Start at the Prologue and First Chapter here
It took the better part of a day for Crypto to understand exactly what had happened. Shame on him – he’d been paying too little attention to the BankCoin software development community lately. Busy as he was making his final preparations, that had seemed excusable; there wasn’t – or shouldn’t have been – much going on there. The last thing the banks wanted after switching over to BankCoin was for anyone to tinker with the software unnecessarily. Maintain it, yes. Fix bugs, certainly. But otherwise, please! Just leave it alone!
So, there was nothing cool and new for developers to do. With the long, high-pressure sprint to the launch date now months in the past, camaraderie within the community was breaking down. Everybody was bored, and flame wars over minutia were reaching epic proportions. All of which, Crypto now realized, provided the perfect opening for a group of enemies of BankCoin 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 them vigorously, inviting them to participate as equals. But the IBs were already working on their own alt coin program, and took a pass. They believed their approach would be better and finished sooner. It ended up being neither, with the result that BankCoin swept the field. Worse yet, the IBs were no longer welcome. 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. Lots of it, and not just for a central authority, like First Manhattan. Every time a dollar changed hands on the BankCoin blockchain, the banks on either side of the transaction split a fee equal to three tenths of a cent. Those small amounts added up to very large ones for the major banks. True, the IBs weren’t barred from the marketplace entirely. They could present transactions to the banks, who would then carry them out on the IBs’ behalf. The banks would even share a piece of their transaction fee – an insultingly small amount: just five percent.
Clearly, at least to the IBs, this situation had to change, and they came together to form an alliance to make that happen. One strategy they considered was to cry foul to the regulators, saying the banks were violating the antitrust laws by keeping them out of the BankCoin network. But following that route would take years, and the IBs would miss out on enormous profits in the meantime. And besides, the IBs had no desire to see more regulations that might get in their way as well.
After trying and failing to develop their own blockchain-based system at great expense, the IBs had no appetite for pursuing that route again. But wait – one of them suggested – why not simply fork the BankCoin software? In other words, start their own blockchain using exactly the same software the banks were using. Lots of alt coin blockchains had been forked in the past, including bitcoin itself. None of the banks could criticize the technology, and it wouldn’t cost much to put in place. Best of all, there would be no technical problem with completing transactions between the two systems, because both were using the same blockchain software. Bank customers could move their accounts to an IB blockchain network with ease.
It could be easily done. Like the other alt coin blockchains, BankCoin was built on open source software. Anyone, anytime, anywhere, had the legal right to use and further develop the same software, without paying anyone a dime. Come to us! The investment bankers could say. Do your business over here instead. And we’ll charge you less!
It was a brilliant idea, especially because the IBs enjoyed much higher profit margins than the banks. They could afford to undercut the banks – even run their blockchain service at a loss for as long as it took for the banks to come around. Eventually, they would have to either beg their way into the IB network, welcome the IBs into theirs as equal partners, or simply merge the two networks. Then the transaction fees could go back up, and life would go on, with a now unbeatable monopoly in place.
Carrying out the first stage of the plan was easy enough. You didn’t need to be a BankCoin genius to copy the BankCoin blockchain and wallet system software. But that would only be the beginning. The BankCoin software might be free, but it was also complex. Each of the IBs needed a team of experienced BankCoin developers with deep understanding of the BankCoin software who could keep their version running smoothly once billions of dollars a day started running through the IB’s competing network.
And there was the rub. The BankCoin community was a tight one, and the participating developers were loyal to the project. Anyone that crossed over to help a bunch of filthy rich Wall Street investment bankers stab the BankCoin blockchain in the back would become an instant pariah in the technical world. Even someone jumping ship for an enormous salary would never be forgiven or allowed into an open source project again.
Leaving a community based on a technical issue, though, would be something else again. That would be a matter of programming principle! And that’s where Head Mutha came in.
Mutha was instantly recognizable anywhere he went, because in his case the onset of puberty was accompanied by an instant infatuation with the music of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Ever since he first heard Peaches en Regalia on a set of headphones he’d done everything he could to emulate Frank Zappa 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 some other distinctive traits. They included a fanatical belief that some technical things should be done in one way (his) and no other, and a willingness to engage in the most spectacularly abusive on-line arguments imaginable with anyone who disagreed. As it happens, that trait is not uncommon in the programming community.
Milton Blefescu, the Chief Information Officer of Silverman Sax, the most powerful IB bank of them all, had never heard of Head Mutha. But he did know 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 issue involved was beautifully arbitrary and insignificant. The BankCoin software needed to be tweaked to accommodate a change in bank regulations. It really didn’t matter whether you chose alternative A or alternative B to accomplish the very minor task at hand. To any objective observer, either approach would work equally well, and there was no performance to using one over the other. But it was necessary to choose just one in order to move forward. The Silverman 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. At the same time, Mutha added an the offhand comment that if anyone thought alternative B was a better choice they were way too big a loser to ever have anything to do with BankCoin again.
These facts were duly reported to Blefescu, who recognized in them the perfect opportunity. Now, on to strategy.
Blefescu happened to be a fan of both the satirist Jonathan Swift as well as the history of computer programming. Both pointed him to the section of Gulliver’s Travels in which Lemuel Gulliver reports on the endless, bloody rebellions launched by Lilliputions who believed that hard-boiled eggs should only be opened at the big end, rather than the royally-mandated small 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 an otherwise-arbitrary decision whether bits and bytes should be ordered from the most or the least significant ends.
Blefescu designated alternative A as the Big End and alternative B as the Small End. He ordered half his staff to go on line 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. More importantly, everyone was ordered to pile on any BankCoin developer foolish enough to enter the fray.
Within twenty-four hours, the BankCoin community was hopelessly divided and howling, and within forty-eight, Silverman Sax and the other IBs had recruited enough top BankCoin programmers away with eye-popping salary offers to announce their new Small Endian blockchain-based payment network.
The bond traders on the IB strategy team wanted to call their new network GreedCoin, but saner heads prevailed, and iBetterBankCoin was agreed upon instead. Besides, the bond traders were told, the similarity in name would really piss off the banks. That carried the day.
What really drove the banks berserk, though, was the decision of the IBs not to charge any transaction fees for the first six months as an incentive for customers to switch over. Which they did, in droves. By the end of the day, the BankCoin system was losing market share at the rate of more than one percent per hour.
Reading the accounts on-line 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 insects. Which, in his own way, he was.
* * *
The pressure on Crypto was now intense. To the good, the Wall Street pundits predicted the BankCoin and iBetterBankCoin networks would merge within weeks, if not days. But on the technical side, Crypto had no insight into what was going on at all. Were the IBs making subtle changes to their software to give them an advantage over the banks? He had no way of knowing, because for the time being, only employees of the IBs had access to the iBetterBankCoin system. He was not yet quite ready to launch his attack, and already too much of the financial world had switched to iBetterBankCoin for his plan to work. Success depended not only on taking down all of the financial infrastructure, but being sure that there was no alternative to immediately replace 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 eventually he brought the Bees around. Eventually they agreed that for the time being it would be futile to launch the attack. But their terms were harsh: he must turn up the heat on Frank Adversego to stop him from discovering Crypto’s plan while his attacks were delayed. And he must buy a gun in case Frank succeeded. They reached a compromise at last, with Crypto agreeing to buy a 3D printer and download the plans for a disposable gun from the Dark Web.
Crypto was also being plagued by a new dream, one he did 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 his top hat, magic wand, and white gloves moving. The gloves would pick up the cards, shuffle them, and spread them on a table. Periodically, the gloves would select two cards and hold them up, displaying them side by side. When they did, a single line of elegant, white, handwritten text spread from left to right beneath the displayed cards. Pick a card, it read. The two cards were always the King of Spades and the Queen of Hearts. It made no sense.
* * *
Author’s Notes for this Week:
I enjoyed writing this chapter, and I hope readers enjoy it, too. The Big Endian/Small Endian battle was real. The can read about the technical aspects here. The text from Gullivers Travels reads as follows:
It began upon the following Occasion. It is allowed on all Hands, that the primitive way of breaking Eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger End: But his present Majesty’s Grand-father, while he was a Boy, going to eat an Egg, and breaking it according to the ancient Practice, happened to cut one of his Fingers. Whereupon the Emperor his Father published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penaltys, to break the smaller End of their Eggs. The People so highly resented this Law, that our Histories tell us there have been six Rebellions raised on that account; wherein one Emperor lost his Life, and another his Crown. These civil Commotions were constantly fomented by the Monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the Exiles always fled for Refuge to that Empire.
You will note a certain name similarity between Lilliput’s rival and the CIO of Silverman Sax, which may also suggest a certain preeminent investment bank.
For those unfamiliar with the world of open source development, the behavior of my fictional developers is not too far off the mark, either.
Besides having some furn for both author and readers, why include this at all?
First, to add some action. Second, to build some suspense leading up to the climax. Third, to put more pressure on poor Crypto. And Fourth, well, you’ll have to wait.
Next Week: Frank fumbles closer to discovering Crypto’s plans.
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