Start at the Prologue and First Chapter here.

“Open it!” Marla said over the phone.

“Don’t you want me to wait till you’re over here the next time?”

“No, today’s your birthday, so go ahead.”

Frank looked at the package and frowned. He gave it a gentle shake, but heard nothing.

“I hope you didn’t get me anything alive this time,” he said.

“Well, not exactly. But anyway, you know you like Thor.”

“Okay, I do. But I don’t want to be running a menagerie here.”

“Quit carping and open it.”

“Okay, okay.” He peeled the paper off and looked at the picture on the front of the box. “A bird feeder? Why a bird feeder?”

“Because you always got a kick out of Julius visiting you on your porch. Maybe he’ll come back if he sees the feeder. And if not, there should be other birds in your neighborhood.”

He did miss Julius. After the crow flew away with Frank’s thumb drive he’d never seen the bird again. So why not?

“Well, that’s true. This was very thoughtful of you. I’ll figure out a way to put it up this afternoon.”

“That’s great. Let me know what kinds of birds show up. Love you.”

“Will do, and you too.” He hung up and took the bird feeder out of the box. It looked like it came with the right hardware to either mount it on his railing or hang it from the porch above his. He walked out on his porch and found it clamped easily onto the railing. He went back inside, ordered a ten-pound sack of mixed bird seed on line, and promptly forgot about his present.

*  *  *

Two days later, Frank was on a flight from New York to San Francisco for his first meeting as the bank’s representative on the GFBS Foundation board. Faithful to his usual anti-social habits,  he donned his headphones even before he walked on the plane, thereby erecting an early defensive perimeter. An uninvited chat with a stranger on the jet way was unwelcome enough; the prospect of being trapped for hours on end with a talkative seat mate was truly alarming.

And yet despite his headphones and studiously averted gaze, someone nudged his shoulder after he sat own. Hopefully it was just  accidental contact while someone was settling into his own seat. But then someone nudged him again. He turned and looked with surprise into the bulging eyes of Dirk Delhohn.

Frank took his earphones off. “What takes you to San Francisco?”

“The same as you, of course. The GFBS Foundation Board meeting,” Delhohn saw that Frank was puzzled. “The Chair of the Technical Steering Committee is given an automatic board seat. But not on behalf of their employer – to represent the developer community.”

“Ah – got it. I guess I’ve heard of that kind of arrangement before. But I didn’t realize you were the Chair of the TSC.”

“Yes,” Delhohn said. “For all my past sins, this is my reward.”

“I don’t follow you,” Frank said.

“Where to begin?” Delhohn said.

Drat! Frank thought. I walked right into that. He looked longingly at the headphones in his lap.

“First,” Delhohn continued, “I have the same duties as any other board member. But the developers believe I am supposed to be their advocate to the Board regarding every real and imagined issue they can imagine, yes? Second, board meetings are confidential. I cannot share anything I hear with the other developers, but they refuse to believe that. And last, I am obliged to support every board decision whether I agree with it or not.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “I can see that would be a problem. How bad is it?”

“Perhaps not as bad as I make it sound; I sometimes exaggerate, you know? And it is amusing to see how willing the mighty directors are to kiss the butts of the developers. You would think the suits worked for the programmers rather than the other way around.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, of course, in any brand-new technology, the top programmers are in huge demand. The best developers can name their price and terms. They can even refuse to work on a project if they don’t approve of it.”

“What do you mean, ‘approve’ of it?”

“Well, for instance, if a project picks an open source license the developer does not like. At one of the first GFBS Foundation board meetings, I heard an executive VP from one of the largest IT companies in the world say that if the Board did not pick the right open source license for the Foundation’s code, he would never be able to get his developers to work on the project. And he was probably right.”

“Interesting,” Frank said. “By the way, if you don’t mind my asking, where did you grow up? I’ve been trying to figure out your accent and can’t place it.”

Delhohn reached for his headphones. “Denmark. But I have lived in this country many years now. Will you excuse me? I have much work to catch up on.”

“Of course,” Frank said, as they each donned their headphones. He was learning to like this guy, quirks and all.

*  *  *

Thirty miles from Frank’s destination, Josh Peabody leaned back in his office chair and took in the view from his Menlo Park office window, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It had been a long stay in the business wilderness after his partners at TrashTalk LLP, the venture capital fund he had co-founded, tossed him out. True, his investment in iBalls.com had turned out to be a debacle of epic proportions. But hey, here in the Valley people said failure was an invaluable learning opportunity. Bless their hearts, the investment community even believed it. Like they did almost any other outlandish idea you fed them.

Anyway, it was great to be back, and he owed it all to Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he was. Since bitcoin took off, over a thousand startups had been launched to issue their own cryptocurrencies. Many of these “alt coins” – as in, alternatives to bitcoin – had taken off in their own right. Even some of the most ridiculous ones. His favorite was the one issued to pay for your dental visits. Now there was a problem the world never knew it needed to solve with a cryptocurrency!

Yes, without Nakamoto, he could never have raised another fund. And at half a billion dollars, CryptoBoom! LLP wasn’t even one of the biggest funds. But every dollar in it was dedicated to investing in cryptocurrencies, and in the startup companies that continuously popped up around them, like crabgrass in an over-fertilized lawn after a heavy rain.

That made Peabody a big deal again, and he was enjoying every minute of being back on top. So far, he’d invested in twenty-two alt coin companies and in another dozen startups providing everything from cryptocurrency wallets, to analysis of crypto currency markets, to cryptocurrency trading exchanges, and much more. He hadn’t had this much fun, or made so much money, since the days before the Internet bubble burst.

Best of all, it was just like old times. You could make money on any fool scheme. He swung back to his screen and opened his favorite cryptocurrency news site to check out how this week’s ICO’s were doing. He loved ICOs – initial coin offerings – even though their best days were already over. Incredibly, the Securities and Exchange Commission had taken years to finally decide to pronounce the obvious – that when people bought alt coins from an issuing company, they were making an investment, and that alt coin offerings should be regulated just like any stock offering. Up till then, it was like the Wild West, when you could sell – and claim you were going to do – just about anything. Lots of people still were, setting up new companies in places like the Cayman Islands, even though legally that didn’t make any difference at all if you then raised money in the United States.

Still, there was always a silver lining to everything, if you knew where to look for it. Now that the regulators were watching, somebody had to help entrepreneurs stay on the right side of the line while still raising money. Silicon Valley law firms and accountants were all over that, of course. And profiting wildly in the process. But that still left room for someone to push the marketing side – the yin of salesmanship to the yang of legal compliance. So, he had also launched an ICO underwriting firm, teaching startups how to set up and hype their ICOs without going over the line; or not too much, anyway. He was making money hand over fist there, too, helping to sell the most ridiculous things imaginable.

And people could imagine some pretty ridiculous things. Take the ICO he pulled off yesterday. His underwriting firm had received a commission of ten percent of the amount raised, and his CryptoBoom! Fund had bought ten percent of the offering itself. The alt coins his client issued were intended to be used solely for the anonymous purchase of pornography – even child pornography. What a great idea!

Peabody clicked through to an exchange site. Sure enough, the value of his fund’s investment in BitchCoin had already more than quadrupled. Ka Ching!

*  *  *

Author Notes for this Chapter:

Readers who have been following Frank ever since the first book (Faithful Friends of Frank?) will spot two familiar items in this week’s chapter. The first is a hint to the introduction of this book’s animal character (following in the paw and claw prints of Lilly, the morbidly obese Corgi (Alexandria Project), Molly, the malevolent cat (Lafayette Campaign), Thor, the secretive tortoise (Doodlebug War), and Julius, the trainable crow (Turing Trial).

Anyone want to guess the species du livre for this book? Hint: it’s not as obvious as it seems.

The second is the return of that old scoundrel, Josh Peabody, the amoral (or worse) venture capitalist that Frank skillfully played to help him work his way back to the real culprits behind The Alexandria Project. The reason for introducing him here is that, unlike many other technologies, a big part of the story about blockchain is the hysteria it has inspired – sincere, in the case of many of its polito-technical proponents, and cynical on the part of the swindlers, and their close cousins in more expensive clothes, the investment community. My His underwriting firm had received a commission of ten percent of the amount raised, and his CryptoBoom! Fund had bought ten percent of the offering itself. My plan is that Josh will be the window into a subplot, still to be thought up, that will explore and satirize that part of the blockchain ecosystem.

Coming soon: Next week, you’ll meet our new animal character. And the week after that, you’ll learn why the banks are all over blockchain technology.

 

Continue to Chapter 6 here