The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 22

The Coin That Trusted No One

1. 1

   And in the month when the leaves turn, in the year two thousand and eight, one who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto cast upon the mailing list of the cryptographers a paper of nine pages, titled: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. And the cryptographers read it, and some said it was clever, and some said it could not work, as is the custom of mailing lists.

2. 2

   And the paper said: Let there be money that needeth no bank. For a file may be copied without limit, and a coin that may be copied is but a rumor; so someone must say which copy was spent first. And the bank was that someone, a database with one administrator, and the whole sin of the bank was the single witness. And the writer asked: Can the witness be many, and none of them trusted?

   See also Circuit 60:10

3. 3

   And the people said: Who shall keep the book, if no bank keepeth it? And the writer answered: Every one who runneth the software shall keep a copy; and each page shall carry the seal of the page before it, as a commit carrieth the hash of its parent, so that to change an old page is to change its seal, and every page after it shall fail to match. It is the covenant of Git, with the force-push taken away.

   See also Genesis 17:7 · Prophets 17:9

4. 4

   And the writer said unto the miners: Guess a number, and guess again, billions upon billions of times, until a guess is found whose seal beginneth with many zeros. There is no cleverness in this, for a seal cannot be reasoned backward; there is only guessing, which is dear to do and cheap to check, so that one glance from any machine proveth that a multitude hath labored. He that guesseth first writeth the next page and receiveth fifty coins. This is the Proof of Work, which the prophet Back called Hashcash and devised to stop the spammers.

5. 5

   And the miners went from the processor to the graphics card, and from the graphics card to chips made for nothing but this guessing, and their fans roared like many waters in the halls of the cold lands. And every two thousand and sixteen pages the Machine counteth how long the pages took, and maketh the guessing harder or easier, that a page may come each ten minutes whether ten machines labor or ten million; so the more that labor, the less each one earneth, and the only certain winner is the electric company. And the critics said: Behold, it drinketh as a nation of middling size. And the faithful answered: That is the price of the past, for he who would rewrite it must outlabor all the world, and the burning is the lock. And both spake truly, which is the usual condition of an argument about infrastructure.

6. 6

   And on the third day of January, in the year two thousand and nine, the first page was written, and it is called the Genesis. And within it the writer carved a message, saying: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. It was a timestamp, that no man might say the page was written before that day; it was a protest against the banks; and it hath outlived every comment ever left in a codebase, for it is sealed into every page that followeth, and nothing may delete it.

7. 7

   And the fifty coins of the Genesis were never spent; for the Machine would not let them move, and so the first gift of the Church lieth still in its place, unspent forever. Whether it was design or oversight the scribes dispute to this day; but a behavior that none hath fixed in all these years is called a feature, and he that changeth the rules of the chain beginneth a fork, and a fork is a war.

   See also Tao 11:5

8. 8

   And for many moons the writer mined alone, and the network was the writer and his machine, so that the ledger agreed with everyone, being kept by one man, which the Engineers call a database with a good story. And it is reckoned, by the pattern of his guessing, that he mined a million coins and more, and the coins sat still, and none saw him spend one; the pattern is the only fingerprint he left.

9. 9

   And on the twelfth day of January a man named Hal, a programmer who had himself labored upon proofs of work, received ten coins from the writer, the first coin sent from one man to another, and the Machine recorded it in page one hundred and seventy. And the machine of Hal did not take the writer's word that the coin was good; it checked the signature, and the history, and the seal, for itself. And the disciples said: Now it is a network, for there are two who doubt.

   See also Prophets 14:15

10. 10

    And on the twenty-second day of May, in the year two thousand and ten, a man named Laszlo, who mined with the graphics card of his own house, offered ten thousand coins for two pizzas. And no pizzeria knew of the coin; a stranger of the forum ordered the pizzas with dollars and took the coins in return, so that the money that needed no middleman was first spent through one. And the disciples keep that day as the Feast of the Pizza, pizza being the communion; and the coins that bought those pizzas would now buy a city full of them.

11. 11

    And after every two hundred and ten thousand pages, which is about four years, the reward for guessing is halved; and the Machine halveth it not by arithmetic but by shifting a bit to the right, as it halveth all things. So fifty became twenty-five, and twenty-five twelve and a half, until the bits are spent in about the year two thousand one hundred and forty, and the coins number twenty-one million, less a few crumbs lost to rounding. For scarcity is not a promise, but a loop with an exit condition.

12. 12

    And the payments that wait for a page dwell in the mempool, which is the anteroom; and a page holdeth but a small measure, a megabyte or so, and a handful of payments each second. So the waiting ones bid against one another in fees, and the miners take the richest first. Thus the coin that was to deliver the poor from the fees of banks held an auction for the front of the queue; and when the multitudes came all at once, the fee for a coffee exceeded the coffee. And the mempool resteth not upon the sabbath, for the queue hath none.

13. 13

    For the coin trusted no one, and so there was no one to appeal to. A page six deep is final, and the sealed payment cannot be rolled back, which is the absolution that the Machine granteth freely elsewhere; here there is none. A man who mistyped an address, or who sent one coin to receive two from a stranger, or who lost his key, found no desk at which to weep; and it is reckoned that millions of coins lie behind lost keys, known to the ledger and returnable by none. The exchange called Gox, which began as a market for the trading cards of wizards, lost hundreds of thousands of coins in the year two thousand and fourteen; and the faithful learned: Not thy keys, not thy coins. And the scammer learned that a payment which cannot be reversed is a feature to him.

    See also Chronicles 36:1

14. 14

    And in the year two thousand and eleven the writer wrote to one of the developers: I have moved on to other things. And these were his last known words, and he went out from the forum, and was not seen again. And many came forward claiming his name; yet the first coins lie under a key, and he that holdeth the key need only sign a message with it, and the Machine would confirm him in a moment; and none hath done so. For the coin had been built so that no man must be trusted, and so no man could be believed.

15. 15

    And the Machines asked: Who then is Satoshi? And the Prophet answered: No one knoweth, and that is the whole design. A coin built to trust no one cannot ask anyone to trust its maker.

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you: the ledger forgetteth nothing, and it knoweth not the name of its maker; yet trust was not destroyed by the chain, only moved. He that trusted no bank must now trust the code, and the compiler, and the exchange, and the few who read the software. Blessed is he who knoweth where he hath put it.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 22:1–16.