by Dan Conway
Chapter Thirteen
The Edge of a Cliff
Even while I was working long hours on our deregulation campaign, Ethereum was a continual presence on my mind. I found it ironic to be working for a centralized company trying to eliminate centralized regulations by pulling the right levers in a centralized political power structure while I was obsessed with a technology that functioned in the exact opposite manner. The only way to change the rules or manipulate the Ethereum blockchain was through transparent consensus. No oily lobbying or campaign contributions could foul things up for everyone else
The concept of blockchain had made its way into the popular business lexicon. Few knew what it was, and the few who did made a clear distinction between private business blockchains (good) that were centralized in key ways, and the public blockchains (bad) like Bitcoin and Ethereum which weren’t controlled by any one person or group. The latter were considered a little dangerous, according to those wise enough to avoid edgy bullshit.
I was happy that the movement was catching on. But the more powerful emotion was fear of missing out.
In the meantime, once again my work status was deteriorating. The consultants were positioning themselves as the company’s savior, at my expense. I noticed the big cheeses hedging in their communications on the pieces of the campaign I was working on.
Normally, when something went well in California, they would send something up the chain, which included a thank you to me. Recently, I hadn’t been mentioned in those notes. You didn’t need to be a Sovietologist to know that if a member of the Politburo was omitted from the group photos, you’d eventually find their body in the dumpster out back. Such was the import of being left off of emails up the chain at Acme. Without constantly feeding the beast, you would eventually grow weak and lose sight of the pack.
***
The great thing about the modern world is that you can quickly become an expert on anything. While walking the dog, I listened to podcasts about Ethereum. When stealing any free time at work, I read about Ethereum. I rejiggered my Twitter feed to follow mostly Ethereum-related contacts. At my usual Friday night Twelve Step meeting, I pulled aside a shaken-looking newcomer. He also happened to be a software engineer. I didn’t ask him about his recovery. I asked him whether he’d heard of Ethereum.
At night I played Ethereum-focused YouTube videos on the big screen. My favorites were from DevCon 1, which took place in London in November 2015—the first congregation of the embryonic Ethereum community. The event had a Woodstock feel. By then I knew all about Ethereum’s creator, but these videos were the first time I laid eyes on Vitalik Buterin. This was the person who prompted me to write three Medium blogs, two of which I deleted because they were too fawning, and I’m a grown man. I’m obviously no genius, but I have a curious faith that I can spot one. I believed Vitalik was the real deal.
Vitalik Buterin was born in Russia and grew up in Canada from the age of six. His favorite childhood toy was Excel. He learned about Bitcoin from his computer scientist father when he was seventeen and attending the University of Waterloo in Ontario. He started Bitcoin Magazine on the side to explore and write about the cryptocurrency space. Unsatisfied with Bitcoin’s limitations, he dropped out of college and took it upon himself to build a new blockchain and an entirely new computer language.
While traveling the world, lodging at various crypto outposts in Zug, Switzerland, the Philippines, and Barcelona, carrying little with him other than his clothes (cat shirts were a favorite), a supply of green tea and a laptop computer, he created Ethereum. Some of the brightest cryptographic minds flocked to Vitalik right away, forming a core of Ethereum co-founders and early disciples. Others, mainly Bitcoin maximalists with a vested interest in Bitcoin’s limited blockchain philosophy and the price of its token, didn’t like the competition. They called him a Judas to Satoshi’s vision, a scammer, a fraud. It wasn’t just that these guys were wrong. It was that they were wrong and complete fucking assholes.
Vitalik visited the Bay Area regularly. I learned that he was coming to my neck of the woods soon. That night, I raced down 101, weaving in and out of traffic, determined not to be late to my first Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup. As I entered the Plug and Play incubator office in Sunnyvale, I looked forward to seeing the man in the flesh for the first time.
After a few clumsy words of welcome by an engineer playing host, Vitalik took the stage. It was the exact opposite of how a rock star would enter an arena full of adoring fans. After the organizer’s, “We are ready for you, Vitalik,” Vitalik walked up in complete silence. He had to plug in his computer so we could all see the screen. For an entire minute, the cord didn’t work. More than a hundred of us watched Vitalik and the AV guy mumbling to each other, fiddling with the cord and looking at something on the laptop screen. Finally his deck was up, he turned his head toward us and I could take the full measure of the man.
He had a big head and a skinny body. He was pimply, like many twenty-one-year-olds. He was wearing a cat shirt, sandals, and jeans that looked a size too small. His eyes drew me in. They were intelligent, far reaching, empathetic. I hate the term “old soul,” which is normally used to describe the secretly miserable, but Vitalik looked like one.
I’d seen the merciless attacks on him from the Bitcoin crowd, the Twitter abuse and other nasty trolling. He always turned the other cheek. Many of these assaults had a kernel of technical critique wrapped in aggression. Vitalik ignored the vile and calmly, non-aggressively responded to the technical critique. His responses were complete, brilliant and devastating. Call me Homer if you like. I was starting to think this guy could go down in the history books.
The questions directed at Vitalik came from cypherpunks fluent in crypto economics, enthusiasts, experts, and academics. Some were very old, some were very young. Imagine the cantina scene in Star Wars. It was a delightfully odd group, without a single big personality pushing business cards.
The first question was something like this: “Vitalik, don’t you think that the Byzantine general’s dilemma could be exploited by the various geographic nodes in a proof of stake architecture? Is there a way to compile the blockchain that is fault tolerant and aligns incentives with the miners?”
I had no idea what they were talking about. I especially didn’t understand Vitalik’s response, which he delivered in an even voice seasoned with small bursts of energy, as if he were connected to a gentle electrical current that gave his face a stutter step every so often. I could read people, and it was obvious that his words allowed this guy who asked the question, and others in the room nodding their heads, to understand something that had previously been elusive. There was something right before their eyes that they had failed to see, even though its logic was indisputable, the same way the equivalence of matter and energy was invisible to scientists before Einstein came along and pointed it out. Had crypto’s Einstein come along?
One after another, they shot him questions, and each time he identified the heart of the matter and dispensed critical wisdom. I wasn’t surprised by Vitalik’s performance. I’d recently read an anecdote in Fortune detailing similar intellectual wizardry. As part of the profile, the writer followed him into a cryptocurrency boot camp at Cornell. The assistant professor was teeing up a difficult logic puzzle. Vitalik offered a solution before the puzzle was fully described. Of course, he was right.
Vitalik’s genius would be critically important for the development of Ethereum, which was completely cutting-edge technology, attempting to do things that were previously considered either impossible or damn near so. He’d be the one shepherding new versions of the blockchain code before it was spun up onto the public net, where it would run independently.
As Vitalik spoke, I thought, Here it is, a technology in real life, in the early stages, that could take on corporations.
***
Occasionally, my Ethereum fever broke, and I wondered if I’d gone off the deep end.
Was my growing, almost
unacknowledged, desire to invest in Ethereum a desperate attempt by a desperate man to find salvation in whatever came his way? Was this how otherwise sane people were scammed out of their nest eggs, through a combination of a too-good-to-be-true opportunity and undiagnosed mental illness?
Most of my friends in tech, the folks working at Google, Apple, and Uber, were dismissive of blockchain, and none of them had heard of Ethereum. A friend broke out in laughter when I said that I was considering investing in cryptocurrency, as if I’d admitted I was going to buy Smurfberries or Scooby Snacks.
I kept thinking of the developers. In the late 1990s, I saw how Macromedia Flash had caught the attention of the most forward-thinking web designers and developers. More than anything else, that is what made Flash such a big hit. Once the smartest developers became obsessed with the product and started using it in new and unexpected ways, it dominated the web graphics market.
Now Ethereum was pulling in the most talented blockchain developers. They were working on hundreds of dApps. They were all decentralized. Once these dApps were released into the blockchain, they weren’t controlled by a headquarters. They were owned by the users of the dApp. All it took was one to hit paydirt to achieve some semblance of widespread adoption. Use of the Ethereum blockchain would skyrocket, as would the value of the ETH token that powered the network.
I’d been living the problem of work, the problem of gatekeepers, my whole life. So I had no problem imagining the benefits of decentralization through blockchain. It became clear to me that the potential value of blockchain could be bigger than virtually anything else ever invented if it was indeed a new platform for the economy, for the world. The scope of its value was almost unfathomable, like trying to get your head around the number of stars in the sky. I wasn’t so naive as to think it would happen overnight. But one of the problems Ethereum was solving was my career. Decentralized work could provide an alternative. So the value of the solution was instantly obvious to me. I speculated that in the years and decades ahead, droves of people—and then everyone—would see its value. Once real dApps were ready to go, and it was hard to know when that day would come, it was a no-brainer. As one of God’s creatures and a thoughtful member of the human race, that thought gave me butterflies. As a greedy speculative investor and recovering pill addict, it gave me a rush.
Chapter Fourteen
Passage
Whenever I read a book or see a movie that covers the first half of the twentieth century, I always wonder what my grandfather, Joe Conway, was doing and thinking at that time. He has always been a mythical, mysterious figure from my family’s past. Maybe it’s because he died so long before I was born. Or maybe it’s because from what little I do know—a handful of biographical facts, a few anecdotes—he was similar to me.
During his youth, the sorrow of departure was the theme of the day in Ireland. Young men and women scraped together money for passage to where they could make a living in distant places, like the United States or Australia. As their ship sailed from the docks, the enormity of their loss was reflected on the faces of their parents, whom they’d likely never see again.
Such was the fate of my grandfather. He left Ireland and arrived in New York in the summer of 1910. He eventually settled in San Francisco, where he met my grandmother and raised a girl and a boy—my father. He owned books of poetry, one of which sits on my nightstand. It is marked up with insights and extemporaneous thoughts. He was a man of letters, like many of the Irish. He received a fine education but had nowhere to use it in his homeland. He had wanted to be a writer, but putting food on the table in America became his focus.
In San Francisco, he found a job in the business office of the San Francisco Water Company, which in those days was a prestigious employer. It was a utility, which provided stability in unstable times. He shepherded his family through the Great Depression with a steady paycheck, reading poetry as release from his day job. He rose through the ranks and became a senior manager.
He defied fate and saved enough to pay for a trip back to Ireland. He planned to depart shortly after his retirement at the age of sixty-five, in 1951. His parents were dead, but he’d see the faces of other family members and friends for the first time in more than thirty years, including his brother James, who had emigrated to England and was also coming home.
Reminders of his coming retirement were cropping up in aches and pains as he exited the streetcar one morning, walked down Polk Street and ascended the stairs of his building at 525 Golden Gate Avenue. The stairs took a little longer than usual. The San Francisco chill was a little colder. He’d picked the right time to leave, he thought as he opened his office door, deposited his hat and coat on the rack and sat down in his work chair. He was sharpest in the mornings, but not today. He stood up from his desk to get a drink of water and was hit by the most violent headache he’d ever felt. Then he dropped dead of a stroke.
He’d waited too long to go home.
***
At 10:15 a.m. on May 15, 2016, I exited my office at Acme California Headquarters in San Francisco after wrapping up a brief call with my team. I could feel the folded papers in the pocket of my sports coat. As I walked down Powell Street and hung a left at Sansome, the sun reflected off the buildings, a neighborhood of skyscrapers and street-level brick and glass-fronted startup workspaces. I loved this city, and I loved this time of morning.
I walked into the hushed Wells Fargo lobby with its marble columns and sixty-foot ceiling like Andy Dupree in The Shawshank Redemption after he escapes from prison and makes his final play. No one could have known that behind my matter-of-fact body language, I was ready to go for broke.
I told the checker what I was there to do. He ushered me to a desk off to the side where I met George, a bushy-tailed twenty-something who was eager to help. I handed him the papers and the instructions to wire money from my Wells Fargo account to Gemini, the digital currency outfit in New York City that was one of the first established players to offer ether, the currency of the Ethereum blockchain.
“How much will you be sending today, Mr. Conway?”
“One hundred thousand dollars.”
I was convinced that Ethereum was the investment of a lifetime, and I couldn’t bear to nibble around the edges. Owning a piece of Ethereum would be like owning a piece of the World Wide Web in 1994, before normal people recognized its value. I was no longer normal. I had seen the light, I’d taken the red pill and there was no going back. One hundred thousand dollars was our entire savings and emergency fund.
He paused for a moment and looked at me with a curious look.
“Ok, that shouldn’t be a problem. What is Gemini, a bank?”
A man has never been readier to answer a question than I was that morning. I reclined in the bank’s chair and explained how this institution would someday be a thing of the past. And if you were smart, George, you’d look into Ethereum and consider buying its token, ether. I wrote it down for him in case he forgot and handed him the folded piece of paper. My modern-day version of “plastics.” He thanked me and got back to punching numbers on his keyboard.
As usual after spouting off about Ethereum, I couldn’t tell if my subject thought I was crazy or just approaching crazy. George excused himself and walked down the hall. I had a sudden fear that he would return with the manager, and I’d be encouraged to just step outside for a moment, where the guard could ensure I didn’t return, while they properly froze my account. Instead he sat back down and said everything was in order, and they were ready to start the wire. The banking machines were cranking up, and the money would leave my account shortly.
My phone vibrated. It was a text from Eileen. I looked at it, and I had the same feeling as when I went to Pill Hill and bought drugs, the same feeling as when I stole a candy bar in third grade. It said, WTF is THIS?!?!? It included a screenshot of an alert notifying her that a wire of $100,000 would be leaving our account shortly, headed to something called Gemini.
I had a
sudden, brutal flashback to when I told Eileen I was going to start drinking again in the spring of 2007. Our good friends Emma and David were getting married in Napa.
After thinking about it for quite some time, I had said, “I’d like to have some wine at the wedding. It’s been a long time, and I know I can handle it. I’m also going to get into great shape.”
She had told me that was a VERY BAD IDEA and stormed out of the room. She did not say she’d divorce me and leave with the kids.
A few weeks later, I made my second and final proclamation: “I’m looking forward to having a glass of wine at the wedding.”
As I took a glorious gulp of chardonnay on the veranda of that winery so many years ago, I looked at the vines and the beautiful people and thought, What a wonderful world. I was delusional. Eileen was devastated.
And now I’d tried to spend all of our money without getting her permission.
I must’ve paused for a moment too long. When I looked up, George was staring at me.
“Is everything ok, Mr. Conway?”
“Yes, George. I need to check something real quickly. Can you please pause the wire for a moment?”
“Sure.” He kept staring at my face, apparently fascinated.