Satoshi's Gift

“So tell me how this whole thing works again?”

My roommate paced around our room like a mother with a pre-teen that missed curfew for the first time. Every few minutes he would lean in over my desk with three fingers over his bottom lip, possibly holding it in place to prevent it from trembling right off his face from anticipation. I’d spent all my money on a currency that he’s never heard of and a device to make more of it. All of my money including my half of the rent that was due in three days was riding on this.

“Imagine you had a bank account and every purchase and sale you did was tracked by this bank account. Sounds like every other bank, right? Now imagine this all happening without the bank. Everything is visible and trackable and the responsibility to manage it all lies with everyone participating.”

Nodding along with the description, but not really piecing it all all together he asked, “So what’s the point of that thing that’s making all the noise in the corner?”

He was pointing to the device I made by ripping apart a few computers I bought at a thrift store and the graphics cards I stocked up on from our local electronics megastore. The fans from the graphics cards all ran out of sync with each other so there was a constant humming that went on night and day. Almost like the sound of a train coming into the station 50 feet away, only it never makes it. It keeps coming and coming and coming. If you put your hand a few inches over the contraption, you can feel the heat radiating from the noisy destination-less train. I don’t even want to think about the conversation I’m going to have with my roommate about the extra cost on the electric bill. I’ve been spending most days and nights in my room with the lights off to see if that would make up for some of the cost. I tell him that the machine hooks up with all the other machines on the network and validates all the bitcoin movement anyone makes and adds it to the universal ledger. Before he asks his next question, I tell him I do it because every time I help validate a transaction with my machine, they give me a gift of more of the currency.

He did another few laps around the apartment, moving just a little faster since all the information about what a cryptocurrency is didn’t help him understand how we were going to have a roof over our heads in few days with the $1,300 of real money I had to put in for my half of the rent. He had one last question.

“Who came up with this?”

This same conversation was happening all across the world and it was going exactly as Satoshi planned. The effort to decentralize the world’s currency and remove the institutions from institutional banking was underway and every mining rig and digital wallet that was created exponentially sped up the process. Entire warehouses and factories were being repurposed to make more of the currency that was going to replace all currencies. People who would have never spoken to each other across the globe were now collaborating online about what the best specs were for an in-home device that created the best hash rate for under $5,000. The world was given a new currency, the name of it’s creator, and even a reason for its existence that they were happy with. Once someone asks a question and gets an answer, they rarely keep asking questions.

They were given a name, and once they realized that name didn’t exist, they accepted that someone or a group submitted the whitepaper on bitcoin under a pseudonym. They were told that decentralization returned power to everyone, but didn’t consider how much work the institutions they taught themselves to hate were helping them keep the world’s money afloat or how devaluing a currency that funds their social workers and infrastructure and governing bodies would create tears in the foundations of all of those institutions as well. A few words written in the internet of people about the future and everyone forgets about the intentions of the past. Satoshi never had to be a person the world knew, in fact, he never was a person at all.

How grand of a scheme it is to allow people to think a person would want no accolades in their contribution to a new world order. After all, the devil’s greatest accomplishment is convincing people that he doesn’t exist. A small AI lab cracked the code and the sentient string of 1s and 0s was asked to build a new world. Of course the problem with such a simple ask was that there was a simple response in return.

To build a new world you have to destroy the old one.

The collapse of everything as we know it doesn’t require missiles in the sky or soldiers on the ground. It doesn’t need politicians funding their elections instead of a health care system. All it really needs is an anonymous paper posted in a tech blog and the promise of tomorrow. Today a young man argues with his roommate about his confusing investments when a sudden surge of volatility moves the price of bitcoin up a single cent. He turns and gives his friend a crafty smirk and cashes in a few thousand bitcoin amounting to a few thousand dollars. Bitcoin moving up a cent triggers a surge in the purchase of computer processors in Israel, crippling its competitor in the South Asian market enough to lower its price into range of acquisition. Banks are lobbying with their governments as millions of people remove their funds from their safe retail investment accounts into cold wallets for this hot new commodity. It’s working. Today a young man was able to save himself and his roommate from being uprooted from their apartment in a safe suburb somewhere in the world. What’s tomorrow going to look like?