On 2014-04-09, my anonymous feedback form was used to link to a “fanfic” on pastebin.com—a story of Satoshi creating the Genesis Block. (I am not sure if the protagonist is supposed to be me.) I felt it was good enough that it did not deserve to expire, and archive it here with some gentle annotation.
“Daddy!”
He imagined her mouth pressed against the tile floor and winced. The muffled voice had descended from the bathroom on the first floor, the source of the main vent stack, which parted the insulation between the floor joists above and descended into the cement floor below. She knew he could hear him through this rather disagreeable conduit, even over the persistent humming and clicking.
“Lunch is ready!”
The thuds of her bounding footsteps reverberated as they trailed off towards the dining room.
Returning his focus to the workstation in front of him, he distractedly lifted the teacup sitting to the left of the monitor to his lips, and taking a sip, quickly realized how cold it was. Setting it back down on the porcelain coaster with a grimace, he paused, eyeing it, before gently nudging it into alignment with the circular brown stain permanently embedded atop the University of Illinois logo.
The basement was only partially finished: tacky wood paneling lined all four exterior walls, yet there were no partition walls, other than a bump-out near the front of the house that enclosed a small, dismal, emergency-use bathroom. Next to the bathroom stood a dust-covered bar piled high with boxes and cruft, decades removed from any use for its intended purpose. Clearly the work of a former owner, performed piecemeal over months of nights and weekends, with the expected result: a half-finished, shoddy job, and surely a far cry from the original magnanimous vision.
It had been cold down here, too: though the boiler for the radiant heating system stood along the side wall, no radiators had been installed below grade. There was only the click of the boiler’s circuit, the whoosh of the flames, and the screech of the flue closing to keep him company, as the system percolated the heat up through the century-old piping, benefiting only the non-trollish family members upstairs.
But it hadn’t been so much as chilly down here for at least a year and a half—even now, in early January, what with all those little dynamos around. He swiveled in his chair to consider them. They had been good little troopers, overall.
A wide bookshelf, long disgorged of such diverse tomes as The Theory of Money and Credit, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and Critique of Pure Reason, overflowed now with spare power supplies, stacks of tiny silver hard disks, and a spaghetti bowl of yellow and blue Cat-5 patch cables—half of them neatly coiled and tied off, the other half dangling in loose curls halfway to the dusty floor.
To the side of the bookshelf, and across from his workstation table, another previous owner, prior even to the shoddy worker, had installed an N-gauge train set, taking up a good eight by sixteen chunk of floorspace. It wasn’t entirely enclosed, though: an ingress had been cut into it, so one could get right in the center and watch the trains travel their routes up close and personal. It was the sixties version of a man-cave: somewhere to get away, if only for a moment, from the persistent demands of family members above.
Of course all the good stuff that once existed on the miniature landscape, the stuff that wasn’t glued down, had been taken long ago, leaving the improbably diverse terrain - snow-capped mountain peaks (replete with required tunnel) descending into a small rural town bordered by rolling farmlands - utterly devoid of any engines or cars, though the various farmsteads, train stations, and gas stations remained.
It would almost be post-apocalyptic, if not for the few residents that remained: the paper boy holding aloft today’s edition, the businessman on the train platform (glancing at his watch for eternity), the farmer carrying pails of milk; the hitchhiker. They were the lucky ones - the ones just beyond the sweeping arc of pre-teen arm reach, who avoided being plucked from their glued-down bases, leaving only two gnarled spots of white plastic, or occasionally the stump of a leg.
Instead of a nuclear attack, however, it looked more like an alien invasion had taken over this miniature world. A dozen or so assorted species of netbook were strewn about the landscape, whether perched atop the mountain peaks, or wedged between rows of pines, or lounging beneath the single stoplight suspended over Main Street. Each had its black umbilical power cord and blue network cable trailing away, like other-worldly snakes, off-world and under the table, where a handful of surge-protected power strips had self-assembled, daisy-chaining themselves together to power the invading force.
These little guys were the source of the incessant clicking and humming, a white noise to which he had not only gotten used to over the previous eighteen months, but had come to require as a fundament of existence, such that a few months into the project he had installed a small fan in the master bedroom upstairs, lest he lay awake in the interminable silence.
The thermal result of all the clicking and humming, usually an unwelcome by-product needing abatement, was embraced, as they took the place of the absent radiators, converting the electricity that came in through the new 200-amp patch panel (for which he had to eBay some of his rarer bound tomes to swing, what with the permitting and all) into a voluminous heat which, though keeping that half of the basement at a toasty 78℉, still left his tea cold after an oblivious twenty minutes of debugging.
He rose from his stool with a creak (the stool, not the man, as he was not yet even fifty) and shuffled around the table. Entering the inlet, he was caught for a moment by the hypnotic twinkling of the rows of green lights on the steel-blue Linksys twenty-four-port Fast Ethernet switch. It was like gazing into fire; but the fire these lights represented would heat up another type of landscape, warming some, and burning others - if the embers could be fanned long enough to keep the spark alive until it took.
Regaining himself, he crouched low, if not with a creak then an audible groan, and kneeling on the hard floor, stretched forward to reach the strips, powering each master switch off in turn.
As the clicking stopped and the fans spun down (in addition to the lack of chargeable batteries in these barely functional netbooks, half the screens in the fleet were cracked, both byproducts of his frugal acquisition method via eBay), he was surprised that immediately upon rising the ambient temperature felt markedly cooler, now that his little companions were dead.
Each had, sticking out of its side like an awkward vestigial appendage, a thumb drive, again of various capacities and manufacturers: some brightly colored and adorned with advertising logos and neat little metal slide-away covers, pilfered from various vendor conference swag bags, while others sported translucent plastic neon covers without any adornment - the no-name bulk ones, most likely acquired from Black Friday sales at Fry’s.
He searched for the nicest one (the code contained within all of them was the same), an orange one with the metal slide cover, and pulling it out with a soft thwick, eyed it for a moment, before tossing it into the air and catching it. Closing his palm around it as if it were a talisman, he paused, as butterflies suddenly swelled in his abdomen. His fist began to shake, ever so slightly, and he gripped the thing tighter.
It has come too far now. It has a life of its own. It needs to be released. To be freed.
These are the things he said, fighting himself. It wasn’t his decision anymore. The thing worked, in this small world at least. It wanted to be free now; to live or die on its own merits.
Regardless, his feet stood firm, so he tried a different tack.
It’ll never work. It has no intrinsic value, there’s no way to bootstrap it. It violates all the laws of how money comes into being. It’s just an experiment, anyway, and it will fail like all the others before it. Digicash. Cybercash. E-Gold. Liberty Reserve. All roadkill on the highway to digital money. It’s really just an academic exercise, nothing more.
Deep down, he knew better, but saying these things got his feet moving.
Next to his main dev box stood a beast of a machine. It was an old rack-mount Compaq ProLiant ML370, picked up at a swap meet for $389.61$2502009, rails still attached. It was a pretty big deal back in the dot-com boom days, and the 7200 RPM SCSI drives it took were abundantly available second-hand. He had seven extras to start with, which he could hot-swap to keep the thing up for at least a year or more continuously, and the yellowed and aging APC UPS beneath the table, acquired via Craigslist, was also still good for a couple of hours if the local utility went belly-up, even if it was originally rated for eight.
An old Dymo label maker - the ones that actually press into the heavy plastic tape, deforming it white into the shape of the letters, was used to tag the beast of a machine. The newer label makers, the ones that thermally print black letters on a thin white tape, just didn’t have that same sense of gravitas. But this; this looked good. Set dead center, in all caps, the blue tape announced:
GENESIS
He had lifted the name from the Project Genesis in Wrath of Khan, a plot line regarding an experiment to terraform a barren waste of a planet into something akin to a paradise. It was a not-so-subtle hint at the grandiose goals of the project—and what that vision implied about the present state of affairs.
Of course you could also read into it the Biblical interpretation (released a few years before Wrath of Khan) which pretty much laid out how this whole ball of wax was willed into existence by the Creator from nothingness.
Either way you took it, it was pretty ballsy, and he knew it.
But he wasn’t feeling those same cojones now, as his unsteady hand flipped the tiny magical boom-stick across the backs of his fingers. Though repeating the mantra of guaranteed failure, his body betrayed this act of self-hypnosis, understanding clearly where this might all go.
That’s why the bootable OS on the stick, running Windows XP, was configured with a Tor connection in the first place. And why he published the whitepaper last Halloween under a pseudonym, through an anonymous German email service. If this actually worked, if it scaled properly, if - in his endless nights and weekends of debugging - he had caught all the serious bugs, exceptions, and edge cases in the protocol, well then…
Perching himself back on the stool, he realized he forgot to fill the coinbase padding, the extra empty bits in the first block, created to bootstrap the entire chain so mining could take over from there. These bits would hold a message—part artist’s signature, part hacker easter egg for those down the line. His original thoughts included quoting either Neil Armstrong, Winston Churchill, or even Louis Armstrong. He had settled on The Boss: Bruce, with the line he quoted at the end of each show, way back in the day:
Remember: in the end, nobody wins unless everyone wins.
Now, however, he was having second thoughts. Despite his earlier measures at anonymity, this choice would pretty clearly peg him as an American. Or at least a resident of the Western Hemisphere. That was too much to give away…but it was such a good quote.
He sat for a moment, then decided the quote should instead be more like a timestamp. After all, the whole system was based in part on a distributed timestamping service, and he wanted a way to prove the thing was bootstrapped at a particular time and date - like when someone doing an AMA on Reddit posts a selfie holding the current newspaper. A way of proving identity in a trust-less environment, using a shared “secret”.
Warming up to the idea, he fired up IE7 and searched the news websites. Nothing too notable jumped out—much about Obama’s upcoming inauguration, debate over who would take the Guantanamo prisoners, and various other sundry affairs of the day. He was searching only the UK newspapers, so the source would match with his diversionary use of British English in his postings, and when he reached The Times of London, he found it: the perfect quote. It was short and sweet, and embedding it would not only be an effective time stamp, but also a time capsule of the current existential ennui washing over the world, and given the unknown future, perhaps an epitaph for the current financial system:
The Times 03/Jan/200917ya Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
A gentle middle finger to the current failing system the project was designed to upend. He couldn’t help but foresee the marketing value of it, either: they would think some brilliant hacker came up with this as a response to the current crisis, even though he had started in earnest two years prior, a good year before the financial system buckled.
They didn’t have to know this was a multifaceted project, decades in the envisioning. They didn’t have to know most of the ideas and concepts were borrowed from others - several invented decades prior, in the seventies and eighties. They didn’t have to know he was simply a visionary plumber, who saw the thing holistically, and that the small amount of brilliance he added was in the way the pipes were fitted together so that the water could flow. They didn’t have to know that he himself had been waiting over a decade for someone else to do what he saw as simply obvious, and when nobody stepped up, he finally got off his lazy ass and did something about it. No—he would let them believe in the myth. It would be better that way.
He slid the stick in his dev box and recompiled the code with the new message, then transferred it, with his shaking hand, into the USB slot on the ProLiant.
Massaging his temples, he swiveled away from the workstation to face the side table. He couldn’t just… do this: it was a moment, and it needed something inspirational. A send off; a virtual champagne bottle striking the bow.
Sitting at an angle to the server on the workbench sat another beast almost as big, but from another age: a McIntosh NC2300 amplifier. He flicked it on, generating a low buzz as the needles popped and settled back on the tiny pegs within their blue square windows. While waiting for the tubes to warm up, he pulled a random vinyl record from the stack of a dozen or so leaning against it, and removing it from the protective sleeve, smiled while admiring it. Bruce would make it into the ceremonies, after all. Perfect.
Mounting it on the Nakamichi Dragon that sat atop the old amp, he cued it up with his right hand while holding the index finger of his left on the pressure switch of the ProLiant. When the sounds of the E Street Band blasted their way out of the Klipsch monitors, he pushed the button on the Genesis machine.
Born to Run.