The future was broken.
Every person in this story I'm about to tell you knew this. Felt it in their bones. Their views were well known and widely shared, yet nothing ever seemed to change. Capitalism was destroying the planet. Income inequality kept tightening its grip. Tech behemoths like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter owned the public square, where once all you needed was a soapbox to voice an opinion. Now any of these monopolists could censor you or shut you down for even clearing your throat. Human beings had ceded their organizing power to corporations that saw them as data to be harvested and sold. The grievances were long and detailed, and yet not many of these people could put their fingers on a way to effect change.
The future was broken.
A global financial crisis had robbed a generation of a decade of productive employment opportunity. The recent graduates in this story who looked out over the years ahead of 2008 saw no hope for economic growth, only job cuts and shrinking industries. The banks that created the fiasco, though, they got off. Hell, they saw their stock prices soar in the years after 2008 thanks to an unspoken but very real US government guarantee – take all the risk you want, we'll be here to bail you out when necessary. The people who lost their homes? Not so much. They'd have to fend for themselves.
The future was broken.
The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, a giant in media theory who changed the way we look at popular culture, warned us in 1967: “How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?” he wrote in The Medium Is the Message. “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”
Fifty years after McLuhan wrote those words, another writer had also been at work. Here was a rare individual, someone able to put a finger on the dystopia that sprang from so much concentration – concentration of power, of wealth, of media. All of it originated from centralization. The gatekeepers kept making the gates higher and higher and more and more costly. But what if we could create a system without gates, without a central authority and the power to say what is permissible? What if, the people in this story asked, the organizing principle instead was flat and distributed and no one had enough control to stop anyone else?
That's the idea Satoshi Nakamoto gave to the world in the fall of 2008. The creator of Bitcoin had seen the future, knew it was broken, but also knew it could be different. Bitcoin would fix the future, and it would change so much more than how people thought about money. It gave these disconcerted characters the elusive thing they sought – the key to unlock it. Blow up the center. Destroy the middleman. Take the power back. That was the idea, anyway.
And while this story must start with Bitcoin, it is not about Bitcoin. It's the story of what came next. It's about going beyond Bitcoin to use technology to build even more powerful connections among people. It's the story of Ethereum, a global network of computers known as a blockchain invented in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian genius who'd yet to celebrate his 20th birthday.
Buterin married the digital money aspect of Bitcoin to the almost unlimited capabilities unleashed by what can be written in computer code. If you think about it in terms of contracts, just about everything I can think of can be boiled down to a written contract. Certainly, legal documents, but also financial transactions, commerce, global trade. Now you could take those contracts and in a sense digitize them by bringing them to life on Ethereum's global network. Once there, they could be accessed by anyone in the world at any time of day or night. There's a money feature embedded in Ethereum too, so you can pay for stuff. And it all takes minutes rather than the days, weeks, or months to complete common transactions in the industries I just mentioned. The efficiency gains are on par with what the Internet provided us in the early 2000s.
At its most valuable, the Ethereum network was worth an astounding $135 billion. Its creators became billionaires and millionaires. Ethereum is – slowly – changing the way finance and mainstream corporations think about the myriad tasks they do behind the scenes to make the world work. This is the story of the people who brought Ethereum to life, and how they changed the world.
But it's also about a $55 million heist that threatened to bring Ethereum down. The DAO attack, as it's known, is one of the strangest tales of thievery I know. A group of good-guy hackers who called themselves the Robin Hood Group fought a ninja war on the blockchain to prevent hundreds of millions of dollars from being stolen. Against them was a malicious but ingenious attacker who for the most part remains unknown to this day. And finally, it's about my effort to find out who did it, to unmask the ether thief.