March 6, 2014
It was early in the morning, but a scrum of reporters had already gathered outside an unassuming three-bedroom house in Temple City, one of the many featureless towns that sprawled along the inland freeways heading east from Los Angeles, serving as magnets for upwardly bound Asian immigrants.
The reporters were chasing a story that would provide the Bitcoin world with a break from all the hard questions it had been facing. That morning, Newsweek had posted its first issue under new owners. On the cover was a dramatic mask, against a black background with the title “BITCOIN’S FACE: THE MYSTERY MAN BEHIND THE CRYPTO-CURRENCY.”
Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity had been a recurring fascination for journalists, but all the previous searches had ended with inconclusive results. Given Satoshi’s skill in using anonymizing software, many assumed that Satoshi would never be found until he, she, or they decided to come forward.
The Newsweek reporter, Leah McGrath Goodman, had seemingly cracked the nut in the most unexpected way. The man she found was named Dorian Nakamoto, but the papers recording his immigration from Japan to the United States in 1959, at age ten, showed that his name, at birth, had been Satoshi. This Satoshi Nakamoto had gotten a degree in physics from California State Polytechnic University and had worked on classified engineering projects before his retirement. He lived with his mother and liked model trains, but his oldest daughter told Goodman that her father was a libertarian; his brother said Dorian loved his privacy. Dorian Nakamoto generally refused to speak with Goodman during the course of her reporting. But when she briefly confronted Nakamoto in front of his house to ask him about Bitcoin, he seemed to confirm the circumstantial evidence.
“I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” Goodman reported that Nakamoto told her. “It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”
It was a completely unexpected outcome to the hunt for Satoshi—so unexpected that it almost seemed to make sense. A master of encryption would have used the most misleading disguise of all, hiding in plain sight with a number in the phone book. When some of the early Bitcoin developers who had corresponded with Satoshi talked with journalists that morning, they acknowledged that the story seemed to fit together.
“It’s probably the best theory yet,” Mike Hearn, the Google programmer in Switzerland, told one reporter.
When Nakamoto refused to come out of the house for much of the morning—despite being at home—it only seemed to confirm that he wasn’t going to refute the story. For Hearn and many other Bitcoiners this was a terribly sad outcome. Satoshi had valued his privacy above all else and now that had been violated. Newsweek had even posted photos of the car in his driveway, with the license plates visible. It was particularly worrying because previous research had suggested that during the first year Satoshi had stockpiled Bitcoins that would now be worth nearly $1 billion, holdings that would make Nakamoto a target of any enterprising criminal. The death threats from fans of Satoshi started flowing into Goodman’s inbox.
Eventually Nakamoto emerged from his house, and before he could shut the door, a crowd of reporters on his front porch clamored to ask him questions.
“Why did you create Bitcoin, sir?” one reporter shouted.
“OK, no questions right now,” Nakamoto said, with a Japanese accent.
Nakamoto didn’t want to talk; he wanted someone to take him to lunch. When someone else stuck a recorder in his face, he said: “Wait a minute, I want free lunch first. I’m going to go with this guy,” pointing at a Japanese reporter for the Associated Press.
As he battled his way out onto the sidewalk, Nakamoto tried to shield his sleepy-looking eyes, behind big square glasses, from the sun. His floppy hair and loose-fitting pants and jacket suggested that he might not have spent much time outside. Looking for the reporter who had promised him lunch and clearly confused, he finally answered the question everyone was asking: “I’m not in Bitcoin—I don’t know anything about it.”
This was, as many reporters quickly pointed out, far from definitive proof that Newsweek had gotten the wrong guy. It is what many people assumed Satoshi would say if asked about his involvement in Bitcoin. Before the reporters could get more out of Nakamoto, he disappeared into the AP reporter’s Toyota Prius and drove off toward a sushi restaurant. The other reporters jumped into their own cars and followed behind, rushing into Mako Sushi after Nakamoto. As the reporters barraged him with more questions, he and the AP reporter left before ordering and returned to the car. What came next immediately entered the list of great Los Angeles car chases, this one narrated in real time on Twitter by Los Angeles Times editor Joe Bel Bruno:
There is a huge chase going on behind #Nakamoto. Tons of media. All heading west on the 10 freeway
We think #Nakamoto might be heading toward downtown LA. Great American #Bitcoin Chase
Traffic!!! Oh no #Nakamoto!
We are two cars behind #Nakamoto, and it looks like the @AP reporter is doing all the talking. #Bitcoin
Hang on folks. . . . . There might be some resolution here with #Nakamoto in downtown LA. #Bitcoinchase surrealer and surrealer
So the Great #Bitcoinchase seems to have found a destination at the @AP bureau.
But the #Nakamoto story isn’t over. Hordes of media here waiting for him.
The reporters who had been part of the chase quickly parked and raced into the AP building. A few managed to squeeze onto the elevator with Nakamoto and the AP reporter. The reporters once again asked Nakamoto if he was the creator of Bitcoin and he once again denied it before disappearing into the AP offices.
With the reporters stationed outside the AP office waiting for Nakamoto’s next move, the focus turned back to Goodman’s article, which was now being looked at with a more skeptical eye. Commentators on Reddit and Twitter pointed out that Goodman’s evidence was almost entirely circumstantial, other than the quote she got from him in his driveway. As Gavin Andresen wrote on Reddit, in an angry open letter to Goodman, what she reported Nakamoto saying could “simply be an old man saying ANYTHING to get you to go away and leave him alone.”
Several people were also combing through examples of Dorian Nakamoto’s writing that had been found online. While the Bitcoin creator’s early writing had been crisp and even elegant, Dorian Nakamoto’s reviews on Amazon and his letters to a model-train magazine suggested a man with a mediocre handle on the English language. In an Amazon review of Danish butter cookies, he wrote:
it has lots of buttery taste
the shipment went well. i’ve had a nice comment from my kids. it’s a perfect xmas and i would say, for other occasions.
As the afternoon went on, a growing number of people concluded that Goodman’s article was aggressive journalism gone terribly wrong. The AP’s story and video from its interview with Dorian Nakamoto did nothing to improve Goodman’s case. Dorian clearly and explicitly denied that he had anything to do with Bitcoin. He seemed to have little familiarity with the technology, calling it “Bitcom” at several points, and implying it was a company at another point. The final piece of bad news for Goodman came that night, on the P2P Foundation website, where the creator of Bitcoin had posted a few items about Bitcoin back in 2009. In the first post since 2009—and the first communication from Satoshi in any form since 2011—the user Satoshi Nakamoto wrote five words: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”
None of this evidence, in fact, proved that Dorian was not Nakamoto. If Dorian was Satoshi, he could have gone home from the AP office, logged into his P2P account, and made the post. And if Satoshi was as smart as some people believed, he would have known exactly what to say to convince people he wasn’t Satoshi (he would have also had to be a very good actor). But in either case, the events of the day underscored just how committed Satoshi still was to remaining anonymous. The reexamination of the evidence also pointed back to the hoard of Bitcoins that Satoshi had mined during the first year of the network’s existence, when his computers kept the system running. An Argentinian security expert, Sergio Lerner, had done a thorough study tracing the patterns of Satoshi’s mining during that time and concluded that he had captured well over a million Bitcoins, worth nearly $1 billion now. More impressive than that, though, was the security expert’s conclusion, from a careful analysis of the blockchain, that Satoshi had never spent a single one of the Bitcoins he had created. His work in creating the system really did seem to be a selfless act.
In addition to what the day had revealed about Satoshi Nakamoto, the incident suggested that the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto really didn’t matter much. For a few hours on the morning of March 6, the world had believed that the creator of Bitcoin was an aging libertarian and model-train enthusiast living with his mother. The price of Bitcoin didn’t move much in either direction. The Bitcoin protocol was now maintained by Gavin Andresen and a team of developers and the code spoke for itself. Even if Satoshi had returned, it seemed he wouldn’t have much to do.
FOR THE FUTURE of Satoshi’s creation, the more important event on March 6 was one that few people knew took place. Just hours after the Newsweek headline started making its way around the Internet, four men took the stage at an auditorium in the New York headquarters of the Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs.
This was a private conference for some of the bank’s most powerful hedge fund clients. In addition to appearances from former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, the former head of the Bank of England, and the former president of the World Bank, Goldman had put together a four-person panel to educate its clients on virtual currencies. The panel was led by the cohead of technology at Goldman, a tall, bald physics PhD named Paul Walker. He opened the fireside chat by describing the two things about Bitcoin that everyone seemed to be able to agree on: “It’s something on the internet that seems to be worth money, and it seems to have been invented by a mysterious person.” But, Walker said, in a joking reference to the morning’s story from Newsweek, “the last part may no longer be true.”
Sitting next to Walker were Barry Silbert and Chris Larsen. Larsen was the man Jed McCaleb had brought on to run his new cryptocurrency startup, Ripple. Most men in the room were wearing ties, but in true Silicon Valley style, Larsen and Silbert were not. The fourth member of the panel was the former head of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCen, James Freis.
Barry asked how many people in the room were skeptical about virtual currencies, and a good majority of them put their hands up. Barry noted how different this gathering was from the elite circles on the West Coast, where at recent events he’d attended a minority of the participants had expressed skepticism. Barry said it reminded him of the early days of the Internet when everyone in the tech industry was leaving good jobs to try to cash in on the new idea.
“It’s either going to change everything, or nothing,” Silbert said.
To appeal to all the financial minds in the room, Larsen said that all the early problems surrounding Bitcoin had obscured the fact that the technology underlying it made something possible that had never been possible before.
“The world now knows how to confirm financial transactions without a central operator,” he said.
It was, though, Walker, the high-ranking Goldman executive, who provided the most encouraging comments about the technology. He said the conceptual advances made by Bitcoin weren’t just clever; they were useful in ways that could influence the future financial system. He had obviously been spending a lot of time studying this and was clearly impressed by what he saw. He suggested that Goldman was not planning to buy or sell Bitcoins, but he indicated that the bank was taking a hard look at how the blockchain might be used to change basic things about how banks do business. It currently took the bank three or so days to settle stock trades. What if that could happen instantly and be recorded on a blockchain for everyone to see?
Barry Silbert and Chris Larsen were beaming. Few things could help a financial cause more than getting the imprimatur of the firm known as “the smartest on Wall Street,” a bank renowned for always seeing what was coming around the next corner and making the right bets. Walker wasn’t making any official announcements, but everyone could see the Goldman executive was into this.
Walker reflected an increasingly widespread fascination in financial circles with the blockchain concept underlying the Bitcoin technology. Many bankers had begun to understand what Gavin Andresen had seen back in 2010 when he first became entranced by the idea of a financial network with no single point of failure. For banks that were terrified of cyber attacks, the idea of a payment network that could keep running even if one player, or one set of servers, got taken out was incredibly attractive. More broadly, the banks were waking up to several increasingly viable efforts to decentralize finance and take business that had belonged to the big banks. Crowdfunding companies like Kickstarter, and peer-to-peer lending services like Lending Club, were trying to directly connect borrowers and savers, so that a bank was not necessary. The blockchain seemed to present a decentralized alternative to an even more basic part of the banking industry’s business—payments.
The banks were notably not becoming any more friendly toward working with Bitcoin the currency. JPMorgan’s operating committee, led by Jamie Dimon, decided in the spring of 2014 that it would not work with any Bitcoin companies. At events in California with tech moguls, Dimon spoke derisively about Bitcoin and the ambitions of Silicon Valley to take over Wall Street’s business. Dimon said that JPMorgan and the other banks weren’t going to go down without a fight. At one point, JPMorgan threatened to stop providing services even to other banks that had Bitcoin companies as customers—like the European bank working with Bitstamp. Other American banks went so far as to close down the accounts of individuals who transferred money to Bitcoin exchanges.
But inside almost all these banks, there were people who loved the concept of a decentralized financial system like Bitcoin. JPMorgan maintained a so-called Bitcoin Working Group, with about two dozen members from across the bank and around the world, which was led by the bank’s head of strategy and which was looking at how the ideas behind Bitcoin might be harnessed by the financial industry.
This JPMorgan group began secretly working with the other major banks in the country, all of which are part of an organization known as The Clearing House, on a bold experimental effort to create a new blockchain that would be jointly run by the computers of the largest banks and serve as the backbone for a new, instant payment system that might replace Visa, MasterCard, and wire transfers. Such a blockchain would not need to rely on the anonymous miners powering the Bitcoin blockchain. But it could ensure there would no longer be a single point of failure in the payment network. If Visa’s systems came under attack, all the stores using Visa were screwed. But if one bank maintaining a blockchain came under attack, all the other banks could keep the blockchain going.
For many technology experts at banks, the most valuable potential use of the blockchain was not small payments but very large ones, which are responsible for the vast majority of the money moving between banks each day. In the stock trading business, for example, the lengthy settlement and clearing process means that the money and shares are all but frozen for three days. Given the sums involved, even the few days that the money is in transit carry significant costs and risks. As a result, various banks began looking at ways they could use the blockchain technology to make these sorts of large transfers quickly and securely. For many banks, the biggest stumbling block was the inherent unreliability of the Bitcoin blockchain, which is, of course, powered by thousands of unvetted computers around the world, all of which could stop supporting the blockchain at any moment. This increased the desire to find a way to create blockchains independent of Bitcoin. The Federal Reserve had its own internal teams looking at how to harness the blockchain technology and potentially even Bitcoin itself.
Many in the existing Bitcoin community scoffed at the idea that the blockchain concept could be separated from the currency. As they viewed it, the currency, and the mining of the currency, was what gave users the incentive to join and power the blockchain. Given that a blockchain could be taken over and subverted if an attacker controlled more than 50 percent of the computing power on the network, a blockchain was only as secure as the amount of computing power hooked into the network. A blockchain run by a few dozen banks would be much easier to overwhelm than the Bitcoin network, which now commanded more raw computing power than all the major supercomputers combined.
Bitcoin mining, which had once been a thing that Martti Malmi and Gavin Andresen could participate in with just their laptops, was indeed well on the road to becoming an industrial enterprise. One of the big players was 21e6, the secretive project founded by Balaji Srinivasan and funded, in part, by Andreessen Horowitz. Balaji had been among the first to see that as the chips became more high powered, the factor determining who would profit from Bitcoin mining would be the energy costs involved in powering and cooling the chips. A chip that was fast but ate up energy and got hot—requiring cooling—could end up costing more in electricity bills than it earned in Bitcoins. To cut down on power costs, Balaji’s team had designed a system that kept the chips immersed in mineral oil, which absorbed the heat and eliminated cooling costs. The data centers running 21e6 machines were now the single biggest source of mining power in the United States. And 21e6 was already working on its next generation of chips, with code names like Yoda and Gandalf.
In China some entrepreneurial young men with access to cheap hardware straight from the factories realized that their country provided its own advantage for cutting down on power costs: corruption. One mining operation near Beijing set up right next to a coal power plant, where it got its power practically free thanks to the relationship between the power company and the owner of the mining computers. Another so-called mining farm was set up in Inner Mongolia where cheap power was plentiful. Mining was particularly popular in China because it provided a way for Chinese citizens to acquire Bitcoins without going through the increasingly restricted Bitcoin exchanges.
Surpassing all these other mining operations, though, was a company created by a reclusive Ukrainian programmer, Val Nebesny, who had designed several generations of ASIC chips after reportedly teaching himself chip architecture from a textbook. Initially, Val Nebesny and his business partner Val Vavilov had packaged the chips in computers that they sold to other Bitcoiners, under the brand name Bitfury. But over time the two Vals kept more and more of the computers for themselves and put them in data centers spread around the world, in places that offered cheap energy, including the Republic of Georgia and Iceland. These operations were literally minting money. Val Nebesny was so valuable that Bitfury did not disclose where he lived, though he was rumored to have moved from Ukraine to Spain. And Bitfury was so good that it soon threatened to represent more than 50 percent of the total mining power in the world; this would give it commanding power over the functioning of the network. The company managed to assuage concerns, somewhat, only when it promised never to go above 40 percent of the mining power online at any time. Bitfury, of course, had an interest in doing this because if people lost faith in the network, the Bitcoins being mined by the company would become worthless.
THE TWO VALS running Bitfury were rare as outsiders who were succeeding in the new, more sophisticated, and heavily scrutinized Bitcoin world. The Vals were certainly not entirely alone. Roger Ver, who had recently managed to renounce his United States citizenship, after years of trying, owned Blockchain.info, which was doing better than ever. The number of wallets hosted by the company had passed 1 million in January and in March was approaching 1.5 million. It became increasingly clear that Blockchain.info’s careful structure—holding only encrypted files for its customers—allowed it to totally avoid the regulations coming down on other Bitcoin companies. Roger was constantly getting entreaties from venture capitalists who wanted to pay millions for some of his 80 percent stake in the company. Newcomers to the Bitcoin world were trying to emulate the Blockchain.info model and create technology that could allow Bitcoin to work as originally intended and escape regulations.
But most of the outsiders who had been pioneers in the early days of Bitcoin had not been able to transition to the new world. Charlie Shrem was sitting at home, under house arrest, while Mark Karpeles was dealing with prosecutors who were looking to punish him for the role he played in the ruin of Mt. Gox.
The early Bitcoin aficionados had certainly not gone away or lost heart. The online forums were still as lively as ever. But whereas these people had mixed and mingled with the big investors at the Bitcoin conference in 2013, they were now part of an isolated community that was cut off from the more sophisticated investors and programmers. This was not dissimilar to other protest movements that had sprung up after the financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street, which initially drew lots of attention—and raised issues that became a part of the national debate—ultimately splintered into many groups and disappeared from the public spotlight.
The marginalization facing the early Bitcoin community was on display at a conference for the more ideologically minded Bitcoin community in early March 2014, held by the Texas Bitcoin Association at a Formula One racetrack on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. Austin was a fitting place for the event because this was where Ross Ulbricht had grown up and founded Silk Road, the truest experiment in many of the early ideals.
Ross was now in jail in Brooklyn, awaiting trial, and his parents had moved to New York to be closer to him. But his mother, Lyn, returned to Austin for the conference. Now raising funds for Ross’s legal defense, she explained that the Bitcoins Ross had when he was arrested had all been confiscated and the family was using its savings to pay for his expensive lawyers.
At the conference, she looked shrunken, but she was treated like an honored guest and she delivered greetings from Ross, who called her frequently from prison in Brooklyn, where he said he was doing well, practicing yoga, and serving as a tutor for other inmates as he awaited trial. The market that Ross had created was generally viewed, in this crowd, as a moral good that had allowed people to make their own choices about how they wanted to live, without government intrusion. Rather than doing any sort of evil, Silk Road had made the world a safer place by allowing people to buy their drugs from the safety of their home.
The accusations that Ross had solicited assassins to murder people were more divisive. In legal papers, prosecutors in Maryland charged Ross with hiring the Silk Road user nob (actually an undercover agent) to murder Curtis Green. Prosecutors in New York accused Ross of hiring the Silk Road user redandwhite to kill several Silk Road scammers. But there was no evidence in either case that anyone ended up dead (in the redandwhite case, Canadian police could not turn up anyone matching the names of the people Ross allegedly tried to have killed). What’s more, in the indictment moving toward trial, these accusations of murder for hire were not included as formal charges. Ross’s mother said it was terribly unfair for prosecutors to pin these accusations on Ross if they were not willing to charge him. But even if Ross had done the things the agents claimed, there were plenty of conference attendees willing to argue that he had made the right decision.
“What if the scammer was going to expose every Silk Road customer?” one young man asked at one of the conference happy hours. “He was doing no one any good. Ross did something to protect all of those thousands of customers.”
Aside from Lyn Ulbricht’s appearance, the most memorable part of the conference was Charlie Shrem’s virtual appearance. He couldn’t travel to Texas, of course, but the organizers got him on Skype and projected a live feed of Charlie, from his basement bedroom with his guitars behind him. Charlie was wearing a brown “BOUGHT WITH BITCOINS” T-shirt that he’d worn two months earlier when he met Nic Cary for drinks, before his arrest.
Charlie was in the midst of trying to negotiate a settlement with the government to lessen the time he’d have to serve—eventually, as a result of these talks, Charlie would plead guilty to one count of aiding and abetting an unlicensed money-transmitting business and accept a one-year prison sentence. In the meantime, his lawyer had told him to avoid making any public statements that might hurt the talks. But his loquaciousness and desire for attention were irrepressible. This kid, who had once been called Statist for his mainstream politics, now gave a fiery talk that was a play on a well-traveled speech delivered by the founder of the Pirate Party several years earlier.
Friends, citizens, Bitcoiners, there is nothing new under the sun.
My name is Charlie Shrem, and I speak to you from under house arrest.
During the last few weeks, we’ve seen several examples of legal outbursts. We’ve seen the police abusing the measures available to them. We’ve seen the actions of the financial services industry. We’ve seen high-profile politicians mobilizing in order to protect the financial and banking industry.
All of this is scandalous without parallel. That is why I stand here today.
When it ended, some twenty minutes later, there was a smattering of applause and shouts. Charlie complained that his connection was making it hard for him to hear the crowd’s response. But the people who got up to ask him questions told him he was a hero.
“We all love you. You are still a huge part of this community,” said the shaggy-bearded founder of a Bitcoin charity. “What kind of beer should we send to you? Because you said you were looking for six packs.”
“I love Blue Moon, but anything exotic is good,” Charlie said.
“All right, cool. Stay strong Charlie!” the man shouted with a raised fist.
ALMOST NONE OF the more recent, moneyed arrivals at Bitcoin showed up for the conference at the race track. But many of them did fly to Austin just as the conference was ending, to attend another conference, SXSW, the storied public gathering where Silicon Valley mingled with celebrities. On the first day of SXSW, in a marquee session with Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Google’s “director of ideas,” Jared Cohen, responded to a question about Bitcoin with his conclusion: “I think it’s very obvious to all of us that cryptocurrencies are inevitable.”
Fred Ehrsam, the former Goldman Sachs trader who had joined the Bitcoin company Coinbase a year earlier, was given the honor of his own SXSW session—not a shared panel with other entrepreneurs—and it was put in one of the largest rooms in the convention center, which quickly filled up. In the question-and-answer session that followed Ehrsam’s talk, Lyn Ulbricht was the first one in line at the microphone. She said something about using Bitcoin for charity, but she was clearly there to make a plug for Ross’s legal defense fund, which she told Ehrsam was hosted on Coinbase. Whereas Lyn had been a star at the Bitcoin conference, here she was an unhappy reminder of a side of Bitcoin that Ehrsam and others wanted to put behind them. Fred responded politely and fumbled to find something to say about the value of Bitcoin for charitable donations broadly. But Fred was not shy about his belief in the transformative impact that Bitcoin would ultimately make as it became “the prevalent transaction medium on the internet.”
Fred’s biggest backer, Marc Andreessen, was increasingly vocal about his belief that the Silk Roads of the world were quickly giving way to more Coinbases. Andreessen frequently noted that in the early days of the Internet, when he was creating the first web browser, the new technology had lacked the infrastructure that would have made it appealing to a mainstream audience, and so it was relegated to fringe groups that were willing to experiment with new technology. In time, though, “the fringe characters tend to get alienated and then tend to move on to the next fringe technology.”
“You don’t get the new technology from the mainstream,” he said. “My prediction is actually that the libertarians are going to turn on Bitcoin. I think that’s about two years out.”
SXSW underscored how thoroughly Silicon Valley was winning the battle to shape and define the Bitcoin technology. The gathering also served as a stark reminder of how Silicon Valley had, more broadly, emerged as the big winner after the financial crisis. With Wall Street in retreat, these were the new billionaire power brokers, flying around the country in private jets. On Saturday night Ehrsam was invited to an exclusive party hosted by Andreessen Horowitz. At the party, which was attended by celebrities like Ashton Kutscher, Ehrsam talked about Bitcoin with Ben Horowitz and the rapper, Nas, whom Horowitz had brought on as an investor in Coinbase. The big names like Horowitz at SXSW reiterated what world-changing new technologies, such as Bitcoin, the tech industry was helping to bring to the world. In an onstage conversation between Nas and Horowitz, Horowitz called Bitcoin “the internet of money,” with the potential to help billions of people. Andreessen Horowitz had recently closed a $1.5 billion fund, and the partners said privately that they wanted to spend as much as $200 million of that on Bitcoin and blockchain startups, if they could find deserving ones.
But the week in Austin couldn’t help fueling suspicion that perhaps, as in the old way of doing things, the economic benefits of all the new technology were, at least so far, accruing to only a small elite, while the 99 percent that Occupy Wall Street had worried about were left reading about it at home on Reddit and Twitter. Bitcoin itself faced the same concerns. Years earlier, Bitcoin had promised that it would spread its benefits to all its users, but by 2014 large chunks of the Bitcoin economy were owned by a few people who had been wealthy enough before Bitcoin came along to invest in this new system. Most of the new coins being released each day were collected by a few large mining syndicates. If this was the new world, it didn’t seem all that different from the old one—at least not yet.