No, this was not good at all, and it would be Crypto who would have to find a solution. Because, of course, that was who Lupanov really was.
* * *
The solution was obvious to the Bees, of course.
You must launch the attack! A Bee shrilled.
Now! Without delay! B Bee echoed in his booming bass.
Crypto jumped; even after all these years, such sudden interruptions still sometimes took him by surprise. In this case, he was doubly shocked, because the Bees might be right.
Indeed, the situation was becoming too complicated – Adversego was doing who knew what on his air-gapped system; the Russ Task Force was beavering away and might discover a vulnerability in the Russ blockchain – perhaps had even stumbled on the flaw Crypto had built into it. What if the FSS had infiltrated the task force? They would then know of the flaw as well, and could patch the Russ blockchain before Crypto launched his attack. What then? All his plans would lie in ruins.
But it was still too early to launch the attack – even another few weeks would make an enormous –
Idiot! B Bee boomed. Idiot! Idiot! IDIOT! Later will always seem better! But later will be too late when suddenly you have handcuffs on your wrists!
Crypto could not argue with that. But he also needed to think, and the Bees were making that impossible. What was the balance between opportunity and risk? And if the time was now, how would his detailed plans for the attack need to be adjusted? With the Bees in hot pursuit, he stumbled off to his exercise bike.
* * *
Crypto was beyond exhausted; he had never ridden so long and so hard. But the effort had produced a solution and, with that result, great relief.
He must assume the Bees were right: it was time to launch the simultaneous attacks on BankCoin and the Russ he had been planning for so many years. Later would be incrementally better but not crucially so. Suddenly, the culmination of his ten-year quest was before him. Now that he had overruled his natural caution, he found himself elated. Just a few final actions, and then he could at last rest and watch – simply observe as multiple waves of financial catastrophe circled the world, governments collapsing in their wake. The sense of relief that enveloped him was so enormous that even the Bees left him alone for a few hours.
Later that day, he had the chance to share his good news; it was time for the weekly meeting of his general staff. He looked forward to the joy it would bring to those who had followed him so faithfully and for so long.
Crypto browsed on to the Tor site where their meetings were held. As always, there would be no video and each participant’s messages would be encrypted on transmission and decrypted on receipt. As well they must since he and his lieutenants were plotting nothing less than the takeover of the developed world.
Comrades, he typed. It is my pleasure to inform you that the day we have awaited for so long grows very near. I cannot yet share the details, but be assured that you will know them very soon.
There was an explosion of enthusiastic responses; Crypto waited until the last had scrolled across his screen.
Indeed, Comrades, he typed, the day grows nigh. But we must not let that distract us from our normal preparations. So, I now ask you to make your status reports. Comrade Cronkite, will you begin please?
With pleasure, Comrade Chairman, the director of communications responded. I am pleased to report the systems of every news agency on our target list have been penetrated. When you give the word, your announcement will be broadcast to billions of people across the world.
Excellent. And now from General Guderian.
Comrade Chairman, the troops are ready and awaiting your call. In the United States, the militias are well armed and eager to overthrow a government they hate and distrust. Throughout Europe, most recently, we have harnessed the zeal of anti-immigrant groups to our cause. In the Russian Federation, the old-line communist guard chafes under the trappings of pseudo-democracy as the economy collapses. Meanwhile, the mad dictator, Denikin, can only think of playing with his toy soldiers abroad. The timing could not be better.
And so, the reports continued. Crypto was pleased. His forces were as ready as they would ever be.
* * *
Crypto was exhausted after the emotional rollercoaster of a day. Time for bed. But first, a final glance at his countdown clock. He tapped a few keys and a tired but triumphant smile spread across his face. The hand on his countdown clock now stood at the eleven o’clock position. Even the Bees were silent. For once, he could say without reservation that life was good.
He turned away from his laptop, but then a soft ding! called him back. He looked at the time – right. That would be his evening BankCoin Google alert. Reviewing it could wait till morning. But habit won out, and he opened the alert instead.
With a lurch, he jolted into full awareness, shocked not only by the title of the story that confronted him but by the sudden, furious return of the Bees and their full-throated chorus, all in full cry.
He clicked on the story title that had grabbed him by the throat and saw a picture of a familiar face – one with a moustache and goatee and framed with long, stringy, black hair. He looked something like an overweight Frank Zappa holding a laptop.
The horrifying title of the story read, “Head Mutha Forks BankCoin.”
Chapter 41
Muthas of Invention
It took the better part of a day for Crypto to understand exactly what had happened. Shame on him – as the Bees were quick to note – he’d been paying too little attention to the BankCoin software development community of late. That had seemed reasonable. There wasn’t – or shouldn’t have been – much going on there. The last thing the banks wanted after switching over to the blockchain was for anyone to tinker with it unnecessarily. Maintain it, yes. Fix bugs, certainly. But otherwise, please! Just leave it alone!
But that meant there was nothing new and cool for the developers to do. With the long, high-pressure sprint to the launch date months past, camaraderie within the community had broken down. Everybody was bored, and flame wars over minutia were becoming common. All of which, Crypto now realized, had provided the perfect opening for a group of BankCoin competitors to make its move.
Shame on him, too, for not paying enough attention to the business landscape. He’d been dimly aware that the big investment banks – IBs as they were sometimes called – were furious at being shut out of the BankCoin system. It was, of course, entirely their own fault. Back when BankCoin was still just a proposal, First Manhattan Bank had courted the IBs energetically, inviting them to participate as equals. But the IBs were working on their own alt coin network and took a pass. They believed their approach was superior and would be finished sooner. It ended up being neither, allowing BankCoin to sweep the field. It also allowed the banks, now victorious, to withdraw their invitation to the IBs to join the BankCoin network. That left the IBs licking their wounds and trying to figure out how to get back in the game.
The reason it mattered, of course, was money. With trillions of dollars now changing hands on BankCoin, big banks were making good money on transaction fees. True, the IBs weren’t barred from the marketplace entirely. They could present transactions to the banks, who would then process them on the IBs’ behalf. The banks would even share a piece of their fee – an insultingly small amount: just five percent.
Clearly, at least to the IBs, this situation could not stand. After BankCoin became successful, they formed an alliance with the goal of devising a strategy to turn the tables on the banks. One approach they considered was to cry foul to the regulators, saying the banks were violating the antitrust laws by denying the IBs the ability to become equal participants in the BankCoin network. But following that route would take years, and the IBs would miss out on enormous profits in the meantime. And besides, they had no desire to see the feds adopt regulations that might restrict their own activiti
es if they succeeded in defeating the banks.
Having failed once to develop a blockchain-based system at great expense, the IBs had no appetite for starting all over again. But wait – one of them suggested – why not simply fork BankCoin? In other words, copy the BankCoin software line for line and use it to create an IB blockchain network that was identical to BankCoin in every respect except one: the IBs would control it.
It was a brilliant idea. Anyone, anytime, anywhere, had the legal right to download and use the BankCoin platform and related tools for free, because they were open source software. And BankCoin customers could move their accounts without having to get used to anything new. Come to us! the investment bankers could say to the entire world. Use our network instead – for less!
That was the clincher. The IBs enjoyed much higher profit margins, so they could afford to undercut the banks – even run at a loss for a while. Eventually, the banks would have to either beg their way into the IB network, welcome the IBs into theirs as equal partners, or agree to merge the two networks. Then transaction fees could go back up, and life would go on.
Carrying out the first stage of the plan was easy enough. You didn’t need to be a BankCoin genius to copy the banks’ blockchain and wallet system software. After that, though, things would be different. The software might be free, but it was complex. Each of the IBs would need a team of experienced BankCoin developers to keep its new system running smoothly once billions of dollars a day was changing hands.
That would be a challenge. The BankCoin software development community was loyal and tight. Anyone helping a bunch of filthy rich Wall Street investment bankers stab the BankCoin project in the back would become an instant pariah in the open source world.
Leaving a community based on a disagreement over a technical issue, though, would be entirely different. That would be a matter of programming principle! And that’s where Head Mutha came in.
Mutha was instantly recognizable anywhere he went because at the onset of puberty he became infatuated with the music of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. Ever since he first heard “Peaches en Regalia” on his headphones, he’d done everything he could to emulate the famed composer/musician in facial hair and clothing. He achieved considerable success in that ambition. When he turned eighteen, he legally changed his name to Head Mutha.
Head Mutha had other distinctive traits. They included a fanatical belief that most technical things should be performed in one way – his – and no other, as well as a willingness to engage in the most spectacularly abusive online arguments with anyone who disagreed. Those traits were not unique in the programming community.
Milton Blefescu, the chief information officer of Silvermensch Sax, the most powerful IB of them all, had never heard of Head Mutha. But he knew programmers and their idiosyncrasies and believed he could use that knowledge to solve the IB’s hiring problem. All he needed was a suitable point of contention to exploit. He deployed several members of his staff to scan the BankCoin discussion logs looking for a possible division to work with. With Head Mutha, they hit pay dirt.
The technical matter at issue was beautifully arbitrary and utterly insignificant. The BankCoin software needed to be tweaked to reflect a minor change in regulatory compliance requirements. There were two obvious ways to alter the code. To any objective observer, either approach would work equally well, and there was no technical advantage to using A instead of B. But it was necessary to choose only one of the two. The Silvermensch Sax employee reviewing the BankCoin change logs noticed that Head Mutha had put in a “pull request” to upload a piece of code based on alternative A into the BankCoin blockchain. In an accompanying note, Mutha stated that if anyone thought alternative B was a better choice, they were too big an idiot to have anything to do with BankCoin.
These facts were duly reported to Blefescu, who recognized in them the perfect opportunity. Now, on to tactics.
Blefescu happened to be a fan of the satirist Jonathan Swift as well as the history of computer programming. Both reminded him of the section of Gulliver’s Travels in which Lemuel Gulliver reported on the endless, bloody rebellion launched by those Lilliputians who believed that hard-boiled eggs must only be opened at the large end rather than at the royally mandated smaller end. For generations, the Big Endians and the Small Endians had fought and died over this sacred principle. Real-life engineers would later fight as passionately over the otherwise arbitrary decision whether bits and bytes should be ordered from the greatest or the least significant number. The latter adopted the name Big Endians, and their opponents perforce became the Small Endians.
Blefescu designated proponents of Head Mutha’s alternative as the Big Endians. He ordered half his staff to go online to stoke the flames in favor of the Small Endian cause, calling Head Mutha the most clueless coder the world had ever seen. The other half was assigned to defend the technical elegance and moral superiority of the Big Endian approach, using equally abusive language. And everyone was tasked with piling on any BankCoin developer foolish enough to weigh in.
Within twenty-four hours, the BankCoin community was hopelessly divided, and within forty-eight, Silvermensch Sax and the other IBs had recruited Head Mutha and enough other top BankCoin programmers away with eye-popping salary offers to announce their new Big Endian blockchain-based payment network.
The bond traders on the IB strategy team wanted to call the new network GreedCoin, but saner heads prevailed. iBetterBankCoin would play much better, the marketing guys argued, and besides, the similarity in name would really piss off the banks. The second point won over the bond traders.
The part of the press release the IBs issued that drove the banks truly berserk was the announcement that BankCoin holders who signed up to the new network within sixty days would pay no transaction fees for the first six months. They signed up in droves. By the end of the day, the BankCoin system was losing market share at the rate of more than one percent an hour and rising.
Reading the accounts online left Crypto rocking slowly back and forth, moaning and clutching his head in pain as if he was being swarmed by a cloud of attacking, shrieking banshees. Which was not far from the truth.
* * *
The pressure on Crypto was now intense. To the good, the Wall Street pundits predicted the BankCoin and iBetterBankCoin networks would merge within weeks and perhaps days. But on the technical side, he had no way of knowing whether the IBs had made changes that would prevent him from taking the iBetterBankCoin network down, because only IB employees had access to the forked software. His strategy depended not only on taking down the entire Western financial infrastructure but also on the absence of another system capable of immediately replacing it. Until the two networks merged – assuming they did – he could not strike. And the Bees were driving him insane.
* * *
It took all of Crypto’s powers of persuasion and persistence, but at last he brought the Bees back under some degree of control. But their terms were harsh: Frank Adversego must be stopped before he discovered Crypto’s plan. And just in case, Crypto must acquire a gun. As part of his truce with the Bees, he agreed to order a 3D printer and download the plans for a disposable gun from the Dark Web. Anything to buy more time.
Crypto was also being plagued by a strange dream, one he could not understand. Every night, he was forced to watch an invisible magician doing card tricks. He knew the magician was there, because he could see a top hat, magic wand, and a pair of white gloves. At the end of the dream, the gloves would shuffle the deck one last time and then spread it fan-wise across a table. Finally, they would select two cards and place them side by side, face up, on the table. Just before the dream ended, three elegantly handwritten words would appear below them. Those words were always the same: Pick a card. The cards, too, were always the same: the king of spades and the queen of hearts.
It made no sense.
Chapter 42
Squirrel!
Frank felt uneasy after his weekly Russ task force meeting. Several weeks before, the president had ordered NSA developers to work non-stop to develop malware to conduct the attack conceived by Frank. Today, Dix had told the team the software had been completed, and that the president had authorized final preparations to conduct the attack.
What was troubling Frank was the prospect of retaliation. If the Russians decided the Russ was the victim of a cyberattack, as they eventually would, they would suspect the United States, no matter how hard it was to trace the hack back to its source. What could be a better way to retaliate than by launching an attack on BankCoin? The Kremlin had access to some of the best black hats in the world. It would be absurd vanity to assume they would not succeed where he had failed, finding a fatal flaw in the blockchain most of the financial world now relied on.
So far, he hadn’t raised his concern during a task force meeting. Counterattacks weren’t part of the group’s remit. Now that a strike on the Russ might be imminent, though, he felt he needed to make his concerns known to someone. He typed them up and sent them off to Colonel Dix.
* * *
Whoever was messing with Frank’s mind in New York had broadened his attack. The same odd events were now occurring at his condo in Washington. And in both places, they were becoming more disturbing.
Last week, he’d reached into his closet in New York for a blue blazer and found it slashed to ribbons. When he returned to Washington, his new loafers were right where they should be. But they were charred beyond recognition. This was getting hard to ignore. But he was uncertain what to do to make it stop – quit the bank? Resign from the task force? Maybe it had nothing to do with either – why didn’t whoever it was tell him what they wanted him to do or stop doing?
The Blockchain Revolution Page 30