Finding SatoshiLance is an NSA agent mainly stuck to his desk job and tracking financials of suspected terrorist organizations. His boss comes in and tells him he has a field job for him. He's been getting a lot of slack from his higher ups to do something about this Bitcoin thing and they want to find Satoshi once and for all.
Lance has heard about Bitcoin but only from the news so he's not too familiar with it. His boss gives him a dossier on several prominent Bitcoin insiders and tells him there's a big get together after the annual Bitcoin convention in San Francisco, telling him to get into that party.
Lance flies to San Francisco and manages to work his way into the exclusive party. There he sees many Bitcoin bigwigs, Andreas, the Winklevoss twins, Eric Vorhees, Gavin, etc...a big party with all of the extravagance of a room full of high rollers. He moves about the party listening in on conversations, trying to get any clue as to who Satoshi might be. He brings it up a few times but nobody budges giving him several theories ("you mean Dorian?"...said with a grin, "I think it's a group of people", "It was Hal Finney"...) but nothing conclusive. As he goes to the bar to get a drink a young hot female with a bit of an edge looks over from her glass. "Why the interest in Satoshi?".
"No reason" Lance says. "Just curious about the man behind what made all of this possible"
"None of these fools know" she says with a grin "and he certainly wouldn't be hanging around at one of these type of things..." as she walks off with her drink before he can say anything more.
He inquires with one of the Winklevoss twins about the name of the girl as they both watch her walk out of the room. "That's Cassandra...she's been around the Bitcoin world longer than most of us"
The next day he's on a video call with his boss letting him know what his progress was.
"Get on that Cassandra woman, it sounds like she might have an idea on who Satoshi is. We'll have some information for you in an hour."
Lance is standing at the Fisherman's Wharf seeing Cassandra buying some fish at the market. He makes his way over to her as she's buying some fish.
"...do you take Bitcoin?" she says to the cashier as he casually greets her, a can of sardines in his hand, "I was about to ask the same thing..."
She smiles at him.
"We sure do, just started" the cashier replies as he pulls an iPad out from under the counter typing in the price, a QR code pops up and he sets it on the counter. Cassandra pulls out her phone and scans it. "Payment complete" the iPad shows.
As Lance finishes paying with bitcoins she looks at him. "Did you come down to Fisherman's Wharf for a can of sardines?"
"I was down here anyway taking in the sights..." he stammers trying to come up with an excuse, she starts to walk away, "...but I had to buy something here since they just started accepting bitcoin...". A smile crosses her face, "I know, right?"
As she starts to head off she yells out, "so are you going to the pub crawl tonight then?" his face shows no sign of understanding "Green Street? The first ever San Francisco Bitcoin street, all the merchants on the street started accepting bitcoins. The meetup's celebrating with a pub crawl. 8 o'clock"
"Maybe I'll check it out" Lance responds casually.
Back at his hotel he checks out the pub crawl details while checking in with his boss telling him about the pub crawl. "while you're over there having a good time chasing girls our guys have been working on this, they're saying this guy Nick Szabo is a good candidate for being Satoshi Nakamoto. He talked about creating an electronic currency just before Satoshi came out with his currency."
Lance arrives at the pub crawl, a good crowd mills around. He talks a bit more with other people each with different stories about their experiences with Bitcoin, he sees Cassandra finally on her own and starts moving over to her.
"Time's up, on to the next" someone shouts out as people cheer emptying their glasses and moving on in a big crowd to the next bar, Lance being pulled away from Cassandra as they go on to the next bar. They go through several bars, Cassandra always being surrounded by a group of friends.
Lance is sitting at a bar and finally Cassandra sidles up next to him "so you made it"
"Yep, having a great time, thanks for the suggestion. My name's Lance by the way."
"Cassandra", she extends a hand.
They start talking, walk together to a few more bars hitting it off and getting a bit tipsy.
"You know the Washington Square Inn started accepting bitcoins this week" he says to her with a grin.
They end up in a hotel room, things getting hot as they have a wild night together.
They wake up in the morning happy but hung over. "What a night" he says. "My head is killing me" she responds.
"I have the perfect cure for a hangover" he says as he heads to the bathroom. "It better not involve sardines!" she laughs.
They spend some time together the next day checking out some of the sites in San Francisco, as they start to get more serious.
Back on video with his boss Lance is getting chewed out. "we're getting so much heat on this, I need results or you're back behind a desk. What did you find out from this Cassandra girl?"
"I don't think she knows anything about this, maybe we need to go another route on this. Maybe I can go work on this Szabo guy.."
"Don't go falling for this girl, this is bigger than you and me. Stop by the San Jose office and pick up a scriptstick. Get that on her computer and we'll know for sure."
Lance is at an agency office talking to a techie. "You plug this in and in 60 seconds we have total access to the computer. We'll have access at the home station and can find what we need." as he hands him what looks like a USB stick.
Lance spends some more time with Cassandra, they're starting to get more serious, he really doesn't want to screw things up.
In the morning she gets up and messes around on her computer, you can see on her screen she's chatting with someone with the alias (Satoshi). "I think he could be the one, nobody's ever made me feel this way", "that's great Cass, I'm really happy for you". She closes the chat box as she heads into the shower.
Lance wakes up as she leaves the room. He pulls the scriptstick out of his coat jacket, his NSA badge falling on the floor as he goes to the computer.
He sits at the computer in frustration, fiddling with the stick fighting with himself. Finally he puts the stick in the computer and it starts loading the program. The shower turns off as the bar moves across the screen. "come on...come on.." he fidgets as he listens from the bathroom. The door starts to open. "100%" the screen shows. He pulls out the stick and moves quickly to sit on the edge of the bed.
"You know I was thinking we could go to that..." Cassandra says as she walks into the room in her towel. She stops as she sees his badge on the floor with the NSA seal on it. She looks up at him sitting on the edge of the bed looking sheepish as she sees in the background her computer accessing all of her files on the screen.
"I'm sorry.." he says, "I was just doing my job, I didn't have a choice!" he stammers
"YOu asshole!" She screams as she starts throwing things at him. "They'll destroy him!" she goes on yelling at him.
At the agency headquarters. "Uh oh sir, looks like agent Seducky's cover is blown." one of the techs says to his boss as he watches the cam through Cassandra's laptop.
"Get a team in there, we don't want her to ruin this for us, keep sweeping her computer...looks like we were on the right track" as her last chat pops up with the name (Satoshi) shows on the screen.
Cassandra grabs the laptop, yanking the chord from the wall smashing it against the table, smashing it with her fists crying.
"Get out!" she yells.. "just get out..." she cries.
"I didn't have a choice..." he continues to mutter as he puts on his clothes and heads for the door.
"Don't you understand?" she cries out, "that's what this is all about...that's what he did for us...he gave us a choice!"
Just as she says that the door busts open and four agents walk in grabbing Lance and Cassandra as they gather up her laptop and start hauling them away as they both struggle in utter confusion and shock.
Back at the headquarters they're just getting into a meeting looking over the data on the screen from the laptop as one of the techs explains his findings. Lance walks in, defeated, sitting down against the wall. His boss gives him a congratulations thumbs up with a big smile as the presentation goes on.
"As you can see she was talking to a person who she nicknamed Satoshi in her chats which doesn't look like someone trying to portray himself as Satoshi, but seems to go through a lot of trouble to hide his identity. We've tracked his IP address down to a house in Russia."
"Which most likely means he's using it as a hop, most traffic of hackers goes through Russia" someone chimes in from the table "did you track his computer ID?"
"Yes, since the Russian hop seems to be very well shut out leaving us no indication from there other than going to the actual connection there..."
"that wouldn't be a problem" a gray haired man at the front of the table chimes in as people look at him strangely
"...well outside of that, we did track the ID of his computer in our Dell database which has a shipping address in Japan."
"I don't want another Dorian fiasco.." the gray haired man says "this time we need solid proof that he's the real deal, then we'll begin to tear him down".
"Tear him down?" Lance speaks up, concerned.
"We've tried everything we can against this Bitcoin thing, our people in the media have been trying different things, linking them to drugs, terrorism, we've gone after the price, spending millions trying to destabilize the price to get people to stop using it, nothing has worked..." another man says looking around the room "we need to do to Bitcoin what we did to the short lived 'liberty movement' that was starting to infect the country a few years ago with their message of End the Fed"
"You mean link Satoshi to some racist comments like you did with Ron Paul?" someone else chimes in
"Exactly, everyone is human and if we can find anything...even if we have to create some evidence...to link Bitcoin to something nobody would associate with, we can push that. If he was ever part of the Tea Party...did he ever shake hands with someone in the KKK or even receive e-mail from a white supremacist, we label him a racist. Find any porn on his computers... anything other than Playboy Playmates and we turn him into a sexual deviant. Find out who he dated when he was a teenager, if he was 18 and she was a day younger than 18, we label him a pedophile. Anything so that whenever someone mentions the word Bitcoin, the easiest response will be 'you mean that currency founded by a racist/deviant/pedophile?'."
"Destroy the man and you destroy the idea."
Lance finally stands up. "Why would you do this to someone? From what I've seen the technology is pretty useful. It's not hurting anyone, just giving a few people another option for making payments"
"That's all you think this is?" The gray haired man stands up. "Everything that keeps this country going is built around the dollar. The whole reason for American dominance in the world falls on the fact that it is the world reserve currency. We lose the dollar and we might as well start looking to Mexico for foreign aid. Every attack against the dollar is an attack against America, and this is an attack. Don't think for a second that this is just a bunch of geeks on the Internet playing banker. We're already losing control of it and every day people show they still have faith in it is one day closer to us not being able to put it back in the bottle. This is bigger than all of us. Bitcoin will be stopped!"
Another tech walks into the room. "We've got him..." as he pulls the keyboard and mouse over so he can pull up some files.
As he does this, Lance moves over to his boss "What's going to happen to Cassandra?" he asks. "We don't have anything to hold her on, if this is Satoshi we won't need her anyway." his boss replies.
They look back up to the screen as a picture and name get replaced by a map on the screen. "...alias Satoshi Nakamoto. He's a mathematical genius out of England known for his work with RSA encryption and Proof of Work systems. He worked for Rose Industries until 2003 when he moved to Japan. We show that he lives here..." he moves the pointer to a remote house on the map "...no job that we know of but his profile matches what we have for Satoshi."
"Let's move on the house, gather any information you can get. Data mine his computers, check for papers with numbers on it..." the gray haired man says "...the only way to prove that this is Satoshi Nakamoto is by getting the private key for the Genesis block. We get that, and we have the proof. No more Dorians or Szabos. We need that key."
Some time later a team of Japanese and Americans in military gear move in on the house, a remote Japanese home with traditional Japanese decor. They move in under the cover of night, tossing in a flash grenade before storming in. They all surround a sole, thin man kneeling on the floor in middle of the room covering his eyes with one arm. The interior is a conservative home with very little technology outside of a single laptop next to a chair.
"You've finally found me lads. What bloody good it will do you." as he sits down on his chair. The agents quickly seize him, strapping his hands behind his back as they start to ransack the place.
Back at the headquarters on the main screen one of the agents at Satoshi's house comes through on video. "The house is secure. We have him here. The only thing he has is a laptop and some notebooks with math formulas all over them. We're uploading the data now but we're not seeing any private keys."
In the background you see several large rough looking men enter the room. The gray haired man talks to the screen "agent, you have done a great job. Have your men move out. We'll take it from here.". As he says that several men move into the room to go talk to the gray haired man. Lance can overhear them saying something about Cassandra. Hearing this he slips out of the room.
"What's going on here?" One of the NSA officials chimes in. "This is out of your hands director. We'll take it from here." The screen goes black as they start pulling files from the computer, the agents in the room protesting.
Meanwhile, Lance hurries through the halls scanning his badge going through several doors until finally he reaches a room with Cassandra sitting rather unhappily. She sees him and starts to go off on him.
"Not now, we gotta get out of here quick." He grabs her down the hall just as the large rough men come around the corner toward her door. "She's gone, find her."
Lance leads her through several hallways into the parking garage. Just as they get into his car the large men come through the door. They call out on their radios once they see them taking off out of the garage. Several black SUVs start chasing them through the city. Cassandra guides him down a few streets she knows helping them to eventually get away.
"Stop here" she says as they're back near her apartment.
"You're going to your apartment? That's the first place they'll look."
"I'll just be a second, it's important." She runs off as he quickly checks around looking for any SUVs.
She returns shortly afterwards with a small backpack and a painting that he recognizes from her wall. She starts putting a few small metal pieces in her backpack that look like dog tags. "My private keys, I have all of my money on these"
They drive off. "And the painting?"
"He gave it to me shortly after he invented Bitcoin. Said it represented the start of something big and to never lose it. Head to Pier 9, I should be able to get some help there."
"They have him, I don't know why they would come for you. What information do you have that they would want?"
"They have him? Don't you mean you have him?" She replies, cutting him like a knife.
"It's a whole other agency they're not CIA, military, nothing I've ever seen before." Lance replies, confused.
"You think any of your government agencies are actually in control of things? Bitcoin is bigger than any one country. It's global and we've pissed off the people who actually run things. The NSA, CIA, Congress, the president...puppets, all puppets."
They pull up to the pier, a cargo ship is loading shipping containers.
"I can get a ride on here, I travel with these guys all the time. They usually have something wrong with the computers in their rooms, I fix them up so they can get their porn while they're away from shore and I get a free ride. Hold my painting, I'll be right back." She heads off with her backpack.
He admires the painting in his back seat taking a picture with his cell phone.
She comes back a few minutes later. "They have 4 more containers to load then we'll be heading out."
"There's no reason to run" Lance says "they told me there's nothing to hold you on, I can talk to them I'm sure it'll be ok, and they have Satoshi so why would they need you? What information do you have that he doesn't?"
"I don't have any information. They probably just want me to use as leverage. They must have found out that he's my father."
Meanwhile at Satoshi's house the men are tearing the place apart.
"Where's the genesis key?" One of the men asks Satoshi who is tied to a chair in middle of the room.
He remains silent. Not saying a word.
"We'll find it, even if we have to tear this place apart."
"Look in the floorboards, the ceiling, everywhere. Look for numbers, anything that starts with a 5 followed by a bunch of numbers and letters. Go through his notebooks, letters, hidden panels, hell we'll go down to the foundation if we have to. The guys at Dagger are going through his laptop." he turns to Satoshi "we'll have it soon enough".
The men start tearing away at walls and floor boards searching everywhere, one man going through his papers.
"He and my mom were high school sweethearts. They had me young but things didn't work out. She was too much of a free spirit and he...well, he always had something important to work on. They divorced when I was 5, I stayed with mom."
It starts to rain as they watch the containers being loaded onto the boat.
"They're both better off though, he moved to Japan a few years later and met a beautiful Japanese woman, Zadoshi. She was the love of his life. They got married soon after they met."
"Was?" Lance asks.
"In 2011...the Tsunami...it took everything from him. They had a house on the ocean, he was in Tokyo when it hit. By the time he could get back his whole village was gone, along with his beautiful wife. It crushed him."
"2011...that's when he stopped working on Bitcoin..." Lance realizes.
"Losing Zadoshi devastated him, Bitcoin only reminded him of all of the time he could have spent with her. Even the name Satoshi was a play on her name, he just didn't want to be reminded of the tragedy. He bought a fixer upper in middle of nowhere and he works on it, spending time in his garden though still working on math problems to keep himself busy. He encouraged me to go out and see the world, to experience everything. Life is too short he says. I just wish he would take his own advice."
"And all I did was make it worse. They're going to tear him apart once they find the genesis key." Lance says.
"They'll never find it." She says, watching the last of the containers getting loaded.
"He had everything at his house. He kept some keys on papers, some on his computer, hidden all over the house. Now that's all been swept out to sea or is under tons of dirt. It's all gone."
"But he had millions of dollars worth of bitcoins. All of it...gone?" Lance says, shocked.
"I'm afraid so. Though he wasn't in it for the money. He wanted to change the world, and he did."
As she says that, three black SUVs start heading toward them.
"We've got to go." Lance says as he turns on the car.
"No, they're after me not you. Take care of my painting for me." she says as she jumps out of the car running toward the end of the pier.
Lance guns the car forward driving at the SUVs sticking his gun out the window shooting at them. He gets the tire of one of the SUVs making it swerve toward the cargo ship crashing against the tie down loosening the ship from the dock. The ship captain sees this and instructs the crew to pull the anchor as he starts to pull off.
Lance barely misses crashing into the second SUV but slams into the third SUV sending both rolling. He barely gets out of his car as gas is leaking everywhere, pulling himself behind a shipping container as the car goes up in flames.
The third SUV heads straight toward Cassandra as she sprints toward the end of the pier. The passenger leans out the window shooting but gets pulled back in by the driver.
"We need her alive!" he says.
They're almost caught up to her when she dives off the end of the pier. They both get out, looking into the water, rain pouring down as the cargo ship moves on, its anchor pulling up. They watch the water for a little while longer before heading back to the SUV.
The SUV passes by Lance's car before it heads off as the picture burns up in the back seat.
Back at Satoshi's house the whole place has been torn apart. Floors ripped up, walls pulled down, every bit of his yard unearthed, his shed dismantled.
"Where is it!" the man shouts at Satoshi. He grabs a table smashing it against the floor. "WHERE IS IT!" he screams.
"It's gone, it's all gone." Satoshi mutters.
"Bullshit!" he screams. He thinks for a moment and walks out toward where the shed was torn down.
Meanwhile, Lance finds himself back at the hotel on Green Street. "I need a room, and I need to pay in bitcoin" he tells the clerk.
Exhausted he falls back onto the bed in his room. He pulls out his phone opening to the picture of the painting. After looking at it for a while he looks closer. He zooms in on two dots with a circle between in the top right corner, they look out of place from the rest of the picture.
He sits up and goes to the desk getting out a piece of paper. He draws the dots on either side of a circle in the top right corner.
"the start of something big..." he mutters.
He stares at them for a while, wiping his eyes, they blur into two lines surrounding an oval shape.
His eyes fly open. "The start of something big! Genesis!"
He draws a line down from each dot.
"It's binary. One zero one...that's a five." as he writes five under the three numbers. He quickly grabs the phone looking closer at the picture. There are different colored dots below it, slightly lighter than the rest of the picture. He draws ones corresponding to the dots on his paper. Underneath he writes the letter "K".
He pulls open a paint app on his phone, playing with the contrast he sees more clearly the lighter dots turning white on a black background. He begins writing out each set of ones and zeros. Writing the number and letter below it.
When he's finally finished he has 56 rows of letters and numbers. He writes the full list out on the bottom.
"The genesis key." he says, sitting back gazing at it.
Quickly he grabs his wallet pulling out several cards from his wallet that he got from various people he met at the Bitcoin gatherings.
He starts dialing.
"Gavin. Satoshi needs your help..." he begins, as he puts several cards on the desk.
Back at Satoshi's house the big man walks into the house.
"Everyone out. We're not going to find anything here. He's hidden it too well. But I know how to get him to talk."
He pulls pulls the hammer from behind him. "Millions of dollars on software...computers...man power...and it all comes down to a five dollar hammer."
He points at one of the men as he's packing things up to leave. "Hold him down"
He stands in front of Satoshi. "You'll tell me, I'll even keep your face nice and pretty for the cameras when we show you off to the world." he says, swinging the hammer.
"But you don't need to walk for them to ask you every damning question we feed them."
With that he kneels down grabbing his foot.
"You can make it easy on yourself, it makes no difference to me. There's a lot of damage I can do before I get to your face."
"Where is the genesis key?" he asks, holding up the hammer.
Satoshi shakes his head softly muttering "it's gone..."
"Wrong answer!" He slams the hammer down on his toes.
Satoshi screams out in pain as the man stands up getting in his face. "Where is it!?"
Satoshi looks forward keeping his mouth closed. Sweat dripping down his face.
"Ok then." the man leans down putting the hammer on top of his foot. "You know, I hear this is the most painful part. Let's see."
He raises the hammer slamming it down on top of Satoshi's foot smashing the bones.
Satoshi screams, writhing in pain, the man behind him barely hanging onto him. His face is red, sweat pours down his forehead, tears falling down his face.
"She's gone!" he sobs, the life drained from his body.
The man stands looking at him, a bit confused but confident that he is getting to him.
He holds Satoshi's face in his hands. "We can end this right here, there's no need for more pain. Just tell me where the genesis key is, it's that simple." he says as he moves the hammer to Satoshi's knee cap.
Satoshi straightens up, a calm falls over his face. He stares forward with no emotion bracing for the pain.
"If you don't believe me...or don't get it" he spits out "I don't have time to try to convince you." he says in condescendingly "sorry" he says sarcastically.
The man looks at him furiously raising the hammer above his head. Satoshi closes his eyes.
"Wait!" the man holding Satoshi says. He stands up listening into his earpiece. "There's something going on at headquarters, they want you to turn on your radio."
The man stands up turning on his radio. "Ya, what is it?" he says into his microphone. "What? What...? That's impossible." He walks over to the TV turning it on.
The screen pops up with some Japanese TV channel. He pulls open the menu and scrolls up to CNN.
"And we're back" the lady says on the screen "with Gavin Andresen, one of the main developers for Bitcoin with us live via Skype saying that he is actually Satoshi Nakamoto." the screen splits to show Gavin in another screen on his webcam from home "Yes Jane, I am Satoshi Nakamoto. I felt it was time to finally reveal the truth to get it out of the way so that we could all move forward focusing on the technology instead of wondering about its creator." she holds a piece of paper in her hand "and you actually have proof, as our viewers probably don't know, only Satoshi Nakamoto has the private Bitcoin key for the first ever Bitcoins created, and I have what is said a message encoded with that key? Is that right Gavin?" She holds up the paper with a bunch of letters and numbers in rows "yes, and anyone can verify it by checking against the genesis public address, and your producer said he would put it on your website for everyone to see, but yes...that does prove that I am Satoshi Nakamoto." "I used the alias at first because I was worried about something happening to me but after visiting the CIA I realized that my fears were unwarranted so I let the 'Satoshi' character go off to other things as I took over the project under my real name..." he goes on.
"This is bullshit!" the man screams at the TV, Satoshi letting a smile grow on up one side of his face. The man listens into the earpiece and changes to Fox News.
"This just in, we have here with us the real Satoshi Nakamoto." the newscaster says into the camera "live via Skype we have Nick Szabo who we verified via a private message that only Satoshi Nakamoto could write that he is indeed, Satoshi Nakamoto" "hello" Nick says into his webcam "yes, as everyone knows I had worked on projects similar to Bitcoin and even told people in the Cypherpunk newsgroups about my idea for Bitcoin before I took on the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto..." he continues on.
Listening into his earpiece the man switches channels again, this time to BBC. Lance comes up on the screen talking into his cellphone. "Yes, I can tell you now that I am Satoshi Nakamoto. I started it under an NSA operation titled 'One World Currency' or OWC for short, it was meant to disrupt the currencies of..." he continues.
Suddenly the Internet explodes with messages from all sorts of people.
Andreas Antonopoulos tweet: "I am Satoshi, I am tired of living with the lie #IAmSatoshi, you can check my signed message from the genesis key here tinyurl.com/auf7s
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss "We are Satoshi Nakamoto, we started working on it after moving on from the Facebook fiasco #IAmSatoshi"
Facebook posts start popping up: "I am Satoshi. Proof here:" followed by a long encrypted message.
Bitcointalk forum member smoothie posts a new thread: "I am Satoshi Nakamoto, proof below"
Reddit members start popping up new threads "I am Satoshi" followed by signed messages.
The man in Satoshi's house drops the hammer. "We're done here. He's useless to us now." he says as they both walk out leaving Satoshi in his chair as the TV continues with reports mentioning all of the other 'Satoshis' popping up all over. A big smile rises across his face as he begins to laugh, and laugh.
All over the Internet the message gets out. "I am Satoshi" goes viral. It becomes a rallying cry.
As Lance drives out of town he smiles as he sees the overpass spray painted "I am Satoshi".
A few days later, the sun setting as Satoshi limps on a cane with a cast on his foot, pulling some wood from the side of the house onto a larger pile he sees a woman walking toward him.
She calls out to him with a wave. "Dad..."
The End
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