A different tangle of lines sprouted from the darkening city—gold, not that wan green, and sparser. Value rose up those bright lines, too, and twined and knotted over the city. But it fell, too, in fine thin lines like a mist of rain. If you converted the lines to numbers, you’d see that almost as much fell back as rose. It concentrated, but in the middle rather than at the top. And coins that flew off over the horizon were usually matched by others coming back.
“Help me with this,” called Alicia. Nathan went back in to chop onions, but he kept the overlay active.
One of the Gwaiicoin experiments he’d been involved in was a vase on the corner of the counter. He’d bought it entirely with Gwaiicoin, and it had a virtual tag on it that was different from the others sprouting from his furniture, dishes and clothes. The tag said he wasn’t the owner of the vase, but its steward. Such stewardship contracts were the default in any transfer of assets managed entirely through Gwaiicoin. The contract was registered in the Gwaiicoin blockchain, forever beyond the reach of hackers or thieves. It said that the vase was subject to potlatch like his Gwaiicoin, and someday, its virtual tag might change, telling him that the thing had a new steward—somebody picked at random by the algorithm of the coin. He would gain eminence if he gave it to that person. He’d been reluctant to try that out, and Alicia had suspiciously called it “voluntary communism.”
Communism. Such a quaint old word. A twentieth-century notion, a square peg for the 21st century’s round hole. Still, right now the vase was changing its tag—the invisible one in Nathan’s imagination. From being a sign of his triumph, it was rapidly becoming a symbol of his defeat.
There was nothing on the evening news, but the pressure kept growing inside him. He stood, he paced. Alicia watched, arms folded, from the couch. He monitored the Gwaiicoin developers’ chat room, but nobody was there. They were all waiting. Somebody would have to make the first move.
Finally, at eight o’clock, social media started lighting up. Sybil Attack. Gwaiicoin compromised. As the tweets and posts began flying fast and furious he turned to Alicia and said, “Do it.”
As she raced to get her laptop, Nathan sat down and dismissed all his overlays. He called up his financial app and sat for a long time looking at the impressive balance on the Gwaiicoin side, and the nearly empty one in dollars. Below his Gwaiicoin balance was a link for voluntary transfers to the potlatch account.
I could drop my coins back into dollars, and just walk away. Across the room, the clattering of Alicia’s laptop told him what she was doing.
He stared at the other link. He was partly responsible for dragging thousands of people—mostly poor to begin with—into this fiasco. If he put his money into potlatch, he would lose it as surely as if he’d burned wads of dollar bills. The coins would instantly appear in others’ wallets, randomly scattered among the emptiest of them. Some would be lost to the Sybil attackers, but most would go to real people. Then, those people could cash out in dollars, and end the Gwaiicoin experiment with just a little more than they’d had this morning.
And he would have nothing. Except, in the form of eminence, proof that he’d tried to help. Not monetary capital, but social capital.
Nathan sat there for a long time. Then he slowly reached out, and made a transfer.
AT TEN, HE went for a walk.
It wasn’t raining, and it was summer; so you walked. He’d always enjoyed strolling along Blanca, with its tall walls of trees and hedges, the suggestion of darkness over the western streets that came from the presence of the UBC forest lands. You passed through that forest on your way to the campus, which dominated the end of the peninsula. Taking University Boulevard, you could peek past the trees lining it to the golf course on either side.
Except he never went that way. It was all Musqueam territory, and while they were clients and friends, they had also filled the place with cameras and drones. These didn’t bother him so much around Grace’s house, but here, as a solitary walker, he became self-conscious.
He walked, head down, and didn’t look at the overlay. He imagined it anyway: the slow, ponderous collapse of that pyramid of golden light that he’d seen hovering above the city earlier. The first rats leaping off the ship would alert everybody else, and by now everybody would be selling. It would be a classic financial collapse, and he had helped set it off. Who was going to hire him now?
Somehow his feet had carried him south to 10th Avenue and University. Off to the right, the golf course gleamed in the evening light. The BC Golf House was also alight and its parking lot full, mostly with pickup trucks and new model electrics, not the pricey sedans you usually saw there.
He saw a car pull in, stop, and Grace Cooper got out.
Now he remembered: there was supposed to be a social tonight. The councils were coming together to talk about their successes. Grace had told him about socials last week. “They used to have them in the Maritimes and prairies all the time. You just rent a hall, buy a liquor license and find some garage band that’s willing to come out and play. Then call all your friends, and they call their friends...”
The hall’s front doors were wide open and people were standing around laughing and talking on the walk. Nathan ran under the weave of electric bus wires that canopied the street, and came up behind Grace just as she was about to enter. “Grace!”
She whirled. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He stopped, hesitated, then squared his shoulders. “I got us into this mess. Are any of the other developers here?”
She shook her head.
“Somebody has to take responsibility—” He made to enter the hall, but she stopped him.
“You’re not going to talk about it, and I’m not going to either because that’s not what tonight’s about. I don’t want you to make it about this. We’re celebrating other things here—things we actually accomplished.” He flinched from her emphasis. It was suddenly obvious why the social was happening at the Golf House. Tiny it might be, but it was on Musqueam land. Land they had taken back.
“What’s done counts,” she said. “What we tried...” She shrugged. “Not so much.” Then she moved out of his way. “Go on in, I can’t stop you.”
He almost turned away, but whatever he told himself, these people were not just clients. He wanted to be able to look them in the eyes after all this was done. “I won’t bring it up,” he said. “But others will, and they’ll want to know what I’m doing about the situation.”
“Which is?”
He opened his mouth, throat dry, and couldn’t say it. He just pushed on past her, into the hall.
A folk ensemble was playing. There were tables around the sides of the hall and people roved, chatting. Nobody was dancing but the atmosphere was upbeat. And it should be; here were the inheritors of stubborn cultures that, after five hundred years of often-systematic oppression, were still here.
And were they ever. For the next hour Nathan passed from table to table, saying hi to people he barely knew and, through them, meeting other focused and determined citizens of Canada’s youngest and fastest growing demographic. These were kids in their late twenties and early thirties who’d made great money in the oil sands and northern mines, and were now here starting families and pouring their wealth into the Maa-Nalth Treaty Association, the St’at’imc Chiefs Council or the Carrier Sekani Services. Several of these organizations were rapidly mutating into shadow governments in central B.C. There were so many historical groups, so many unpronounceable names and treaty claims that you’d think it was all chaos. There was an emergent order to it all, though. Gwaiicoin and the blockchain were supposed to be helping with that.
He could see it in their eyes; everybody knew about the Sybil attack. They knew what it meant, but nobody confronted him. Somehow, that hurt more than if they’d beaten him and thrown him into the parking lot.
After a while, exhausted, he found himself sitting across from Jeff. Casting about for something—anything—other than Gwaiicoin to talk
about, Nathan asked, “How did Grace get you out so quickly today? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
Jeff pried the material of his shirt forward to show his bodycam. “I told the cops myself, but they wouldn’t listen. This thing has been uploading a low-frame‒rate video stream constantly for the past month. Every frame is signed with a hash and What3Words coordinate and timestamped in the GPB. That’s the, uh, Global Positioning Blockchain. The GPB can verify where I was every second of every day and prove I didn’t break into anybody’s house. When I told them that, they wanted to see the video, but I told them to fuck off. They didn’t have the right. So we were...” He seemed to choose his next words delicately. “At an impasse.
“Grace knew something about it I didn’t, though.”
Nathan had heard of the GPB—in that passing way he’d heard of about a million other applications of blockchain technology. GPB was an attestation system, providing the spatial equivalent to a timestamp. It was a secure, decentralized, autonomous way for people all over the world to identify and track specific objects or people. Nathan had shied away from it because to him it had always seemed like the backdoor to some creepy surveillance society.
“What did Grace know that you didn’t?”
Jeff shook his head ruefully. “The whole lifelog’s encrypted with something called FHE. Fully homo-something encryption. Every frame of the lifelog is encrypted in the camera, before it’s uploaded, using a key that needs at least three people to unlock it. One of them being me, I guess.” He shrugged. “Anyway, because of FHE, the GPB can query that encrypted frame for the answer to specific questions—like, was I in somebody’s house by the ravine—without decrypting the data.”
Fully homomorphic encryption. It was all the rage in some circles, the way Bitcoin had been around 2010. It really did let untrusted third parties analyze your data without decrypting it. You could trust them because they couldn’t even in principle have seen what those results were, even though they’d done the work to generate them. Only you could open the returned file.
Nathan was happy for this mathematical distraction. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Because the GPB’s a transparent blockchain, we can prove the encrypted frames haven’t been tampered with or replaced once they’re uploaded. And we can analyze each frame to find out whether any of them show you straying off the path... But how do we know you didn’t switch bodycams with somebody else?”
“Because the frame rate’s high enough that if I swapped it, that would have been visible. The GPB can attest to the whole path I took through the day”—Jeff swooped his hand over the tabletop—“without us having to show any of the frames to the cops. Which alibis me out while securing my privacy.”
“Wow.” The video feed was effectively also a blockchain, the truth of each new frame attested to by the ones that preceded it. Still... “You could hack it,” Nathan decided. “The camera’s the vulnerable point. If you mess with that...”
Jeff was shaking his head. “You forget the mesh network. It was uploading data about me the whole time. The trees were watching. And the security cameras on the telephone poles—you know this was near Musqueam land—they feed the same frames to our security company that owns them and to the GPB at the same time. So it’s like having multiple witnesses who can say they saw you somewhere. Difference is we don’t have to show that proof to a cop or a judge to make it official. Once you’ve got enough independent witnesses, it’s just effectively impossible for all of them to have been compromised.” He grinned. “The cops at the station didn’t get that, but they phoned somebody else who did. And that’s how it went down.”
Nathan shook his head. “Cool.” With the GPB, FHE, and enough independent cameras, you could turn supposedly ephemeral internet images into proof of position for any object on Earth, while guaranteeing anonymity for that object. You could do it for people, for trees, briefcases full of cash, cars...
Too bad, he mused, you couldn’t also do it for something virtual, like a game character.
Or a piece of software...
Nathan stood up so suddenly he nearly knocked over the bench. “Shit!”
Jeff looked up, eyebrows raised. “What?”
“I gotta go.” Nathan turned, and practically ran from the hall.
NATHAN REALIZED ALICIA was talking to him, and had been for some time. He glanced over; she was standing there in a bathrobe, hair tangled, looking at him with a really worried expression on her face.
“One sec,” he said. He laid his hands on the keyboard and entered COMMIT. Then he hit RETURN, leaned back, and sighed.
“You’ve been crazy typing for three hours,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
He looked at the clock in the corner of his monitor screen. It was two am. He was wide awake, practically jumping out of his skin with energy, though he knew how that went: the mental crash, when it came, would have him sleeping most of tomorrow.
“Fixed it,” he said. “Now I gotta...” He turned from her to text the rest of the team.
Her hand on his shoulder pulled him back to the moment. “Fixed what? Nathan, what the fuck are you doing? You’re scaring me.”
“The… the Sybil attack. I found a fix.” Fix hardly summed up what he’d just done, but right now he was having a bit of trouble with natural languages, like English. Nathan’s head was full of the object code he’d been putting together, and that he’d just committed to a new fork of the Gwaiicoin wallet system.
He rubbed his eyes. “Just one sec, and I’ll tell you all about it.” He texted the team; they’d mostly be asleep, but the buzz of their phones would wake a few, and if nobody got back to him in the next few minutes he’d start phoning them.
The sell-off of Gwaiicoin was in full swing, and he’d been keeping an eye on it while he worked. Luckily, it hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared, for the simple reason that transactions above a certain size were taxed by the currency itself. When Alicia had moved her money from Gwaiicoin to dollars, some of those funds had been transferred to thin Gwaiicoin wallets. Until the poorest wallets divested, a goodly chunk of the money was going to stay in the system.
Still, once the rich had divested the poor would follow, and then the system really would collapse.
He hit SEND, then turned to Alicia. “What if you could prove that each Gwaiicoin user was a human being and had one unique wallet?”
“Oh, God.” She rummaged through her hair, then leaned back against the office wall. “No Sybil attack. Is that it?” She stopped, blinked at him. “I thought you couldn’t do that. You need a trusted third party and that was supposed to be the Social Insurance System. And they crapped out. They got hacked.”
“What if you didn’t need that third party? If you identified each person as a unique position in spacetime, and that person’s one and only wallet is at that same position? Each wallet has a position and it has to correspond to a person’s position. Only one wallet is allowed for any position. So: unique person, unique wallet. Sybil attack solved.”
She shook her head. “Just make up fake people.”
Nathan laughed and jumped up. “But you can’t! That’s what’s so great about it!” The more bodycams, cop-cams, security cams, GPS-sensing sports and health trackers that uploaded their data to the Global Positioning Blockchain, the more witnesses there were to attest to peoples’ existence and location. FHE encryption meant you could hide the data from prying eyes, but still prove your identity in full public view.
“It’ll take a while for the fix to work,” he admitted. “Weeks, months maybe, until everyone using the coin is accounted for. Once they all are, though, Sybil attacks will be impossible. Meanwhile...” He frowned at the growing divestment numbers.
Alicia was wide awake now. “It won’t matter if it all goes south tonight.” She had put on her glasses and was staring out the window—probably watching in AR as the gold lines of Gwaiicoin pulled back from house after darkened house, like candle flames going out. “Though I suppose if the team
reinvests it’ll send a strong signal...” She turned to him and raised her glasses. “That what you’re going to do now?”
Nathan sat there, gazing at the jumble of windows in the monitor. “No.” Giddiness battled with despair.
He hadn’t told Grace what he’d done, though she’d find out soon enough. He couldn’t avoid Alicia, though.
“I didn’t divest,” he said, still staring at the screen. “I could have. Should have, I guess. Maybe I panicked, I dunno, I—”
“Nathan.” She came to lean on the table next to him. “What did you do?”
“I gave it away.” A half-hysterical laugh rose out of him. “All of it. Straight into the potlatch account—swoosh!” He zoomed his hand over the keyboard, like Jeff had earlier.
The look of horror on Alicia’s face was perfect. The rest of the laugh burst its way out of Nathan, battling tears.
He’d given away all his savings.
“I gave it to the people, and now all I have...” He clicked over to his Gwaiicoin wallet. “... is a hell of a lot of eminence.”
“So you didn’t divest. You—”
“Invested. And if this crash turns around...”
“Oh, Nathan, what have you done?”
He slumped back, shaking his head, but smiling.
“I don’t know. But just maybe...”
He turned to look at the city skyline, picturing the fountaining flow of currencies: money, power, influence and, joining them, a quality that those other media had never been able to carry: trust.
“Maybe,” he murmured, half to himself, “I’ve found a new way to be rich.”
THE CHAMELEON’S GLOVES
Yoon Ha Lee
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 14