The Blockchain Revolution Read online

  “Remind me how Russia ended up holding on to Kaliningrad.” Yazzi said.

  “It’s actually more than just the port, although not much – the territory is only eight-six square miles in all, and its full name is the Kaliningrad Oblast. Roosevelt and Churchill let Stalin have it at the end of World War II, and Russia managed to hang on to it when the USSR collapsed. It has a well-developed deep-water port, but to use it today, Russia has to ship goods across either Lithuania or Poland. Both of those, of course, are members of NATO, so in times of rising tension they could stop anything from going into or out of Kaliningrad. If Denikin can seize a land corridor for Belarus through to Kaliningrad – or more likely bully Lithuania into granting one – he’d solve that problem.”

  “It’s obvious why Belarus would play ball. But why should Lithuania knuckle under to Russia?” Yazzi asked. “There’s no love lost between them.”

  “True, sir. But one could imagine a treaty between them under which Russia once and for all recognizes the sovereignty of an independent Lithuania. It’s a tiny country, and one power or another has occupied it for most of the last five hundred years – first Sweden, then the Russians, and finally the Soviets. Twenty square miles of territory, more or less, might seem like a small price to pay to get Russia to sign on to a non-aggression pact.”

  “Unless you consider who’s giving the guarantee,” Yazzi snorted.

  “Point taken, sir. Anyway, that’s our best guess.”

  Yazzi scanned the circle of intent faces surrounding the table. Yes, he’d have to act. This time Denikin was going too far. Better to make a decision here and now rather than delay.

  “Thank you for your update, Jim. I’d like to clear today’s agenda and spend the rest of the morning discussing whether it’s time to launch an attack against the Russ. We’ve got to get Russia to back off from this senseless, ongoing campaign of aggression.”

  * * *

  Shukov finished reading the field report he’d requested and smiled. He was pleased at how well his new “out of the box” model of thinking was working out. Not only pleased, but refreshed. He hadn’t put in a late night yet this week.

  The BankCoin network, it seemed, employed a clever approach to keep issues secret until patches were installed throughout the system. His agents had learned that a special department of the BankCoin administrator, First Manhattan Bank, was charged with maintaining security in a centralized manner. All flaws identified by any bank network member were sent in secret to the security administrator, which developed and distributed patches directly to the network members, bypassing GitHub. Only after all banks confirmed installation of the patches was the new code incorporated into the public version of BankCoin at GitHub.

  So, the way was clear: to engage in some old-fashioned spycraft. He’d need to infiltrate First Manhattan Bank and to direct additional agents to work their way up through the ranks of the BankCoin Foundation. Once he had people in the right positions in both organizations, he could report with confidence to the JCSC that there would soon be a way to destroy the BankCoin system.

  He went back to what he had been doing before the field report had arrived: studying the FSS organizational chart. It looked as if several positions might be opening up soon. He wondered which promotion would be his?

  * * *

  “And how are you today, Mr. Adversego?”

  “I guess I’m okay, Jim. How about you?” At first, Frank had been uncomfortable having an assigned driver in New York. Surely the chauffeur would become chatty sooner or later. Then Frank would never get any work done during the drive to and from the airport. Worse, he’d be trapped into trying to sound intelligent discussing topics he knew nothing about, like sports and reality television.

  But Jim was the soul of discretion. Polite, respectful, and quiet, yet ready to answer every question as briefly as possible. It was like having Alexa as a chauffeur. Frank had decided early on he could definitely get used to this town car business.

  “I’m good, sir. To the airport?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Frank felt uneasy about no longer looking forward to returning to Washington. True, his DC apartment seemed small and tawdry now, like the divorced male, Ikea-dominated flat it was. But he’d never been ashamed of it before. After all, virtually no one except Marla and Tim ever saw it. Still, it bothered him now. Enough that he’d finally broken down and bought some new furnishings, something he hadn’t done in years. Okay, decades.

  His old wardrobe – if that wasn’t too grand a word – embarrassed him, too. So, the new suitcase he was carrying today – instead of his venerable, beat-up, old backpack – was transferring some sports shirts, slacks, and shoes to Washington. Someone must be monitoring his closet in New York because anything that relocated to Washington was immediately replaced. That was spooky but also convenient.

  He was glad to be returning this time, though. Marla and Tim were coming over for dinner. His daughter was very visibly pregnant now, and seeing her looking healthy and happy would make him smile. He wondered whether she would notice the snappy jacket he was wearing?

  The answer he got the next evening was yes. She also noticed his new shirt, shoes, belt, and slacks. When he met Marla and Tim at the door, she took him by the shoulders and turned him around, whistling softly as she did.

  “Well, will you look at that!” she said. “He can be taught! Scratch that – what am I saying? He can be dressed up.”

  “Don’t expect a ‘thanks’ for that,” Frank said, tilting his nose upward. “I’ll have you know I’ve actually bought a few things myself.”

  “Really?” Marla said, marveling. “Like what?”

  “Like a new dining room table and chairs. And a few other things, too.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket to show her pictures. “If you start treating your father with a little more respect, I might even ask you over to see them after they’re delivered.”

  Clearly, he couldn’t wait for her to see what he’d ordered. “Okay, point taken,” she said. “I’ll see if I can behave.”

  When he handed her the phone, she saw an expensive antique-style dining room set in a showroom. On the wall behind it was an oval mirror in an ornate gilt frame, flanked by candle sconces. Next to those, she saw a pair of pictures of an English hunt club pursuing a fox. Everything was distinctly tasteful and would look utterly ridiculous once it was surrounded by everything her father wasn’t replacing.

  Frank frowned. “You don’t look impressed. I’ll have you know that furniture cost –”

  “Five times as much as the rest of what’s in your apartment combined,” she said.

  Frank frowned more deeply. He’d bought the furniture in New York City, and the multiple was closer to ten.

  “Well, what’s wrong with that? You’ve always told me I should quit living like someone in a college dorm.”

  “Well, I guess,” she said. “That’s a fair point.”

  After they said goodnight, Marla turned to Tim. “So, what do you think of my new dad? The one in the pressed pants with the furniture from the English country house about to be shoe-horned into his eight-hundred-square-foot condo? Will he be wearing an ascot in front of a fake fireplace the next time we visit him?”

  “No.” Tim laughed. “I think he’s just getting used to having some money for a change. And he’s right – for as long as I can remember you’ve been pushing him to get some real adult furniture.”

  “Okay,” she said, looking out the window of the car. “But I don’t want him to make a fool of himself either. Or try to change who he really is.”

  “Don’t you think you’re selling him a bit short?” Tim asked.

  “Am I? Don’t get me wrong – I love my father dearly. But he’s a really unsophisticated guy. He’d like you to think otherwise, but he’s not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  �
�Oh, come on. You know him better than that by now. How about this – I’m sure you can recall a situation where he was the butt of a joke and didn’t even realize it. And it can go deeper. If someone said something mean to him, it might go right over his head. I’ve seen that happen. When I asked him later if it had made him angry, he just looked puzzled. When I explained it, he was amazed anyone would do that.”

  “Well,” Tim said, “I think we just have to wait and see.”

  Chapter 30

  Knock, Knock

  Frank had returned to New York, where he was confronted by more new clothes in his closet and the old challenge of justifying his existence at First Manhattan. He had found nothing of interest in his review of BankCoin on his air-gapped system, meaning he was once more back where he started. Which was to say, nowhere. Now what? He turned to a list he kept of things to worry about and decided to do a thorough review of an even earlier version of BankCoin – the earliest one that existed, instead of the first version First Manhattan had adopted. That program would contain all the essentials needed to make the platform work, but none of the bells and whistles that were added later to optimize its operation. In theory, at least, understanding the starting point better might make it easier to spot malware added later.

  But when he went online, he found that the GitHub repository didn’t include any earlier versions of BankCoin. Hmm. Schwert must have been working on BankCoin somewhere else then, maybe at one of the other “forges” that hosted open source software. But Frank couldn’t find an earlier version anywhere, at least under Schwert’s name. So where was it?

  He went back and looked for clues in the source code for the version of Blockchain he already had. Huh! He hadn’t ever noticed it before, but it didn’t include any of the historical information you’d normally expect to find there – no listing of prior versions and no record of what changes had been in earlier releases or who had made them. Schwert must have cleaned all that out before he launched BankCoin into the world. That was odd.

  So where were the original versions? Magnus would know. Frank got up and walked to his cubicle.

  “Hey, Dirk.”

  The programmer turned and peered at Frank over his spectacles. He blinked several times but said nothing.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” Frank asked.

  “That is a question. Another question, I suppose you mean?”

  Frank laughed; Magnus didn’t.

  “Sure,” Frank said. “And maybe more than one. Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Actually, it looks like I am about to lose them. What can I tell you?”

  “I was looking at the BankCoin logs at GitHub and noticed the first version is very mature. Can you help me find the earlier ones?”

  “No,” Magnus said.

  “No, as in ‘No, you won’t,’ or no, as in ‘No, you can’t.’”

  “The latter.”

  “So, who could?”

  “Only Schwert.”

  “Are you saying he did all the early work on BankCoin by himself?” Frank asked.

  “That is apparently the case. Schwert, it seems, developed BankCoin on his own system and then revealed it to the world. Rather like Satoshi Nakamoto, so it is not so strange.”

  “Well, it’s strange to me,” Frank said, “given that the banks adopted it so quickly. It took a long time for bitcoin to be taken seriously. And the version Nakamoto first put up on the internet still needed a lot of work before anyone used it to even buy a pizza.”

  “This is true, but your point is what? Blockchain is now widely accepted. And there are very many other blockchains. The general approach is well-known and documented. Why should not Schwert build a blockchain on his own?”

  “Well, okay,” Frank said. “But why should First Manhattan have bought into it so fast?”

  “Why do you say it did?”

  “Didn’t it?”

  Magnus gave Frank an appropriately pitying glance.

  “So. Schwert posts a message at a popular blockchain site to announce his new creation. Along with the message is a white paper – just as so many others have done. And there is an address at GitHub. ‘Come look at my blockchain,’ he writes. So, some do. And they like what they see and tell others. They, too, tell others. Soon, many people are talking about his blockchain. The word gets around. Is this so strange?”

  No, actually it wasn’t, Frank had to admit. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

  “Enough questions for today?” Magnus asked.

  “Sure – thanks.” As usual, everything Magnus said made perfect sense but failed to satisfy. Frank couldn’t decide whether that was helpful or maddening. What he could decide was that he was yet again back where he was before: staring at his worry list, trying to decide what to do next.

  In the end, he decided to try using his air-gapped copy of BankCoin instead of just studying it. Perhaps if he reviewed it from that perspective he might stumble on – he wasn’t proud – something he’d missed when examining it as a static piece of software. And where better to begin than by adding a block of his own to the Genesis Block – the very first block of transactions created by the great Günter Schwert? But first he wanted to understand better how BankCoin made that possible.

  He scrolled through the code that had created the Genesis Block, taking notes as he went along. Then he went through it again and leaned back. He was left with two somewhat contradictory impressions.

  The first was a reaffirmation that Schwert was a brilliant computer architect. The structure of the code was impeccable. Economical, robust, and – to a programmer at least – beautiful.

  The second was that, for all his brilliance, Schwert could be sloppy. This little bit of source code here, for example – it was supposed to lead the program on to its next task, but instead, it was followed by some unrelated code. He was surprised the extra “call” to nowhere didn’t hang up the whole program. There were a couple other examples just like that. He expected Schwert or someone else must have cleaned those bits of coding cruft in a later release. Well, what the heck. He’d seen sloppy programmers before who were otherwise masters of their craft – so good at the big picture they didn’t have the patience to go back and double-check everything so long as the code ran.

  So, he was back where he started. Or even behind that point, because Schwert’s coding skills were so elegant that Frank wasn’t sure he’d yet grasped all the subtleties of the program elements that created the Genesis Block and would create every block thereafter. Most programmers were like bricklayers: you put this on top of that and then another one of these on those and so on until you had a wall of code modules that did what you wanted them to. These days, a lot of those bricks were open source code someone else had written and posted to GitHub so that anyone, like you, could include them in their own wall.

  In contrast, Frank was sure every line of code he’d just reviewed had been written by Schwert himself. And not as an assemblage of bricks. There were continuous threads of logic that flowed through the block generation code from beginning to end. That was how the most brilliant programmers Frank had known so long ago at MIT had structured code. In those days, even a powerful computer had a tiny fraction of the power a cheap flip phone from a decade ago commanded. It would take a hundred of those early computers to run the kinds of programs developers wrote now to run on an entry-level laptop. But a real code master would still design an algorithm that was elegant in its simplicity, able to achieve great things with meager resources.

  Schwert was clearly such an artist. But why bother? BankCoin was a complex piece of software, to be sure. But it hardly challenged the powerful computers the member banks were using. Was it art for art’s sake? Perhaps it just came naturally to Schwert. Either way, it continued to make Frank’s job difficult.

  Knowing that Schwert was a better programmer than he was left Frank
feeling both frustrated and mildly intimidated. He hated to admit his own limitations. But after banging his head against the BankCoin architect’s coding wall for a while he decided perhaps it was time to swallow his pride and ask Schwert to walk him through the security precautions he’d presumably taken in creating BankCoin.

  Why not? Frank emailed him to make the request.

  * * *

  When two days passed without a response, Frank presented himself once again at Dirk Magnus’s cubicle. As usual, the truculent coder either didn’t, or wouldn’t, acknowledge Frank’s presence until he spoke.

  “Knock, knock,” Frank said.

  Magnus’s goggle eyes swiveled around and fixed themselves on Frank.

  “‘Knock, knock,’ I believe, is perhaps one of your American jokes?” Magnus asked.

  “Well, yes, but not this time. It’s just slang. Anyway, can you tell me how to get in touch with Schwert? I emailed him, but he didn’t respond.”

  “I can give him a message, yes.” Magnus said. “Or, also, another maintainer could.”

  “You mean the Cabots talk only to the Lodges, and the Lodges talk only to God?”

  “Excuse me, please?” Magnus asked.

  “Sorry. It’s an old Boston saying. You see, the Cabots and Lodges were the highest of society and – never mind. So, you have to be next in line to Schwert before he’ll waste his time answering a question. Is that it?”

  “I would not say it that way, no. He works very hard and relies on us to support him in his efforts. It is a very large and busy project as you know.”

  “So, what if I was the executive chairman of First Manhattan? Would he answer me then?” Frank asked.