DEDICATION FOR MY MOM AND DAD CONTENTS Dedication Introduction Part: One Chapter 1: January 10, 2009 Chapter 2: 1997 Chapter 3: May 2009 Chapter 4: April 2010 Chapter 5: July 12, 2010 Chapter 6: September 2010 Chapter 7: March 16, 2011 Chapter 8: June 19, 2011 Chapter 9: July 2011 Chapter 10: September 2011 Chapter 11: November 2011 Part: Two Chapter 12: February 2012 Chapter 13: May 2012 Chapter 14: August 2012 Chapter 15: October 2012 Chapter 16: December 2012 Chapter 17: January 2013 Chapter 18: February 2013 Chapter 19: March 2013 Chapter 20: March 2013 Chapter 21: April 11, 2013 Chapter 22: June 2013 Part: Three Chapter 23: August 2013 Chapter 24: September 30, 2013 Chapter 25: October 2013 Chapter 26: November 18, 2013 Chapter 27: December 7, 2013 Chapter 28: January 20, 2014 Chapter 29: February 2014 Chapter 30: March 6, 2014 Chapter 31: March 21, 2014 Epilogue Technical Appendix Acknowledgments Sources Index About the Author Praise Copyright About the Publisher INTRODUCTION It was after midnight and many of the guests had already gone to bed, leaving behind their amber-tailed tumblers of high-end whiskey The poker dealer who had been hired for the occasion from a local casino had left a half hour earlier, but the remaining players had convinced her to leave the table and cards so that they could keep playing The group still hovering over the felt and chips was dwarfed by the vaulted, wood-timbered ceiling, three stories up The large wall of windows on the far side of the table looked out onto a long dock, bobbing on the shimmering surface of Lake Tahoe Sitting at one end of the table, with his back to the lake, twenty-nine-yearold Erik Voorhees didn’t look like someone who three years earlier had been unemployed, mired in credit card debt, and doing odd jobs to pay for an apartment in New Hampshire Tonight Erik fitted right in with his suede oxfords and tailored jeans and he bantered easily with the hedge fund manager sitting next to him His hairline was already receding, but he still had a distinct, fresh-faced youthfulness to him Showing his boyish dimples, Erik joked about his poor performance at their poker game the night before, and called it a part of his “long game.” “I was setting myself up for tonight,” he said with a broad toothy smile, before pushing a pile of chips into the middle of the table Erik could afford to sustain the losses He’d recently sold a gambling website that was powered by the enigmatic digital money and payment network known as Bitcoin He’d purchased the gambling site back in 2012 for about $225, rebranded it as SatoshiDice, and sold it a year later for some $11 million He was also sitting on a stash of Bitcoins that he’d begun acquiring a few years earlier when each Bitcoin was valued at just a few dollars A Bitcoin was now worth around $500, sending his holdings into the millions Initially snubbed by investors and serious business folk, Erik was now attracting a lot of high-powered interest He had been invited to Lake Tahoe by the hedge fund manager sitting next to him at the poker table, Dan Morehead, who had wanted to pick the brains of those who had already struck it rich in the Bitcoin gold rush For Voorhees, like many of the other men at Morehead’s house, the impulse that had propelled him into this gold rush had both everything and nothing to with getting rich Soon after he first learned about the technology from a Facebook post, Erik predicted that the value of every Bitcoin would grow astronomically But this growth, he had long believed, would be a consequence of the multilayered Bitcoin computer code remaking many of the prevailing power structures of the world, including Wall Street banks and national governments—doing to money what the Internet had done to the postal service and the media industry As Erik saw it, Bitcoin’s growth wouldn’t just make him wealthy It would also lead to a more just and peaceful world in which governments wouldn’t be able to pay for wars and individuals would have control over their own money and their own destiny It was not surprising that Erik, with ambitions like these, had a turbulent journey since his days of unemployment in New Hampshire After moving to New York, he had helped convince the Winklevoss twins, Tyler and Cameron, of Facebook fame, to put almost a million dollars into a startup he helped create, called BitInstant But that relationship ended with a knockdown, drag-out fight, after which Erik resigned from the company and moved to Panama with his girlfriend More recently, Erik had been spending many of his days in his office in Panama, dealing with investigators from the US Securities and Exchange Commission—one of the top financial regulatory agencies—who were questioning a deal in which he’d sold stock in one of his startups for Bitcoins The stock had ended up providing his investors with big returns And the regulators, by Erik’s assessment, didn’t seem to even understand the technology But they were right that he had not registered his shares with regulators The investigation, in any case, was better than the situation facing one of Erik’s former partners from BitInstant, who had been arrested two months earlier, in January 2014, on charges related to money laundering Erik, by now, was not easily rattled It helped that, unlike many passionate partisans, he had a sense of humor about himself and the quixotic movement he had found himself at the middle of “I try to remind myself that Bitcoin will probably collapse,” he said “As bullish as I am on it, I try to check myself and remind myself that new innovative things usually fail Just as a sanity check.” But he kept going, and not just because of the money that had piled up in his bank account It was also because of the new money that he and the other men in Lake Tahoe were helping to bring into existence—a new kind of money that he believed would change the world THE BITCOIN CONCEPT first came onto the scene in more modest circumstances, five years earlier, when it was posted to an obscure mailing list by a shadowy author going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto From the beginning, Satoshi envisioned a digital analog to old-fashioned gold: a new kind of universal money that could be owned by everyone and spent anywhere Like gold, these new digital coins were worth only what someone was willing to pay for them—initially nothing But the system was set up so that, like gold, Bitcoins would always be scarce—only 21 million of them would ever be released—and hard to counterfeit As with gold, it required work to release new ones from their source, computational work in the case of Bitcoins Bitcoin also held certain obvious advantages over gold as a new place to store value It didn’t take a ship to move Bitcoins from London to New York —it took just a private digital key and the click of a mouse For security, Satoshi relied on uncrackable mathematical formulas rather than armed guards But the comparison to gold went only so far in explaining why Bitcoin ended up attracting such attention Each ingot of gold has always existed independent of every other ingot Bitcoins, on the other hand, were designed to live within a cleverly constructed, decentralized network, just as all the websites in the world exist only within the decentralized network known as the Internet Like the Internet, the Bitcoin network wasn’t run by some central authority Instead it was built and sustained by all the people who hooked their computers into it, which anyone in the world could With the Internet, what connected everyone together was a set of software rules, known as the Internet protocol, which governed how information moved around Bitcoin had its own software protocol—the rules that dictated how the system worked The technical details of how all this worked could be mind-numbingly complicated—involving advanced math and cryptography But from its earliest days, a small group of dedicated followers saw that at its base, Bitcoin was, very simply, a new way of creating, holding, and sending money Bitcoins were not like dollars and euros, which are created by central banks and held and transferred by big, powerful financial institutions This was a currency created and sustained by its users, with new money slowly distributed to the people who helped support the network Given that it aimed to challenge some of the most powerful institutions in our society, the Bitcoin network was, from early on, described by its followers in utopian terms Just as the Internet took power from big media organizations and put it in the hands of bloggers and dissidents, Bitcoin held out the promise of taking power from banks and governments and giving it to the people using the money This was all rather high-minded stuff and it attracted plenty of derision— most ordinary folks imagined it falling somewhere on the spectrum between Tamagotchi pet and Ponzi scheme, when they heard about it at all But Bitcoin had the good fortune of entering the world at a utopian moment, in the wake of a financial crisis that had exposed many of the shortcomings of our existing financial and political system, creating a desire for alternatives The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and WikiLeaks—among others—had divergent goals, but they were united in their desire to take power back from the privileged elite and give it to individuals Bitcoin provided an apparent technological solution to these desires The degree to which Bitcoin spoke to its followers was apparent from the variety of people who left their old lives behind to chase the promise of this technology— aficionados like Erik Voorhees and many of his new friends It didn’t hurt that if Bitcoin worked, it would make the early users fabulously wealthy As Erik liked to say, “It’s the first thing I know where you can both get rich and change the world.” Given the opportunity to make money, Bitcoin was not only attracting disaffected revolutionaries Erik’s host, Dan Morehead, had gone to Princeton and worked at Goldman Sachs before starting his own hedge fund Morehead was a leading figure among the moneyed interests who had recently been pumping tens of millions of dollars into the Bitcoin ecosystem, hoping for big returns In Silicon Valley, investors and entrepreneurs were clamoring to find ways to use Bitcoin to improve on existing payment systems like PayPal, Visa, and Western Union and to steal Wall Street’s business Even people who had little sympathy for Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party could understand the benefits of a more universal money that doesn’t have to be exchanged at every border; the advantages of a digital payment method that doesn’t require you to hand over your identifying information each time you use it; the fairness of a currency that even the poorest people in the world can keep in a digital account without paying hefty fees, rather than relying only on cash; and the convenience of a payment system that makes it possible for online services to charge a penny or a dime—to view a single news article or skip an ad—skirting the current limits imposed by the 20- or 30-cent minimum charge for a credit card transaction In the end, though, many of the people interested in more practical applications of Bitcoin still ended up talking about the technology in revolutionary terms: as an opportunity to make money by disrupting the existing status quo At the dinner a few hours before the late-night poker game, Morehead had joked about the fact that, at the time, all the Bitcoins in the world were worth about the same amount as the company Urban Outfitters, the purveyor of ripped jeans and dorm room decorations—around $5 billion “That’s just pretty wild, right?” Morehead said “I think when they dig up our society, all Planet of Apes–style, in a couple of centuries, Bitcoin is probably going to have had a greater impact on the world than Urban Outfitters We’re still in early days.” Many bankers, economists, and government officials dismissed the Bitcoin fanatics as naive promoters of a speculative frenzy not unlike the Dutch tulip mania four centuries earlier On several occasions, the Bitcoin story bore out the warnings of the critics, illustrating the dangers involved in moving toward a more digitized world with no central authority Just a few weeks before Morehead’s gathering, the largest Bitcoin company in the world, the exchange known as Mt Gox, announced that it had lost the equivalent of about $400 million worth of its users’ Bitcoins and was going out of business—the latest of many such scandals to hit Bitcoin users But none of the crises managed to destroy the enthusiasm of the Bitcoin believers, and the number of users kept growing through thick and thin At Pantera Capital, 217, 343 Patagon, 162 Paul, Ron, 110–111 PayPal about founding, 185–187, 291–292 acceptance of Bitcoin, xii, 261–262 Bitcoin support from, 129, 158–159, 184–185, 192, 349 buying/selling Bitcoin through, 38, 52–54, 110 ransom demands and criminal use, 347–348 restrictions by Argentina, 159–161 shutting down Mt Gox account, 64 WikiLeaks blockade, 57 Paysius, 174 PC World, 57 People’s Bank of China, 273–275 Pidgin (chat service), 246 Pirate Party, 35, 333 Ponzi scheme, Bitcoin as, 220 pornography, 72, 112, 117, 126, 234 Powell, Jesse, 94–96, 103, 105, 127–128, 139, 252, 315, 337 Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), 10, 13 proof-of-work, 18–19 P2P Foundation, 30, 323–324 public-key cryptography, 9–10, 141, 185–186, 238, 248, 281, 320, 330 Q coin (Chinese virtual currency), 257, 260–261, 268 ransom demands/payments, 82, 150, 347–348 Reeves, Ben, 237–239 reusable proofs of work (RPOWs), 18–19 Reuters, 211 Ribbit Capital See Malka, Micky Ripple, 187, 325 redandwhite (screen name), 225–226, 245 Russia, 54, 135–136, 197 Sacks, David, 192 Salmon, Felix, 210–211 SatoshiDice (gambling site), viii, 136, 193, 224, 338 Satoshi Ltd., 174 Satoshi Nakamoto creation and promotion of “e-cash,” 5, 20–22 disappearance/search for, xiv, 60–62, 80–81, 141 participation in forums, 55–56, 58–59 unearthing identity, 319–324, 339–340 Schumer, Charles, 84, 269 SecondMarket See Barry Silbert Shared Coin, 270 Shasky Calvery, Jennifer, 235, 266 Shrem, Charlie See also BitInstant arrest by federal agents, 298–300 background and founding of BitInstant, 128–130 lack of management skill, 220–224 marginalization in Bitcoin future, 331–334 vacating Bitcoin Foundation seat, 345 Silbert, Barry, 143–144, 147–149, 217–218, 300, 303–304, 314, 325–326 Silicon Valley Bank, 203–204, 305–306 Silk Road additional resources, 368n BitInstant transactions, 129–130 creation and business concept, 69–73 as fringe group experiment, 335 government investigation, 84–85, 121, 169–171, 213, 227–229, 298–300 growth and success, 115–121, 137–138, 167–168 growth in membership, 75–77, 82–84 hacker penetration, 169, 225–226 seizure by FBI, 245–253 Silk Road 2.0, 269–270 Sirius-M (screen name) See Malmi, Martti Slashdot, 47–51, 53, 58 Snoop Dogg (rapper), 297 Snowden, Edward, 271 The Social Network (movie), 145 Songhurst, Charlie, 184, 292 Spain, 330 Spitzer, Elliot, 186 SpongeBob SquarePants stickers, 39, 69 Srinivasan, Balaji, 191–192, 294–295, 329 scout (screen name), 169, 246 silkroad (screen name), 73, 118 See also Ulbricht, Ross Stephenson, Neal, 19, 252 Summer Olympics (Beijing, 2008), 145 SVBitcoin (email list), 204 Swap Variety Shop, 39 Szabo, Nick, 18–19, 338–341, 351 Taaki, Amir, 57–58 Tanona, Bill, 165, 180 Target Corporation, data breach, 288–289 taxes/taxation, 13, 126–127, 168, 219–220, 239–241, 287 Tea Party movement, xi–xii TechCrunch, 214 Tencent (Chinese Internet company), 261, 284–285 Texas Bitcoin Association, 331–334 Thiel, Peter, 185–187, 192, 211, 291 Tibanne (cat), 66, 140, 200, 312 Tibanne Ltd., 68 Time (magazine), 79–80 Tor (software/network), 71–73, 120, 245, 369n Transaction malleability, 309–310 Trickster (screen name) See Malmi, Martti 21e6 (mining company), 191–192, 294–295, 329 Two Bit Idiot (blogger), 315 Ukraine, 329–330 Ulbricht, Lyn, 331–332 Ulbricht, Ross See also Silk Road about creation of Silk Road, 69–73 arrest by federal agents, 246–251 fundraising for legal defense, 331–332 murder-for-hire accusations, 225–226, 332 plans to go off-the-grid, 226–229 Underground Brokers (renamed Silk Road), 70 See also Silk Road U.S Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 78, 81, 86–87 U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 121, 247 U.S Department of Justice (DOJ), 186, 234, 266–267 U.S Department of the Treasury See Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit [FinCen] U.S Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), 298 U.S Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137–138, 227–228, 245, 247–251 U.S Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 114 U.S Federal Reserve about role as U.S central bank, 17, 23 assessment of Bitcoin, 266–267, 289, 328 function of gold standard, 31 monetary policy, 80, 110–111 technology, adaptation to, 132–133 2008 big bank bailout, 32, 286 U.S Government See Government regulation/investigation U.S Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 248 See also Taxes/taxation U.S Marshals Service, 353 U.S National Security Agency (NSA), 271, 342 U.S Secret Service (USSS), 17, 266–267 U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), ix, 224, 338 Variety Jones [vj] (screen name), 118–119, 228 Vaurum (Bitcoin company), 340–341 Vavilov, Val, 330 Ver, Roger See also Memory Dealers background and intro to Bitcoin, 77–80 as Bitcoin spokesman, 214 dealing with ransom demands, 348 investment in BitInstant, 128–131, 175 investment in Blockchain.info, 237–239, 252 meeting Erik Voorhees, 107–110 NYC Bitcoin Expo 2011, 103–105 promotion of Bitcoin, 127–128, 294 background and intro to Bitcoin (cont.) reaction to Mt Gox collapse, 311, 314 relocation to Japan, 125–126 renouncing U.S citizenship, 126, 169, 234, 330, 338 responding to Mt Gox hack, 92–96, 308 size of Bitcoin holdings, 287 2013 Argentina, Bitcoin meeting, 277 Vessenes, Peter, 138, 144, 200, 213, 233 Virtual money See Digital currency Voorhees, Erik introduction to Bitcoin, 107–110 early vision/prediction about value, vii–ix, xi–xiii gathering for Lake Tahoe poker game, vii–viii joining BitInstant, 130–132, 135–137 sale of SatoshiDice, viii, xv, 224 van Der Laan, Wladimir, 348 Wagner, Bruce, 102–104, 128 Walker, Paul, 325–326 Washington Post, 267 Wells Fargo Bank, 202, 219, 272–273, 287–288, 302 WikiLeaks, xi, 56–58, 66–67, 80 Wikipedia, 4, 45 Williams, Tom (possible pseudonym), 98 Wilson, Fred, 154, 182, 212, 300–301, 305 Winklevoss Capital, 149 Winklevoss, Tyler and Cameron backing BitInstant startup, ix, 144–149, 173–177, 201–202, 220–223, 297 buying/selling Bitcoin, 180, 196, 250–251 investment in Bitcoin, 211–215 loan to Mt Gox, 205 Mt Gox collapse, 312–314 regulatory filing for COIN, 353 testifying at government hearing, 300–302 Woo, David, 272 Woodside Bakery and Cafe, 291–293 World War II, 31 Wuille, Pieter, 348 Xapo, 281–282, 292–296, 305–306, 349–351, 353 See also Wences Casares Yang Linke, 255–256, 258, 260 Yoda (computer chip), 329 Zimmerman, Phil, 10 Zuckerberg, Mark, 145, 176, 221, 291 ABOUT THE AUTHOR NATHANIEL POPPER is a reporter at the New York Times, where he has covered the intersections between finance and technology Before joining the Times, he worked at the Los Angeles Times and Forward Popper grew up in Pittsburgh and graduated from Harvard College He lives in Brooklyn with his family Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com PRAISE FOR DIGITAL GOLD Short–listed for the 2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year “Necessary reading.” —Bethany McLean, New York Times Book Review “Digital Gold is as strong a narrative achievement as a reporting one.” —Chris Wilson, Bookforum “A vivid guide to the characters who met online and built bitcoin.” —John Gapper, Financial Times “Bitcoin may be inherently speculative, but Digital Gold is a sound investment.” —Edward Chancellor, Reuters “So, yes, it’s a totally awesome book” —Justin Fox, Bloomberg View “It’s a tale told quickly and well.” —John Biggs, TechCrunch “An impressive accomplishment.” —Tim Fernholz, Quartz “A family saga structured like a tech thriller.” —John Naughton, The Guardian “Nathaniel Popper’s new book, Digital Gold, is as close as you can get to being the definitive account of the history of Bitcoin.” —Felix Salmon, Fusion “An engrossing look at a system creatively designed to bring money into the twenty-first century.” —Library Journal “An amazing story Bitcoin is about to transform both finance and how we use the Internet, and this fascinating book chronicles its unlikely genesis Popper has produced a riveting tale filled with colorful innovators that is crucial reading for anyone who wants to understand the future.” —Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators “Bitcoin may be a product of computer science, but it is a very human story This highly entertaining history reminds us yet again that truth can be stranger than fiction and can be peopled with even more unusual and compelling characters.” —Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury “This excellent work is the book on Bitcoin you’ve been waiting for” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “An elegant, thrilling tour de force Nathaniel Popper gives us a front-row seat on the origins of Bitcoin and its captivating cast of characters The fastpaced action never stops.” —William D Cohan, author of House of Cards “Finally, the book so many of us have been waiting for: A riveting and smart account of the strange history of Bitcoin You’ll start knowing nothing about Bitcoin and finish with deep knowledge, but you won’t realize you’re learning along the way you’ll just think it’s a lot of fun.” —Adam Davidson, cofounder of NPR’s Planet Money “An engrossing introduction to one of the most transformative innovations in finance of the last few decades Digital Gold paints a vivid portrait of the economics and technology of Bitcoin as well as the people behind it.” —Susan Athey, the Economics of Technology Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and winner of the John Bates Clark Medal in Economics “The most compelling and in-depth investigation into the world of Bitcoin and digital currency Nathaniel Popper charts Bitcoin’s fascinating transformation from fringe oddity to a truly global currency If you want to understand the future of money, read this book.” —Joshua Davis, author of Spare Parts COPYRIGHT A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2015 by HarperCollins Publishers Copyright © 2015 by Nathaniel Popper All rights reserved under International and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books DIGITAL GOLD FIRST HARPER PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2016 ISBN 978-0-06-236250-6 (pbk.) EPub Edition May 2016 ISBN 9780062572066 (reissued) 16 17 18 19 20 OV/RRD 10 ABOUT THE PUBLISHER Australia HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Ltd Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia www.harpercollins.com.au Canada HarperCollins Canada Bloor Street East - 20th Floor Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada www.harpercollins.ca New Zealand HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive Rosedale 0632 Auckland, New Zealand www.harpercollins.co.nz United Kingdom HarperCollins Publishers Ltd London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF, UK www.harpercollins.co.uk United States HarperCollins Publishers Inc 195 Broadway New York, NY 10007 www.harpercollins.com * For more detail on how this and other basic elements of how the Bitcoin network worked, see the Technical Appendix on page 357 * For more information on the mining process, see the Technical Appendix on page 357 * See the Technical Appendix on page 357 for more detail on how the mining process worked ... organizations and put it in the hands of bloggers and dissidents, Bitcoin held out the promise of taking power from banks and governments and giving it to the people using the money This was all rather... different version of the Bitcoin software it would essentially be ignored by the other computers and would no longer be part of the Bitcoin network To recap, the five basic steps of the Bitcoin process... world It was these people, in different places with different motivations, who had built Bitcoin and were continuing to so, and who are the subject of this story The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi, disappeared