private-key/public-key encryption for a long time, so I may have stumbled backward onto bitcoin,” Wade says. “My first feel of it was, ‘This is challenging. This is really hard.’ There wasn’t any way to double-click the logo and it’ll install itself or something like that. You had to build it yourself.”
His wife gives him a hard time about its name... “Really Easy Internet.” “Intuitively, it sounded like it was a good solution... Let’s make something that’s hard, easy. But that wasn’t a selling point enough to overcome that the market wasn’t ready for it,” says Wade. The group raised $2.5 million in venture capital but shut down in 2001 when the dot-com boom turned into the dot-com bust. “The saddest part was that what we had invented was something that was just too early. It was a voice over Internet. And eventually it became something like Skype, but we were too early, when nobody cared.” Skype was founded a few years later. It ultimately sold to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. That’s around when Wade was discovering his next major opportunity, at a stage when almost no one could have guessed just how big it would get... EVERY TRANSACTION EVER In January 2009, the Bitcoin network got its start when Satoshi Nakamoto created the first “genesis block.” Today, there are just over 18 million bitcoins in circulation... all of them initially mined by individuals and companies... and most of them mined by those who realized the opportunity early, like Wade. “I grew up surrounded by the secrecy of a national nuclear weapons lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico. I liked cryptography and
It could be something irresistible... an app or a
service that’s right around the corner.
A Wired story titled “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” in November 2011 seemed to put the nail in the bitcoin coffin before it had even begun. The price of bitcoin had only reached parity with the U.S. dollar earlier that year. But still, there was a note of hope... “You could say it’s following Gartner’s Hype Cycle,” London-based core developer Amir Taaki says, referring to a theoretical technology-adoption-and- maturation curve that begins with a “technology trigger,” ascends to a “peak of inflated expectations,” collapses into a “trough of disillusionment,” and then climbs a “slope of enlightenment” until reaching a “plateau of productivity.” By this theory, bitcoin is clambering out of the trough, as people learn to value the infallible code and discard the human drama and wild fluctuations that surround it. The earliest miners could receive 50 bitcoins for each block they mined. That was halved in 2012... and halved again in 2016. Mining is essentially a way of using computing power to
46
November 2019
Made with FlippingBook HTML5