seem
like much of an option for
Hal given that he didn’t have
any coins to send. But before
he could poke around further
the program crashed.
It didn’t deter Hal. After
looking at his computer logs,
he wrote to Satoshi to explain
what had happened when his
computer had tried to link up
with other computers on the
network. Apart from Hal, the
log showed that there were
only two other computers on
the network and both of those
were from a single IP
address,
presumably
Satoshi’s, tied to an Internet
provider in California.
Within an hour, Satoshi
had written back, expressing
disappointment
with
the
failure. He said he’d been
testing it heavily and never
encountered any trouble. But
he told Hal that he had
trimmed down the program to
make it easier to download,
which must have introduced
the problem.
“I guess I made the wrong
decision,” Satoshi wrote with
palpable frustration.
Satoshi sent Hal a new
version of the program, with
some of the old material
restored, and thanked Hal for
his help. When it, too,
crashed, Hal kept at it. He
finally got it running using a
program that operated outside
Microsoft Windows. Once it
was up, he clicked on the
most
exciting-sounding
function in the drop-down
menu:
“Generate
Coins.”
When he did this, the
processor in his computer
audibly clicked into gear at a
high clip.
With everything running,
Hal could take a break and
attend to his familial duties,
including a family dinner at a
nearby Chinese restaurant and
a small birthday party for his
son. The instructions Satoshi
had
included
with
the
software said that actually
generating coins could take
“days or months, depending
on
the
speed
of
your
computer and the competition
on the network.”
Hal dashed off a quick
note telling Satoshi that
everything was working: “I
have to go out but I’ll leave
this version running for a
while.”
Hal had already read
enough to understand the
basic work his computer was
doing. Once the Bitcoin
program was running, it
logged into a designated chat
channel
to
find
other
computers
running
the
software—basically
just
Satoshi’s computers at this
point. All the computers were
trying
to
capture
new
Bitcoins, which were released
into the system in bundles of
fifty coins. Each new block of
Bitcoin was assigned to the
address of one user who
linked into the network and
won a race of sorts to solve a
computational puzzle. When
a computer won one round of
the race and captured new
coins, all the other machines
on the network updated their
shared record of the number