In the morning, I invited Diamond for coffee at my office. He showed up in his uniform.
I poured him a mug. He sniffed it, then held it out to Spot. “Smell okay to you?”
Spot sniffed it and wagged.
“Okay for the hound, okay for me,” Diamond said.
“Last night, I read a Brotherhood gang website,” I said. “It has a section where guys advertise their services and can connect with people who want to employ them. The website company explains how they pay them in bitcoin. It’s set up so everyone can stay anonymous. I’m curious if you know what bitcoin money is?”
“Kind of. You can just call it bitcoin. It’s a type of crypto-currency with no centralized government or major bank behind it.”
“I’m not sure I understand what that implies.”
Diamond spoke slower. “The way we have a sense of the value of the dollar is that the U.S. Government and the U.S. Central Bank, and a whole lotta other banks and businesses use it and attach dollar amounts to their goods and services. That supports our sense of how much a dollar is worth. But with bitcoin and other such currencies, there’s no official government or big bank support. So all we have is business usage to give the currency value.”
“Wouldn’t that still be a good way to determine value?”
“In the short term, yes, absolutely.” Diamond sat down on one of the chairs, leaned back, and put his feet up on the edge of my desk, his ankles resting on the wood, careful to make sure the old surface didn’t scuff his shiny shoe polish.
He said, “If you can buy a car or a house or a suit of clothes using bitcoin, then that shows that the sellers who take bitcoin believe in its value. From what I’ve read, there are other similar currencies popping up every week. However, without the official backing of governments or big banks, the value of bitcoin and other currencies is less stable than dollars. And how much it buys has varied drastically over the years. Bitcoin value has gone down and up with much more volatility than the value of the dollar.”
“Does bitcoin come in just coins? Or is there paper money, too?”
“Neither. It’s in the cloud. A network of computers spread across the internet.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d heard about the cloud for years, but the concept still seemed a bit foggy.
“Think of when you see an online banking page that shows your checking account or savings account,” Diamond said.
“I don’t do online banking,” I said.
“Yes, of course,” Diamond said. “I keep forgetting the depths of your anachronistic tendencies. Okay, imagine that you did do online banking. You’d go to your bank’s website, log in, and then you could look at a page that shows your balance in dollars. You could then go to a site - let’s say, the IRS website - and pay your taxes by authorizing the IRS to directly debit your checking account. All this time, you would never actually see dollar bills or coins.”
“Ah. I see.”
Diamond continued. “So bitcoin is like that. No physical money. Just money in the cloud, money that is not directly connected to dollars or euros or yen. But like other kinds of money, your bitcoin account is accessed with an account number and a password. In essence, you use your computer to point to your little kitty of bitcoins and send some of them to somebody who’s selling something you want. As a private detective, you could, for example, decide to take payment for your services in euros or yen in addition to dollars. Increasingly, people are also willing to take bitcoin instead of dollars. Could be, your dentist will one day advertise for patients and use as an incentive the fact that she takes bitcoin.”
“You called it a cryptocurrency. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know the details. I’m a cop, remember? But I understand that the encryption software - the cryptography - that keeps such a currency secure is very complicated. The fact that the encryption is hard to break gives users a sense of security critical to maintaining bitcoin’s value and usefulness.”
“So that people can’t make counterfeit bitcoins?”
“Yeah. But more details would be above my pay grade,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Gotta go.”
“Okay, thanks.”
After Diamond left, I thought about the people I’d met who were experienced in the computer and financial worlds. People like Yardley LaMotte and his employees at Tahoe Robotics. Angel investor William Lindholm. The lender who just died, Anders Henriksson.
Before I could organize my thoughts, the phone rang.
“I was so busy playing banking professor that I forgot to tell you,” Diamond said.
“What?”
“A trucker was coming over Carson Pass into Hope Valley on Highway Eighty-eight. When he got down to the valley floor, he pulled off to relieve his bladder and saw a body lying not too far away. The man apparently looked like he was taking a nap on the meadow.”
“But no nap, huh?” I said.
“No. Turns out the guy was the missing helicopter pilot. He worked for the charter company in Reno.”
“The same pilot who flew the Tahoe Robotics mission at Job’s Sister?”
“Indeed,” Diamond said.
“What are we to conclude? That someone tossed the pilot out of his own helicopter?”
“Probably,” Diamond said. “And found maybe ten or fifteen miles as the crow flies from where the helicopter was left in Alpine County. After the autopsy, we’ll know for certain that the man died from blunt force trauma caused by a fall from his own helicopter.”
“Because the helicopter was found in relatively pristine condition, we can then assume there was another person in his helicopter who was also a competent pilot?”
“Pretty sure about that, too,” Diamond said.