Satoshi no no, p.4
Satoshi No No, page 4
The rest of the fight was sad and predictable. In retrospect, the dry kindling of many such issues had been building for months, and any spark would have been enough to burn down the relationship. But in his golden-hued memory, all he saw were the small gestures of kindness from both of them: how she had found him a friend’s place to crash at; how he had continued to pay his share of her rent for a couple of months; how she had let him keep all his favorite books of hers; how he had continued to send her treats and toys for Riker.
In the months since, the maturity and respect they had both shown despite the pain of their breakup had given him a measure of hope that, even if they had no future together as lovers, they might be friends — at least once enough time had passed.
“Where were you?” Noretta asked, noticing his far-off gaze.
He just smiled at her. “Have you ever heard of a dead man’s switch?”
02:
Wise as serpents, harmless as doves
On Thursday morning Chip was in a meeting with the rest of the CloudButler IT team. They were in the Amp — short for Amphitheatre — a hideously expensive room that their CEO, Lars Samuelson, had insisted on including in the last round of building renovations. It had required structural bypasses to connect the fourth through sixth floors of the building with a wide open, terraced floor plan. A South American tree, painstakingly irrigated, gnarled its way from floor to roof, vines snaking exotically about its trunk. Palmer stood at the bottom of the Amp conducting his symphony, constantly glancing at his shiny Apple Watch as it buzzed alerts at him. Chip stood in a dark recess of the top terrace, arms crossed, next to Ravi.
They were doing a “stand-up,” a daily meeting decreed by their Scrum project management methodology. Everyone on the team would stand and deliver a (supposedly) brief account of what they did yesterday, what they were planning to do today, and any blocking issues that they were stuck on or that required help from someone else. The idea was to encourage team cohesion.
Unfortunately, Palmer had decided that the entire IT department, all 40-plus of them, would be considered a single team. Thus a meeting that was designed to take five or ten minutes ended up taking an hour or more. Everyone had to listen to everyone else summarizing their workday in the most dry and technical terms, even though only a handful of the summaries were actually important to anyone but the person speaking. Blocking issues had invariably already been raised to the relevant person, so mentioning them in the meeting was merely a way of publicly blaming and shaming others for delays.
Case in point: Michael Nguyen from Development, teammate #17 clockwise. (They all tended to assume the same ranked order each day, despite the stand-up’s ostensible goal of reducing hierarchy and increasing cohesion.) Michael was about two minutes into his report; his teammates would thank God if it ended at four.
“Defect #QA00375938: ‘Segmentation fault in management panel when resuming VM from sleep.’ This is a tricky one, ‘cause we can’t reproduce it in our dev environment. It only seems to occur on our ButlerBlade 3 hardware. We need to get the memory dumps and stack traces from the occurrences in production before we can continue with our analysis. But our request for dumps is still pending with DevOps.”
DevOps was Chip’s domain, and he was familiar with this particular issue, so he stepped forward. The Amp was peppered with unobtrusive microphones coupled to a Cisco appliance that promised voice relay, noise cancellation, auto-transcription, and searchable archiving. Of course, it had never worked right. Problems of feedback and network connectivity had plagued it since day one, and the task of troubleshooting it had been foisted onto the unwilling and ill-equipped building maintenance team. It happened that through a quirk of corporate mergers and acquisitions, building maintenance were the only unionized staff at CloudButler, and they had simply turned off the microphone system and asked everyone to speak louder during meetings.
So Chip raised his voice. “The BB 3 hardware was deprecated back in February. The only instances still running BB 3 are on-site customer setups where we haven’t seen that issue.”
“No problem. I know you guys are busy,” Michael said. “We can keep it pending.”
“It’s not that—” Chip sighed and shifted his feet. He didn’t want to derail an already overlong meeting, and push it from painful to excruciating, by calling out Michael on his passive-aggressiveness. “Could we just close off the issue? We probably won’t see it going forward.”
“Let’s keep it open,” Palmer interjected. “The ticket notes say it occurred over 65 times in the last 18 months and affected 42 servers.”
Chip’s mouth folded flat as he stepped back into the shadows and re-crossed his arms. He had found it increasingly difficult to go through the motions at work. Like anyone who had resigned themselves to a reliable, well-paying, but ultimately unfulfilling job, he had developed coping mechanisms that helped him stomach the silly rules and unspoken logical fallacies that permeated his organization. But the weight of his recent discovery had torn through that fragile fabric of professional detachment.
Michael resumed his droning. “Defect #QA003748011: ‘XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities in public-facing web console.’ We see this as a low priority. No occurrences reported in production, and no return on investment if we devote the time to tightening up the security.”
“Hang on,” Chip called out. “That’s a serious vulnerability. If it ends up getting exploited, it could seriously hurt our reputation. We can’t just ignore it. A breach could—”
Palmer was shaking his head as he cut in. “What we’ve learned from recent data breaches at other companies is that the trade journalists will make a fuss, but the public won’t see it as a driver to switch platforms. It’s not a bottom line issue for us. Plus, we haven’t seen any occurrences in production.”
Something inside Chip snapped. “How would we even know? If a skilled attacker was exploiting a SQL or XSS injection bug, we might not even know until a company database ended up for sale on the dark web. Or worse, a customer database. Never mind the hit to our reputation, we have a responsibility here. This issue was discovered over two years ago, and you’re prioritizing it below a random crash on hardware that we don’t even use any more. It’s retarded!”
Palmer eyes were wide. Chip caught his breath and looked around the room. His teammates suddenly appeared fascinated with their shoes.
“I think we can take this offline and discuss one on one, Chip. Is that OK with you?” Palmer offered.
“Yeah.” And Chip walked out.
The day after he had reconnected with Noretta, Chip had decided to bite the bullet and cash out some of the bitcoin. He had taken another day off work and gotten up early in the morning to prepare.
He knew that any attempt to move old school Satoshi coins would be quickly noticed, and he didn’t want that attention. But he had to establish something tangible before he would upend his life. No amount of public key cryptography and hash verification could compare with the feeling of a stack of cash in your hand. Getting that cash safely and anonymously, well, that was another matter.
All the popular online bitcoin exchanges seemed to require way too much personal identification before they would allow you to open an account to trade bitcoins for cash. They wanted banking details, tax documents, scans of your driver’s license or other ID card, and more. Given the realities of fraud and crime dominating much of bitcoin’s usage, Chip couldn’t blame them if the big exchanges succumbed to government and public pressure to curb anonymity. But he had no desire to find fake ID or get into the forgery business. He just needed a way to cash out some of his coins without exposing himself.
There were online networks to connect local bitcoin buyers and sellers for in-person cash trades, but Chip didn’t think that option was much safer. He wasn’t comfortable meeting shady strangers for five-figure cash deals. And if the bitcoin buyer was more legit, they’d probably want to do the deal at a bank or police station for safety — not ideal given his situation. It also didn’t seem easily scalable, as he wanted to spread his transactions out as much as possible.
So he started looking into bitcoin ATMs. These had sprung up around the world just a couple of years after bitcoin had burst onto the scene in 2009. Unfortunately, they had their own drawbacks, mostly related to the nature of the bitcoin network itself. Because the network required consensus from multiple nodes to validate each transaction, the transactions couldn’t be settled instantaneously. Each block in the distributed blockchain was about one megabyte in size and could hold many transactions. Blocks took about 10 minutes to achieve consensus on the network. But even after a block was added to the chain, it wasn’t completely settled and could be reversed by other miners — either legitimately, if the miner was stopping a double-spend attempt, or illegitimately, if the miner was attempting to fork the blockchain and create his own double-spend. In practice, this was extremely rare, but in keeping with bitcoin’s trust-but-verify philosophy, exchanges and ATMs often required multiple blocks to be confirmed before they considered a transaction settled. Each additional confirmation exponentially increased the chances that the transaction was valid. The number of confirmations required was a trade-off between the monetary value of the transaction and the chance that one of the parties was malicious. For transactions under $1000, one confirmation might be enough, but for more than that, three to six confirmations were typically required.
The withdrawal limit on most local Bitcoin ATMs — at least, the ones that published their withdrawal limits online — seemed to be around $3000. Chip didn’t relish the idea of loitering in a dingy corner store for 30 to 60 minutes, waiting for an ATM to spit out his cash. There was also the matter of transaction fees. These had risen in recent years as the reward for mining a new Bitcoin block had steadily decreased. Miners had to make up for the lower block rewards by increasing the transaction fees they charged; it was now common for a single transaction to incur fees of $3 to $4. And of course, transactions that offered higher fees were verified by the miners more quickly.
Chip decided to withdraw $2000 at a time and offer a transaction fee of $20 on top of whatever exchange fee the bitcoin ATMs charged (sometimes up to 10%.) This would encourage faster transaction settlement, and he figured it was a good balance of caution and expediency. He printed out a map with waypoints for each of the 15 ATMs that he wanted to hit. He tried to plot a path that would minimize his time between each stop. It was a bit like the old traveling salesman problem from computer science, and he marvelled at how intuitively the human brain approximated a solution without applying any conscious algorithm.
He set out on his bike with a backpack over his shoulders. His first stop was the forest trail in a nearby park where he knew there were no cameras. There he put on a hoodie, his dollar-store sunglasses, and of course, his face mask. He hoped that would be enough to keep him anonymous if someone managed to get a hold of security camera footage from one of the ATM locations. If everything went according to plan, he would end the day with $25,000 in his pocket.
Chip quickly arrived at his first location, a Circle K several blocks from his home. He locked his bike up and walked in, glancing at the cashier as he made his way to the ATM at the back. It took him a moment to get his bearings in the ATM’s user interface.
Typical, he thought. It’s trying to get me to sign up for an account and use their proprietary wallet.
Chip cancelled out of all the upsell crap and got down to the basic buy/sell functionality. He set up a withdrawal of $2000 cash with a 7.5% ATM exchange fee. On the screen, the machine showed a QR code of the address he was to send the bitcoins to. He scanned the QR code into the bitcoin wallet he had installed on his phone earlier and initiated the transfer with a $10 transaction fee. Then he looked up at the ATM screen and waited. A moment later, the screen changed:
Transaction status:
Transaction detected on bitcoin network. Awaiting confirmation...
Please note that confirmation can take 30-60 minutes depending on network conditions. To avoid this delay, set up a CoinCash wallet to hold your cash once the transaction is settled.
[Setup CoinCash wallet and receive 10 free CoinCash credits]
[No thanks, I’ll wait]
Chip chose the “No thanks, I’ll wait” option. He fidgeted a bit and looked around the store. It was pretty quiet. The cashier was eyeing him suspiciously. Chip tried to look casual. He grabbed a Popular Mechanics magazine from a nearby shelf and pretended to read it for a while.
The cashier walked over a few minutes later and adjusted some items on the shelves before turning to Chip. “Magazines are for purchase only, sir.”
“Oh, sorry,” Chip said, and put the magazine back on the shelf.
Drops of sweat beaded on his temples. He felt a pressing urge to appear normal. He followed the clerk back to the till, leaving the ATM still waiting for confirmation. A few steps later, the clerk turned around and faced him in the middle of an aisle.
“Can I help you with anything?”
“Uh, no, I’m good!” Chip stammered.
He quickly grabbed some random items off the shelf and took them to the till with the cashier to pay. Chip was just about to use his credit card when he remembered that he was trying to stay anonymous. He usually didn’t carry cash, and the only other payment method he had was a debit card — also a no-go. He grimaced and mumbled to the clerk that he had made a mistake. He picked up his items to carry them back to the shelf, and then realized for the first time what he had grabbed in his haste: a box of Trojan condoms and a tube of Preparation H.
Damnit.
Chip made his way back to the ATM as casually as he could, and took out his phone to play some chess. A few moments later, the ATM screen changed again:
Transaction status:
Transaction confirmed on bitcoin network. Dispensing your cash...
Thank you for using CoinCash ATMs!
Would you like a receipt?
[Yes] [No]
The machine began spitting out money. Chip frantically grabbed the bills one at a time, like a beginner being dealt his first hand in poker. He stuffed the cash into a ziplock bag in his backpack and quickly left the store without a receipt.
Chip hopped on his bike and pedaled like a maniac. The wind whipped at his face and blew his hoodie off his helmet. He felt high. It had taken about 30 minutes for the ATM to verify that transaction. He hit the next two stops on his map in quick succession, hoodie and mask securely back in place. He decided to increase his transaction fees to $30 to try to push the confirmation time down to 20 minutes, and this seemed to work.
As the game wore on, his confidence grew along with his money pouch. For the last few ATMs, he got a little cocky and left the transaction confirmations pending while hitting the next ATM. He realized there was a chance that somebody would wander up, see the cash being dispensed, and just grab it, but ATMs were not used much these days. And he believed most people were honest. While you couldn’t trust any particular person with certainty, you could probably trust a statistically random individual, most of the time. So he swung back through the ATMs he had left pending, in the same order, and at each one, his timing was good. He walked into the stores, straight up to each ATM, waited no more than 5 minutes, collected his cash, and walked out.
On the way home, he went back through a different forested park trail, doffed his hoodie and mask, and leisurely rode back to his apartment. Back inside, he searched for a good place to hide the cash. He found a disused Samsung Blu-ray player that was leaning haphazardly against a stack of books at the bottom of his closet.
Perfect.
Chip grabbed a screwdriver and opened up the chassis, marvelling at how much empty space could now be found in consumer electronics. More and more components were consolidated in a few chips, leaving the circuit boards unimpressive and bare. He found a cavity that could easily hold his $25,000 or so in cash, and probably 10 times that if he folded it carefully. He placed the cash inside, screwed the chassis back together, and sat back, quite satisfied with himself.
For the next few days, Chip didn’t touch the cash. He had gone to work, gone to lunch, and gone home. He hadn’t said anything about it to Ravi, Noretta, or anyone else. But he had felt it.
Chip walked the CloudButler hallways now, strangely buoyant, as he made his way to the games room. Any other time, he would have been anxious over a confrontational exchange like the one he’d just had in the Amp. He would have replayed the scene continually in his mind, with the talking heads of Palmer and Michael dancing merry-go-round, refining arguments and counter arguments, adjusting his tone of voice and choice of words until he had achieved a perfectly persuasive and reasonable response. But now, he didn’t give a shit.
He strode into the games room and revelled in the cool, conditioned air. A trio of guys were playing pool. A few others chilled out on the leather sofas in front of a giant 75” 8K display that flashed “SELECT INPUT SOURCE” while they buried their faces in their 6” smartphones. A rare group of women played ping pong; for their trouble, they got continual sideways glances from all the men. A couple guys played foosball.
