Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper Read Free Book Online Page B

that Satoshi had written Bitcoin in, so Martti began teaching himself.
    Martti had time for all of this because he failed to land a summer programming job—a failure that gave Bitcoin amuch-needed boost over the next months. Martti got a part-time job through a temp agency, but he would spend many of his days and nights at the university computer lab and find himself emerging at dawn. As he learned C++, Martti was going through the laborious process of compiling his own version of the code that Satoshi had written, so that he could begin making changes to it. He and Satoshi communicated regularly and fell into an easy rapport.
    While Satoshi never discussed anything personal in these e-mails, he would banter with Martti about little things. In one e-mail, Satoshi pointed to a recent exchange on the Bitcoin e-mail list in which a user referred to Bitcoin as a “cryptocurrency,” referring to the cryptographic functions that made it run.
    â€œMaybe it’s a word we should use when describing Bitcoin. Do you like it?” Satoshi asked.
    â€œIt sounds good,” Martti replied. “A peer to peer cryptocurrency could be the slogan.”
    As the year went on they also worked out other details, like the Bitcoin logo, which they mocked up on their computers and sent back and forth, coming up, finally, with a B with two lines coming out of the bottom and top.
    They also batted back and forth potential improvements to the software. Martti proposed making Bitcoin launch automatically when someone turned on a computer, an easy way to get more nodes on the network.
    Satoshi loved it: “Now that I think about it, you’ve put your finger on the most important missing feature right now that would make an order of magnitude difference in the number of nodes.”
    Despite Martti’s relative lack of programming experience, Satoshi gave him full permission to make changes to the core Bitcoin software on the server where it was stored—something that, tothis point, only Satoshi could do.Starting in August, the log of changes to the software showed that Martti was now the main actor.When the next version of Bitcoin, 0.2, was released, Satoshi gave credit for most of the improvements to Martti.
    But both Satoshi and Martti were struggling with how to get more people to use Bitcoin in the first place. There were other computers on the network generating coins, butthe majority of coins were still captured by Satoshi’s own computers. Andthroughout 2009 no one else was sending or receiving any Bitcoins. This was not a promising sign.
    â€œIt would help if there was something for people to use it for. We need an application to bootstrap it,” Satoshi wrote to Martti in late August. “Any ideas?”
    Returning to school for the fall semester, Martti worked on several fronts to address this. He was eager to set up an online forum where Bitcoin users could meet and talk. Long before Bitcoin, online forums had been where Martti had come out of his shell as a teenager, allowing him a social ease that he never had in real-life interactions. He could almost be someone else. Indeed, when Martti and Satoshi eventually set up a new Bitcoin forum, Martti gave himself the screen name that would become his alter ego in the Bitcoin world: sirius-m.
    The name had a cosmic ring to it, and conveyed that this was “sirius business,” Martti thought to himself. But it also had a more playful meaning for Martti, who had used the alias in a Harry Potter role-playing game at age thirteen.
    The Bitcoin forum went online in the fall of 2009 and soon attracted a few regulars. One of them, who called himself NewLibertyStandard, talked about the need for a website where people could buy and sell Bitcoins for real money. Martti had been talking with Satoshi about something similar, but he was all too glad tohelp NewLibertyStandard.In the very first recorded transaction of Bitcoin for United States dollars, Martti