Charlie Shrem descended the stairs two steps at a time, keeping one hand against the unadorned cinder block wall to his right as he navigated the narrow slabs of wood that went down, down, down into his basement command center, his operational headquarters, his corporate throne room—his bat cave.
Every nerve in his fragile, five-foot-five-inch frame was firing in tune to the freakishly loud EDM music piping through the plastic buds jammed into his ears. He’d been on an electronic music kick for two weeks straight, ever since a friend from college who’d taken a job at one of the investment outfits on Wall Street had taken him out to celebrate the impending launch of Charlie’s new company. His friend had got him past the line at one of the clubs over the bridge in Manhattan, a place in Chelsea, Charlie believed, though the night had gotten hazy enough by 2:00 a.m. that the details were mangled. What he did remember was that the place was banging, going off, filled with city girls in tube tops and shorts and ridiculously high heels. Then again, Charlie was pretty sure he didn’t actually talk to any of those girls; it was New York, after all, so most of them were a head taller than he was anyway, and besides, his buddy had a corner table stacked with vodka, and not the cheap stuff Charlie was used to. Working for an investment bank had its advantages, including a corporate credit card. And for the moment, plastic was still king.
Charlie hit the bottom step and launched himself over a pair of cardboard boxes overflowing with broken keyboards and injured wireless routers. Similar boxes were stacked up to his right and left, leftovers from one of his previous businesses, the one he’d actually started in high school. While the other kids at the nearby Yeshiva of Flatbush had been busy studying their Torah—and yes, a few of those boxes contained menorahs, prayer books, yarmulkes—Charlie had been sneaking away from the urban campus during his free periods to make house calls all over the neighborhood, picking up broken electronic equipment, computers, routers, DVD players, even cassette recorders and bringing them back to his bat cave to fix. He’d called the company Epiphany Design and Production, mainly because he liked the word “epiphany.” Eventually, in the year between high school and college, his first business had morphed into a second one, a daily deal online retail site called Daily Checkout.
Hence the boxes, stacked all over this basement in Brooklyn, scaling the cinder block walls in pyramids so high they would have made Ramses himself proud. Beyond the boxes, there were also corrugated metal shelves lined with the tools of his old trade: soldering irons, circuit boards, pliers, wire cutters, and extension cords running in every direction, like living creatures.
Charlie picked his way through the chaos, finally approaching his desk— a small wooden affair, barely big enough for his equipment: a computer, three monitors standing side-by-side, and his keyboard. He didn’t care that it was the same desk he had been using since junior high, then in high school at the Yeshiva, and then while he’d made his way back and forth to Brooklyn College for his undergraduate degree.
He knew that one day this place was going to be on the cover of magazines, maybe even carefully chopped up and carted off to the Smithsonian, to sit right next to George Washington’s teeth and Steve Jobs’s first Mac.
Okay, he wasn’t sure that Jobs’s Mac was in the Smithsonian, but it damn well should have been, and Charlie’s desk was going to end up right next to it. In California, they launched revolutions from garages: Jobs and Woz building personal computers next to a rack of pocket wrenches in a garage in Los Altos, Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard making oscillators behind barn-like doors in a garage in Palo Alto, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin inventing Google as Stanford grad students in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. But in Brooklyn, there weren’t many garages; there were basements. And in the part of Brooklyn where Charlie grew up, those basements were crowded, dark, dingy, and usually smelled a little bit like brisket.
From above, the urban neighborhood of narrow streets spanning Avenue I to Avenue V, Nostrand to West Sixth Street, might have looked like any other section of the borough, but in reality, Charlie’s home sat right in the center of the seventy-five-thousand-member-strong Syrian Orthodox Jewish community—an ethnic, religious, and cultural island unto itself. Although the “SYs,” as they called themselves, did not dress in the black garb of other Orthodox Jewish sects—a choice made in part to allow them to flourish entrepreneurially and financially in the wider community of other Jews and gentiles—the Syrian Orthodox Jews were held together by strict traditions and codes dating back generations. Most draconian of these codes—a law known as the “Edict” set down by a group of Syrian rabbis in 1935—made sure the sect would remain insular: “No male or female member of our community has the right to intermarry with non-Jews; this law covers conversion, which we consider to be fictitious and valueless.” But despite these mostly successful blinkered rabbinical strategies, which had kept the Syrian Jewish community intact—all of Charlie’s cousins, uncles and aunts, grandparents, and family going back generations lived within a quarter mile of his house—and are firmly lodged in the Brooklyn landscape—the SYs had simultaneously managed to extend themselves outward in financial empires, in areas including real estate, retail, electronics, and, more often now, technology.
Charlie reached the desk and dropped into his chair, yanking out the earbuds and resting his phone next to the keyboard. Then he powered up his computer, heading right for his Skype account.
It took less than a minute for his business partner to appear in the lower left corner, shrunk down so that Charlie could talk while simultaneously monitoring the computer code that was now free-flowing like a river down the center of his screen.
“You’re late,” his business partner croaked through the internal microphone of Charlie’s computer. “Is this becoming a habit for you?”
Charlie kept his attention on the streaming code. He’d grown used to Gareth Nelson’s conversational style: his usual lack of social conventions, his abrupt vocal patterns, and of course his heavy Welsh accent, which made half of what he said pretty much incomprehensible. This largely explained why most of their interactions had occurred over email or instant messenger. In fact, Charlie believed that in total, he’d probably spent less than seventeen minutes actually conversing by voice with his business partner in all the time he had known him. Over text, Gareth’s accent didn’t get in the way, and his Asperger’s was a great benefit. The guy didn’t waste any words; everything was business, which made him the perfect sort of partner and counterbalance to Charlie.
“This looks really good,” Charlie said, jabbing at the code. “The transactions will go smoothly, and the servers look like they can handle a pretty large customer base. It’s a great starting place.”
He was nearly bouncing in his chair as he made the calculations in his head. Although he was small, he was constantly in motion, which made him often appear to take up much more space than his frame would have suggested. He also had a tendency to talk really fast; actually, everything about him moved fast. His feet, his mouth, his brain. Even his hair follicles; his cheeks and chin were in a constant state of overgrowth and, even at noon, were covered by what could only be described as something several hours beyond a five o’clock shadow.
The speed at which his mind moved was probably the reason why during college he’d shifted his focus from tinkering with electronics to computer coding, eventually teaching himself to become a world-class hacker. Working on hardware was slow, meticulous; but when you were coding or hacking, you traveled at the speed of electricity. Of course, hacking had its risks, and you could get yourself into a lot of trouble if you weren’t careful.
When Charlie had hacked into the University of Ghana, he’d actually sent them a private briefing afterward, detailing their security vulnerabilities. It was a courtesy in security circles known as “responsible disclosure.” He’d also worked his way into an airport’s security system in Germany and grown a following on hacking forums under the avatar “Yankee,” a nod to his New York roots.
Charlie wasn’t a black hat, a malicious hacker in search of monetary gain; he was something closer to a white hat, drawn in by the puzzle and the challenge of finding security flaws. It was hacking that had actually led him to the new business he was about to launch with Gareth, his autistic Welsh partner, a man he’d never met in person. A business that Charlie considered a truly revolutionary moment in tech history.
His newest adventure had begun almost three years earlier, while he was still a college senior. After an uneventful day spent commenting on a variety of hacking forums, Charlie had suddenly seen a strange little email that had been sent out to a cryptography mailing list. The email had come from someone named Satoshi Nakamoto. In the email, Satoshi had stated that he’d developed a brand-new virtual currency, which he’d then described, in detail, in an attached “white paper.”
At first, Charlie had thought the email was a joke. Stupid bullshit, he’d told himself. Who was this Satoshi Nakamoto, anyway? Charlie looked around hacker forums for more background on this Satoshi character but could find nothing. Stranger still, Satoshi, who claimed to be a Japanese man in his midthirties, wrote his emails in perfect, idiomatic English. Once Charlie read the white paper, however, it was obvious that Satoshi was a polymath, a multidisciplinary genius who was an expert in cryptography, math, computer science, peer-to-peer networking, economics, and more. How could this person be that smart and accomplished and yet be a ghost to the internet, a complete phantom? How could Charlie not at least even know of him?
Or her.
Or them.
Charlie would have gone on with his life, ignored the email and the white paper, if it wasn’t for the enthusiasm of a new, online friend he’d met while perusing crypto boards and forums under the handle “Yankee”: the autistic Welshman Gareth Nelson. From their many exchanges, Charlie knew that Gareth wasn’t the type to get excited easily; hell, before Satoshi and his white paper, Charlie hadn’t thought the guy was even physically capable of getting excited.
But Gareth was certainly excited now: this was something big, important.
Revolutionary.
Over the ensuing years, Charlie had realized that the Welshman was right.
He moved his face closer to the screen as the last few lines of code flowed upward. He was totally in the zone, barely listening as Gareth offered comments from his Skype corner, as the EDM music still leaked, in tinny twists, out of the earbuds on the desk by Charlie’s cell phone, as footsteps reverberated through the basement ceiling above him: his mom, working on that brisket.
Almost three years after reading Satoshi’s white paper, Charlie was certain: it was going to change everything.
And Charlie was going to ride that change right out of his mother’s basement and into history.