Albert and Sakura

It was a hot day in June when Albert decided he was done working for someone else and picked up his ball cap and messenger bag and walked out of the office. He was frustrated, hot, sweaty, and mad. That was it really, he was just plain mad. His boss was a jerk and didn’t even understand half of what Albert showed him, but he was the one making all the money while Albert scrounged behind the seat cushions when he needed money for the subway. It wasn’t fair, Albert thought. How could someone so stupid be his boss? Albert would never understand the way companies worked. It was like they promoted the people who couldn’t do anything so they wouldn’t mess up the actual day-to-day business. It made little sense, but Albert was done trying to understand. He was going to do his own thing.

He wasn’t sure what to do yet, but he had a bunch of ideas. He wouldn’t start a brick and mortar store, too much money to get it up and running, but he might be able to manage an online business. Maybe. He’d think about it while he stood in line for a slice. Pizza was good for thinking. Then he’d probably wander around the city trying to think some more since his roommates made it near impossible to think at home. Home, he thought, disgusted. Albert had grown up watching movies where the hero always lived in New York City and had a magnificent apartment, and there were always clean streets and cabs were always available and easily afforded. The reality of coming to New York was that Albert lived in a fourth-floor walkup in a Haitian neighborhood in Queens. Everyone knew each other, and he and his roommates were the odd men out.

Albert grew up speaking Spanish to his grandmother and English everywhere else so it wasn’t that he didn’t understand that culturally the grandmothers sitting on the stoop were just chatting but it was strange to him that he couldn’t understand them. When he lived in New Mexico, his abuela and her friends would sit in the park and gossip all afternoon until it was time to go home and cook. But now that the chatter and easy camaraderie was in French and Creole and he couldn’t understand it, he felt even more alone than he had when he’d left Abuelita and New Mexico.

As Albert wandered around feeling sorry for himself, he found himself in different neighborhoods as he walked downtown. When he got to Wall Street, he finally descended the staircase to go home, catching the 3 train to Fulton Street and then the A train all the way to Howard Beach, almost falling asleep on the long ride home. He was slightly terrified about paying rent, having just quit his job, but he certainly would not miss this ride twice a day. As he emerged from aboveground, he heard the patois of French and Creole and English specific to this neighborhood and thought maybe he should learn French. Maybe he’d find a job close to home if he could at least speak French. That thought carried him across the street and down the blocks until he looked up and realized he was already home.

As he climbed the three flights to his apartment, he decided not to tell his roommates he had quit his job. He didn’t know them all that well, and he didn’t want them to look for a new roommate before he was ready to leave. That meant he wouldn’t be able to call Abuelita until he was alone in the apartment or went for a walk. He pulled out his Blackberry and realized he needed to plug it in before he tried either option, so as he entered the apartment he made straight for his bedroom to get the cord.

As he opened his door, he smiled. He had the brightly colored blankets his abuela had sent him and the beautiful art he’d picked up at street fairs around the city. It made it feel more like home. He kicked off his shoes and threw his hat on the dresser and his bag over the back of the chair at his desk. Albert ran his fingers through his hair, thought about taking a shower, and realized he should wait until later after his walk to talk to Abuelita privately. Instead, he sat down at his desk and booted up his computer. He had been thinking about going back to school, he’d majored in Math in his undergrad program, and he had been thinking that a graduate degree might give him more job options. He knew Abuelita could cosign any loans he needed; she had always been there for him like that. Albert knew part of his resentment with the job he had just left was that he wasn’t making enough to put any money aside to go home to see her and while she’d offered to pay for the trip, he didn’t want to take anything else from her. She’d helped him with the deposit for this place, and he had no idea how long it would take him to pay her back.

In frustration, he turned to the computer and joined the chat room he’d been active in lately. It was for math geeks who enjoyed solving complex proof of work problems with hexadecimal numbers just for fun. He had never known why, but his brain just looked at complex problems and saw solutions. Not that it was easy, that’s what kept him coming back though. He loved a challenge.

Speaking of which, he saw his quasi-nemesis StarChild was online. StarChild was an astronomy student at CalTech whose undergrad had been Math like him, but whose grad work was in Physics and who was now working on astronomy for their PhD focusing on the computations necessary to explore space and time in a way Albert didn’t understand. He hated that, so he’d gone to the library to get some books on the things StarChild wrote about, and he was slogging through them. In the short term, it was honing his mathematical skills and making him better at solving the proof of work problems in the group. After an hour of chatting with the group and some computational work, Albert had cooled off, both physically and emotionally, and decided to put off calling Abuelita until he had some idea of what to do next. On impulse, he private messaged StarChild and asked them about what they thought about grad schools and what the experience had been like. He regretted it almost as soon as he’d sent it, but he didn’t know anyone who had gone to grad school in real life. Almost all of his friends in New Mexico had left high school and gone into local jobs, a few had opened businesses, but none had gone further than an undergrad degree. One of them had told Albert once that they were just more pragmatic than Albert was. He’d taken exception, but they hadn’t exactly been wrong either. Albert was always dreaming of the next big thing. He always wanted more and felt it was within his reach. As he powered down his computer, he decided there had to be something within his reach, he just couldn’t see it yet.

After a couple of days checking out grad schools and dodging his roommates, Albert was back in the chat room when StarChild signed in. He had assumed they hadn’t replied because they thought it was stupid of him to ask, but almost as soon as they signed in, the message window pinged and StarChild was privately messaging him. He was surprised but pleased. The opportunity to talk to someone like StarChild didn’t come along every day. He asked questions about grad school, asked about living in California, and after he had asked everything he could think of, he was feeling bold and asked StarChild if they’d give him their real name. He hastily typed that if it wasn’t ok, they should totally just say so. The cursor just sat there, blinking… Then a line of text appeared and Albert couldn’t believe it when he read, “My name is Sakura.” Wasn’t Sakura a woman’s name? He quickly looked it up and found out it meant ‘cherry blossoms’ and was definitely a female name. He was a little surprised at himself for being surprised. His abuela had raised him to believe women could do anything men could do, and she was quite the example, so he’d never considered himself a misogynist, but he was genuinely surprised to find that Sakura was the person behind the screen name StarChild. He still hadn’t typed anything, so on impulse he replied with “Cool, I’m Albert.” The screen sat there blank for so long that Albert thought maybe StarChild, Sakura, hadn’t wanted to have him reply and maybe he should have left well enough alone. Then the next message appeared, “Cool, nice to meet you. Gotta go, it’s my time to be in the computer lab.” and then StarChild’s name disappeared off the list of people in the room. Albert signed off too, needing to think about all the things Sakura had told him about grad school and living in California.

Over the next week he chatted with Sakura several times, each time realizing she had to be one of the brightest people he’d ever known when she presented a solution he hadn’t considered, or suggested ways to find work, or even just talked about her interest in astronomy. He also applied to graduate school at MIT, Harvard, Princeton and Perdue, deciding he wanted to go into a computational science and engineering program. He also decided that if he had to live somewhere for a couple years, he could handle Boston, living in New Jersey would allow him to stay connected to his new home away from home in New York, and Houston would at least feel a little like home. Maybe. He was still iffy on Perdue. He really wanted to stay in the Northeast and experience life here for a while. If he could get the Financial Aid he needed. He and Sakura worked out elaborate budgets and equations that would allow him to live on less and almost make a game out of it. Albert now looked forward to chatting with Sakura when they were both online. To be honest, he was online a little bit more than he needed to be to catch her online when he could.

When he took the GRE and scored exceptionally well, he knew it was a good sign. Admissions deadlines were already here, so he filled everything out and sent it in and then crossed his fingers. When he heard back from all four that they wanted to interview him, he was ecstatic. Then he read the letters more carefully, they were all offering to enroll him in the Winter term. He felt a sick roiling in the pit of his stomach. He was at the end of his savings and, while he had found a job that let him pay his bills, it barely covered them. Now that he was out of cash, he’d have to choose between lunch and subway fare most days. He had already switched rooms when another roommate moved out because the room was smaller, so it cost less. He’d sold his computer games and pawned a guitar he’d picked up when he moved to the city. The only other thing he had of value was his computer, but without it he wouldn’t be able to connect with his network. He stopped his thoughts and corrected himself. He wouldn’t be able to chat with Sakura. That was what really kept him from selling it. She was the most fascinating person he’d ever met, and he couldn’t stand the idea of letting go of that connection.

They had been working on a project that he’d been thinking about because of the work they’d done budgeting his non-existent money and wondered if he could make something out of his search to find money where none really existed. Currency, he corrected himself. Currency was what they spent now. Since the United States had gone off the gold standard, the dollar was no longer money, but rather cotton rag paper that people agreed had value. He found the distinction interesting, wondering if there would be something to replace the dollar someday, or whether the currency of another country would become the world’s standard. He’d been doing research into community currency ever since he’d seen someone spending what looked like Monopoly money at a local coffee shop and found out it was a way of keeping money circulating within a community. The idea intrigued him. If communities or regions could create their own local currency, why couldn’t there be a technology based currency? It would allow citizens of the internet to spend their money in a different way, unbound by exchange rates and VAT taxes and the like.

He had brought the idea up to Sakura and, in her own thorough way, she’d examined the idea for flaws. She questioned how it would be maintained because if it was banked in one country, it would essentially belong to that country. So they created a mathematical way to hold the transfer and exchange of their invented currency in blocks that would link together to form a transaction list that would be locked and remain completely transparent but would also not belong to any single country. Then they figured out how each person could save their digital currency to a wallet that could be safely saved online. They were chatting one night when Albert asked her why their theoretical ideas couldn’t be put into actual practice. Sakura sent back a long line of ‘ha ha ha’s’ and Albert was a little crushed. He knew he was her mathematical equal, but he sometimes felt stupid because he hadn’t been to school as long as she had. Albert had looked her up after she’d given him her name and there was only one woman with that name in the PhD program at CalTech so he’d looked at her CV and couldn’t believe some of the papers she’d authored and some of the events at which she’d presented her work. He wasn’t exactly intimidated, but it was something close to it. So instead of pushing for the viability of their project, he let it lie. For now. Only for now, he promised himself. For now, he would focus on grad school.

Albert selected MIT, because they were MIT after all, and they also gave him a good loan package. He also applied for, and received, a couple of scholarships that helped round out his ‘income’ while he was in school. He would come out with debt at the end, but he’d also come out qualified to work in fields where he would never again have a boss who couldn’t understand what Albert was talking about. That was worth a lot to him. When he signed up for classes, he added an elective on monetary systems on a whim. He decided that even if it was just for fun, it would give him a better understanding of the world.

He and Sakura chatted regularly, and one night she brought up the currency they had been discussing over the Fall while he’d been waiting for school to start. She suggested a way to make it more stable. Instead of having it come from one country, the new currency could be online only, run through computers. Albert thought about it and realized that if they could actually find a way to get people to agree there was value to the currency, they could completely turn banking upside down. They started working on a way to maintain their online transactions, deciding that even if it was just the two of them that used it, they had to set it up correctly. They worked on it in their spare time, establishing a system which would support money lending and borrowing but also money storage. The first storage space they created, they named Genesis for the beginning of everything. It was a little tongue in cheek since neither of them was overly religious but Albert figured it would be nice to make some part of this with Abuelita in mind and her favorite part of the Bible was Genesis so they agreed and the first storage spot was named. They quickly did the math and immediately decided every other storage space would have to be numbered or nobody would be able to track the ever-increasing storage spaces. As they continued, they created a framework that would support a decentralized banking system and they got more and more excited. They had started it on a whim, and now it was actually coming together.

After many long months of working on it, taking breaks around Sakura’s dissertation work and Albert’s exams, they had solved almost every problem. Except that they weren’t sure how to get people to agree that it had value. If the public found out it was created by a couple of twenty-somethings on a whim, it would be dead and buried before it even proved itself. Albert considered the options, giving it to someone respected by the financial community and hope they saw the genius in the idea like they did, giving it to someone who wasn’t in the financial field but had a lot of influence, or creating an identity with which to introduce it and be the main ‘person’ connected with it.

Albert liked the last idea because he knew that he and Sakura had the knowledge to take their system online and launch it and he believed they were the best suited to do the work but he also believed there would be benefits and he wanted those for Sakura and himself. As they worked through the next fall they got closer and closer, figuring out how to store blocks of information and string them together like a ledger, making the system fraud proof and also completely transparent. They both thought those things were missing from the current banking system and wanted to cement them into this alternative way of exchanging money. They used strong cryptography to secure the blocks of data and string them together in a kind of chain of information, like pages in this ledger they had started imagining for their new cryptography protected currency trail.

When they both went home for Christmas break, they decided to try a test and Albert sent ten coins, they had decided to call them that because every country had coins so it didn’t seem quite so foreign, to Sakura in California. In code, it looked like she had received them and the data was stored on their Genesis block. Albert sat there, stunned. He’d just sent ten coins to Sakura in California. Albert had the trail to prove it. He quickly messaged her, asking if she’d gotten them in her wallet. She had. They both just sat there, dumbfounded, for a few minutes. It worked. It really worked! Neither one of them could believe it. They knew the math was solid; they knew the cryptography was strong, and they knew the premise was one that should work, but to see it actually work was incredible.

When they got back to school in January, they decided they needed to create a single persona for their invention. Sakura picked a family name, Satoshi, and Albert decided to use the N from Abuelita’s last name, Nunez, but to make it a Japanese name to match Sakura’s choice. After looking through common surnames, he decided Nakamoto was the perfect fit. And so they became a single entity, Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi wrote a paper on the cryptocurrency, created chats, and generally pushed the idea out into the world for the next six months.

They also decided to open it up to other people, seeing an influx of people like themselves who thrived on the challenge of hunting down a hexadecimal hash that would allow them to unlock their chance to be the ledger keeper for the current block of data. As the months went on, there was a sort of slang developed where the coins became bitcoins and the act of solving for the hexadecimal hash was called mining and blocks going in order were called blockchains. As Albert and Sakura chatted with other mathematicians and got feedback, they decided they had found something that would outlast either of them. But Albert was finishing his graduate program and Sakura was finishing her thesis, and it was time for them to move into new jobs and new parts of their lives. Still, they couldn’t imagine shutting down their cryptocurrency experiment.

As they discussed it, they decided to set up more rules around what could and could not happen and give it an endpoint, but also create a structure for the bitcoin owners to have a voice in how things were run after they bowed out. After all, with a million bitcoins between them, what else was there for them to do? No, they decided, it was better to leave it to grow on its own. And so, on a sunny day in 2010, they agreed today was the day, and they left their creation behind.

They still keep in touch, and they both know if they wanted to they could go back and reintroduce Satoshi Nakamoto and get back into things but they both know it would be the end of their anonymity because the internet’s ability to track things down had changed considerably since they had invented their pseudonym. Since both had successful careers doing work they enjoyed, it wasn’t an issue to leave the bitcoins in the wallet, even though they were now worth over 35 billion dollars. For some people that would have been too strong a temptation, but for Albert and Sakura it was simply common sense. They both had lives they enjoyed, jobs they loved and family they wanted to keep out of the limelight. Someday, maybe, when all 21million coins had been found, they might step out of the shadows to revisit their creation. But for now they just laughed with each other at the suppositions and guesses of pundits and financial wizards and computer gurus who weren’t even close to figuring out the entire story.

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~Jennifer