of Bitcoins owned by that
computer’s Bitcoin address.
Then the computers on the
network would automatically
begin racing to solve a new
problem to unlock the next
batch of fifty coins.
When Hal returned to his
computer in the evening, he
immediately saw that it had
made him 50 Bitcoins, now
recorded next to one of his
Bitcoin addresses and also
recorded on the public ledger
that kept track of all Bitcoins.
These,
the
seventy-eighth
block of coins generated,
were among the first 4,000
Bitcoins to make it into the
real world. At the time they
were worth exactly nothing,
but that didn’t dampen Hal’s
enthusiasm.
In
a
congratulatory
to
Satoshi that he sent to the
entire mailing list, he allowed
himself a flight of fancy.
“Imagine that Bitcoin is
successful and becomes the
dominant payment system in
use throughout the world,” he
wrote. “Then the total value
of the currency should be
equal to the total value of all
the wealth in the world.”
By his own calculations,
that would make each Bitcoin
worth some $10 million.
“Even if the odds of
Bitcoin succeeding to this
degree are slim, are they
really 100 million to one
against? Something to think
about,” he wrote before
signing off.
HAL FINNEY HAD long been
preoccupied by how, in look
and texture, the future would
be different from the present.
One of four children of an
itinerant petroleum engineer,
Hal had worked his way
through
the
classics
of
science fiction, but he also
read calculus books for fun
and eventually attended the
California
Institute
of
Technology. He never backed
down from an intellectual
challenge.
During
his
freshman year he took a
course on gravitational field
theory that was designed for
graduate students.
But he wasn’t a typical
nerd. A big, athletic guy who
loved to ski in the California
mountains, he had none of the
social awkwardness common
among Cal Tech students.
This active spirit carried over
into his intellectual pursuits.
When he read the novels of
Larry Niven, which discussed
the
possibility
of
cryogenically
freezing
humans and later bringing
them back to life, Hal didn’t
just ponder the potential in
his dorm room. He located a
foundation
dedicated
to
making this process a reality
and signed up to receive the
Alcor
Life
Extension
Foundation’s
magazine.
Eventually he would pay to
have his and his family’s
bodies put into Alcor’s frozen
vaults near Los Angeles.
The advent of the Internet
had been a boon for Hal,
allowing him to connect with
other people in far-flung
places who were thinking
about similarly obscure but
radical ideas. Even before the
invention of the first web
browser, Hal joined some of
the
earliest
online
communities, with names like
the
Cypherpunks
and
Extropians, where he jumped
into debates about how new
technology
could
be
harnessed to shape the future
they all were dreaming up.
Few questions obsessed
these groups more than the
matter of how technology
would alter the balance of
power between corporations
and governments on one hand
and individuals on the other.
Technology
clearly
gave
individuals
unprecedented
new powers. The nascent
Internet allowed these people
to communicate with kindred
spirits and spread their ideas
in ways that had previously
been impossible. But there
was constant discussion of
how the creeping digitization
of life also gave governments
and
companies
more
command over perhaps the
most valuable and dangerous
commodity in the information
age: information.
In
the
days
before
computers,
governments
certainly kept records about
their citizens, but most people
lived in ways that made it
impossible to glean much
information about them. In
the
1990s,
though—long
before the National Security
Agency was discovered to be
snooping on the cell phones
of ordinary citizens and
Facebook’s privacy policies
became a matter for national
debate—the
Cypherpunks
saw that the digitization of
life made it much easier for
the authorities to harvest data
about citizens, making the
data vulnerable to capture by
nefarious
actors.
The
Cypherpunks
became
consumed by the question of
how people could protect
their personal information
and maintain their privacy.
The Cypherpunk Manifesto,
delivered to the mailing list in
1993
by
the
Berkeley
mathematician Eric Hughes,
began: “Privacy is necessary
for an open society in the
electronic age.”
This line of thinking was,
in part, an outgrowth of the
libertarian politics that had
become popular in California
in the 1970s and 1980s.
Suspicion
regarding
government had a natural
appeal for programmers like
Hal, who were at work
creating a new world through
code, without needing to rely
on anyone else. Hal had
imbibed these ideas at Cal
Tech and in his reading of the
novels of Ayn Rand. But the
issue of privacy in the
Internet age had an appeal
beyond libertarian circles,
among human rights activists
and other protest movements.
None of the Cypherpunks
saw a solution to the problem
in
running
away
from
technology. Instead, Hal and
the others aimed to find
answers in technology and
particularly in the science of
encrypting
information.
Encryption technologies had
historically been a privilege
largely reserved for only the
most powerful institutions.
Private individuals could try
to
encode
their
communications,
but
governments
and
armed
forces almost always had the
power to crack such codes. In
the 1970s and 1980s, though,
mathematicians at Stanford
and MIT made a series of
breakthroughs that made it
possible, for the first time, for
ordinary people to encrypt, or
scramble, messages in a way
that could be decrypted only
by the intended recipient and
not cracked even by the most
powerful supercomputers.
Every user of the new
technology, known as public-
key
cryptography,
would