Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

January 10, 2009
It was a Saturday. It was his son’s birthday. The Santa Barbara weather was
beautiful. And his sister-in-law was in from France. But Hal Finney needed to be
at his computer. This was a day he had been anticipating for months and, in
some sense, for decades.
Hal didn’t even try to explain to his wife, Fran, what was occupying him.
She was a physical therapist and rarely understood his computer work. But with
this one, where would he even begin? Honey, I’m going to try to make a new
kind of money.
That, in essence, was his intention when, after a long morning run, he sat
down in his modest home office: a corner of his living room with an old
sectional desk, taken up primarily by four computer screens of different shape
and make, all wired to the separate computers he used for work and personal
pursuits. Any space that wasn’t occupied by computer equipment was covered in
a jumble of papers, exercise books, and old programming manuals. It wasn’t
much to look at. But sitting there, Hal could see his patio on the other side of his
living room, bathed in California sun, even in the middle of January. On the
carpet to his left lay Arky, his faithful Rhodesian ridgeback, named after a star in
the constellation Boötes. This was where he felt at home, and where he had done
much of his most creative work as a programmer.
He fired up his hulking IBM ThinkCentre, settled in, and clicked on the
website he’d gotten in an e-mail the previous day while he was at work:
www.bitcoin.org.
Bitcoin had first crossed his screen a few months earlier, in a message sent to
one of the many mailing lists he subscribed to. The back-and-forth was usually
between the familiar personalities he’d been talking to for years who inhabited
the relatively specialized corner of coding where he worked. But this particular
e-mail came from an unfamiliar name—Satoshi Nakamoto—and it described
what was referred to as an “e-cash” with the catchy name Bitcoin. Digital money
was something Hal had experimented with for a long time, enough to make him

Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper