Start at the Prologue and First Chapter here

It made no difference now where Frank was. At home, on the train, or in the tiny office on the perimeter of First Manhattan’s anonymous IT cube farm where he was sitting now. If he was awake – and sometimes even when he was asleep – he was completely immersed in the blockchain. Day by day, he probed deeper into its origins, its evolution, and, most importantly, the ways in which it was being manipulated with fraudulent intent.

But digging deeper didn’t make some aspects of the blockchain any more comprehensible. Frank had long been aware that an almost religious fervor possessed many blockchain proponents. As he spent more time on the Reddit pages where the most zealous blockchain advocates hung out, Frank decided some were simply possessed.

Indeed, the story arc of blockchain eerily recalled the rise of some religions. In 2008, as the global financial infrastructure threatened to collapse, an unknown developer named Satoshi Nakamoto popped up on the Web, posting a brief, nine-page white paper proposing a system to support the transfer of economic value without the involvement of any bank, or the use of any existing currency. Nakamoto never revealed even one personal detail in any of his many communications. A few years later, after “bitcoins” – the cryptocurrency he created – became a reality, he disappeared as mysteriously as he had surfaced.

To this day, no one knew who the enigmatic cryptocurrency prophet was, or where he might now be. Was Nakamoto in fact Japanese? Or even a man? Perhaps he was really a woman, or a secret cabal of multiple developers drawn from the libertarian anarchists who were then obsessed with replacing the crumbling financial system. There were plenty of theories, but no answers. Though some yearned for the return of the crypto-messiah, he, she or they never emerged again.

Frank became dimly aware of a loud rapping sound. He looked up and realized someone was at his office door. He wondered how long they might have been there.

When he opened the door, he recoiled slightly as he found himself staring into a pair of eyes open so wide that the pupils formed lonely islands in a surrounding sea of white.

“Is this still a good time?” the owner of the eyes said.

Frank wondered what time it was, and then realized it didn’t matter. He had no idea who the guy was, or what he was there for, anyway.

“You wanted someone to brief you on the GFBS Project,” the eyes added.

“Right!” Frank said. “Yes! Come on in and have a seat.” Frank took in the rest of the guy’s appearance in as he sat down: dumpy, fifty-ish, wearing a tee shirt, jeans and sandals – with socks. But that was to be expected. This guy actually wrote code. And for an open source software project to boot.

“So, I’m Dirk Delhohn,” Frank’s visitor said, sitting down. He had a slight accent Frank couldn’t place. “I’m the bank’s lead developer on the GFBS project. And you’re Vijay Patel’s replacement on the GFBS Board of Directors, right?”

“That’s right,” Frank said. “I just found out this morning, so anything you can do to put me in the picture would be really helpful.”

“Sure,” Delhohn replied. “How much do you already know?”

“Well,” Frank said, “I know the project’s about two year’s old, and that all the major banks are participating. Also, that the goal is to create a blockchain to support global banking, and that it won’t issue a cryptocurrency, at least externally. But that’s about it.”

“Okay,” Delhohn said, “So, where should I begin?”

“Vijay will fill me in on the bank’s business goals,” Frank said, “so maybe you can fill me in on the technology. Where did it come from to begin with?”

“From the same guy who runs the project, Günter Schwert,” Delhohn replied. “About two and a half years ago, he posted a pretty impressive proof of concept code base on Github. He called that version Venice, and a lot of technical folks liked it.”

Frank had already checked out the GFBS code on Github, a fantastically successful public website where anyone could post software code and see if anyone else took an interest in it. Millions of people did so every year, although only a handful of projects attracted such a large corporate following.

“How come Venice?” Frank asked.

“When he posted the code, Schwert wrote that Venice is where banking as we know it was invented. Sometime in the 1600’s, if I’m remembering right. Anyway, Venice picked up support really quickly in the developer community.”

“What was the appeal?” Frank asked. “There were already lots of other financial blockchains by then.”

“Venice solves a lot of problems bitcoin and some of those other blockchains have, like speed. Bitcoin can only complete seven transactions a second. That’s pathetic, compared to a major credit card system, like Visa, which can process sixty thousand transactions a second. The banking system could never use the current bitcoin platform to replace their existing systems. And Schwert’s architecture is really elegant. That pulled a lot of the best talent in.”

“Who does he work for?” Frank asked.

“No idea.”

“But you work with him, right?”

“Sure,” Delhone said. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve met him. Everything’s done on line. And who cares? The guy’s brilliant.”

Frank cared, but that could wait. “Okay,” he said, “how about the rest of the top programmers? Do they all work for banks?”

“Nope. Like I said, word got around quick that Venice was way cooler than any of the other blockchains out there. Once a few banks took notice and announced they were interested in adopting Venice when it was beefed up, a lot more of the elite programmers started contributing code. Sure, developers from most of the big banks are involved, but like any other really successful open source project, this one’s a meritocracy. Anybody can offer to contribute code, and the best developers rise to the top, no matter who they work for. The top ones are mostly independent programmers.”

“Does that go for the Technical Steering Committee, too?” Frank asked, referring to the small group of elite programmers that decided how the code should evolve, and when a new update was ready to be released.

“You bet. There’s only two other TSC member besides me that work for a bank.”

“Got it,” Frank said. “So, let’s talk more about the code itself. Where do things stand there?”

“We’ve had three major releases so far. The last one was the first to include everything needed to go live, but it still had to be upgraded to handle a full volume of transactions. Schwert called that release London. We’ve been cleaning it up and testing it ever since, and it’s almost ready to go.” Schwert’s eyes somehow managed to open even wider. “Unless things slip, the banks will start transitioning over to it next week.”

“What’s that version called?” Frank asked.

“Manhattan,” Delhohn said.

By the time Delhohn left, Frank was feeling reasonably well grounded on the technical side. But he hadn’t learned anything more about Schwert. Frank typed his name into Wikipedia, but all he found were a few references to him at the GFBS page. One noted that he was one of the first people to “mine” bitcoins. Under Nakamoto’s system, a bitcoin only came into existence when someone, using a computer, solved a problem generated by the system. The first person to do so received a set number of bitcoins as a reward, and the process was referred to as mining, as if a bitcoin was a precious metal that had to be dug out of the ground through great effort.

There were very few miners back then, and the first ones received thousands of bitcoins for each block of transactions they claimed. Not that it did them any good, at first. What value did a bitcoin have if no one would accept one in payment for anything? It was another year before anyone did so, when a Florida man paid 10,000 bitcoins for two large Papa John’s pizzas, delivered. The faithful still celebrated May 22 as Bitcoin Pizza Day.

Frank opened up a crypto currency tracking site to check on bitcoin’s current value. Wow. The same 10,000 bitcoins today would be worth over $150,000,000. He went back to the GBFS Wikipedia page and saw that Schwert was also referred to as a bitcoin billionaire. Lucky for him, he must have been less fond of pizza.

*  *  *

Author’s Notes for this week’s chapter:

One of the toughest things about writing a technothriller is how to explain the technology clearly enough to be understood by a lay person. An even tougher challenge is to include enough detail to satisfy technothriller fans without so much that it turns off people who are only looking for a fast-paced page turner. Authors like Michael Crichton are very good at striking this balance.

How to handle technical detail is an even bigger challenge with a technology like blockchain, which is purely technical, more than usually abstract, and frankly pretty boring. In comparison, while the technology behind artificial intelligence is complex, the concept is intuitively clear and the possibilities fascinating. With blockchain, it’s also hard to convey why something that is in essence so simple (a bunch of duplicate copies of the same records with some clever security aspects) could inspire so much hand-waving among its hordes of dedicated followers. As you’ll see, I plan to include subplots involving coin offerings of cryptocurrencies and related shady characters to provide some action, as well as a sense of what the evolving cryptocurrency/blockchain ecosystem is really like.

So – what you see above is a first crack at laying out some basics of blockchain in the course of introducing a new character. You’ll also have noted that it’s always a challenge to figure out a way to make a character memorable.

Like the rest of what you have and will read here, much may change between this draft and the final version. Explanations may move around, or be introduced by a different means.

One unresolved issue is that I have not yet come up with a foil for Frank to have these conversations with. In The Alexandria Project, just about all of the conversations went on in his head. Josette came along in The Lafayette Campaign for plot reasons, but provided someone with whom Frank could think out loud. In The Doodlebug War, the young political scientist who became Marla’s husband one book later provided the dialogic partner, and in The Turing Test it was Shannon Doyle, Frank’s first significant other since I began chronicling his adventures in real time.

And here’s your bonus factoid for this week. Whatever happened to Shannon?

Sadly for Frank, on the heels of their joint success conquering Turing, she was offered her dream job with SpaceX, and now lives in Hawthorne, California. Sadder still, as we all know, Frank isn’t good with long-distance relationships. But they are still friends.

See you next week.

Continue to Chapter 4