Banking on Bitcoin Page #4

where he told me that he was

gonna step away from the project

and do something else.

He never told me what else

he's gonna do

or that he is doing.

I had just been invited

to give a talk at the CIA.

And I told satoshi that

I accepted the invitation

to go speak at the CIA.

After he sent

that email to satoshi

telling him that he was

planning on going to the CIA,

he never heard

from satoshi again,

and that was essentially the last

time anybody heard from satoshi.

You very quickly get caught up

in the question

of who is satoshi nakamoto?

Where did this come from?

Who is this person?

I mean, this is the 2000s.

Information is out there,

everything.

Everyone knows everything

about everybody.

How can there possibly

be a person

that nobody knows

who this guy is?

But there is a person...

At least I think it's a person.

It might be a group...

Who nobody knows

who this guy is.

And he kind of appears

out of nowhere in 2008

on these cryptography

email lists,

with this system called bitcoin.

He's very active

in the early years,

there's a lot of back and forth

with him communicating

with people.

It seemed like most people

kind of wrote him off

as kind of like a

delusions-of-grandeur kind of scheme.

Hal Finney, on the other hand,

seemed to be really interested

right from the beginning.

He was a crypto-idealist.

Like, he was not as

kind of cynical

as many of the other cypherpunks

so he got really into this.

He started talking

to satoshi nakamoto,

who he said seemed like some

young Japanese American coder.

Hal Finney was the first guy

to work with nakamoto.

He was a cryptographer.

Soon as nakamoto released it,

he was one of the first people

to email him back and say,

"hey, this is interesting.

I'd like to work with you."

And in the first weeks

of bitcoin

he worked with him

back and forth

setting up the system.

And satoshi nakamoto

ended up sending hal Finney

the first ever bitcoin

transaction.

Any discussion

of satoshi's identity

has to go back to the fact

that bitcoin

was based on this small number

of projects back in the 1990s

that only a handful

of people knew about,

like hashcash

and bit gold and b money,

and so you end up with

a pretty small group of people

who would have known

about these projects.

People though chaum,

David chaum, was, you know...

Everybody in

the cypherpunk movement

at one point or another,

they've said,

"well, he must have been

satoshi."

They've all come out

and denied it.

Probably somebody

who started out in the '90s,

in California,

with the cypherpunks.

Somebody who was very,

very good at cryptography

who understands encryption,

and has done a wonderful job

of just separating bitcoin from

anything that can identify him.

I think for bitcoin's sake,

that continuing anonymity

of satoshi

has ended up being

a really good thing,

because people who

have gotten involved in it

have been able to write

their own ideas and dreams

onto this technology,

and there was nobody

there to say,

"no, that's not

what I meant."

In the early, early days,

the first group was

really just a bunch of

more or less

tech-minded coders.

Then you had the libertarians

come on board,

who saw it through

a political lens,

I'm excited to be

a little bit of a part of it

with allowing

and accepting bitcoin.

And then you had these

two groups working together

and they overlapped too,

and the timing was very good

because the existing system

was in utter disrepair.

It was like a match

to a pile of wood

with gasoline

poured on top of it.

And the whole thing kind of

really goes viral and takes off,

and then you have the suits,

the vc money,

and it was very small at first,

just a couple of guys

out in silicon valley

who ran into bitcoin guys

at coffee houses

and you started having

this meshing of conversations.

Once silicon valley

gets on board,

that whole dynamic

starts to take off.

So now you have

the tech-minded coders,

the libertarians,

the counter-culture people,

the vc, silicon valley,

and you have this entire

great mishmash of people

coming together.

You had a network effect.

The more people

that got involved,

the stronger the network got,

and the more it grew and it

really started growing on itself.

And in 2013 especially,

you literally see

this thing mushroom.

The thing was just growing,

growing and growing and growing

as more and more people

got involved.

I think most bitcoin

companies at the time

knew that a big part

of the market for bitcoins

was people buying drugs

on silk road

who needed bitcoins to do that.

The big bang moment for bitcoin

was the silk road.

What Ross ulbricht did

by creating the silk road

was he took this

by no means common

but usable cryptocurrency

called bitcoin

and he married it

with a streamlined,

workable user interface

that was a free market

that could sell anything.

What would happen

if people were really free

truly free to trade

what they wanted to?

Ross did have

an extremely radical

libertarian viewpoint,

and really wanted to experiment

with using technology

to create free markets

for people.

What Ross ulbricht did is a

combination of Tor and bitcoin.

That was the "aha" moment

that Ross must have had.

The silk road was

basically the fruition

of all the cypherpunk dreams,

the crypto-anarchists' utopia

that they had imagined

in the '90s,

you know, was real now.

This was a perfectly,

in theory, anonymous website,

with perfectly, in theory,

anonymous money

used to by any contrabands

imaginable.

The silk road website is a

particular headache for authorities.

It's a anonymous

online marketplace

where people sell drugs

that are posted to customers

all over the world.

Cyber investigators, you know,

when there's a crime

can kind of trace you back

because you have an ip address.

It's like a telephone number,

so if you call another computer

that ip address is tracked.

On Tor, that's taken away,

because your information

hops from computer

to computer to computer

so there's no way to trace you

back to your original one.

Tor is an anonymous system,

so if you use the Tor browser,

which it has a browser.

You can go to Tor

and download their browser,

you can browse with

some degree of security.

So that's great for plugging

your banking information

into a site

so you don't get hacked.

The other component of Tor,

which has similar uses,

is called Tor hidden services.

Tor hidden services

is actually, to put it simply,

a url that doesn't have ".Com"

on the end of it.

It has ".Onion."

And that is its own little space

where you can create websites

and you could freely transact

without oversight or regulation.

People put websites on there

that are outside of

law enforcement's view.

There's hackers for hire,

there's malware,

there's credit card

dump services

there's a whole bunch of them.

Chris tarbell has ended up

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes