Kill Process (15 page)

At forty-five minutes, the bitcoin hits four hundred and fifty dollars, up 10 percent from our purchase price. From there, Dan’s phone display becomes like a spinning display counter, the price rolling up every time the phone polls for new data, which it does every few seconds in response to the ever-changing values.

It hits six hundred an hour and fifteen minutes after Tomo started buying, and now the entire bitcoin community tries to acquire more coins. Transaction volume is up dozens of times over normal.

“We sell, right?” Dan’s nails are all gone. This is a bit out of the ordinary for him.

“No, it’s still going up.”

“This is too fast. They’re going to know something is up.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “Someone big is buying.”

The math says Tomo’s next buy will be about 1.6 million dollars, and the one after that will be $3.2 million. Neither comes close to the largest exchanges for fiat currency in the history of bitcoin, which are well north of ten million, but it’s the pattern of gradually escalating purchases which has to be driving automated buying algorithms into a frenzy.

At two hours, the bitcoin discussion boards are nearly inaccessible under the load. Everyone in every timezone is awake and online. At near as I can estimate, Tomo bought about a hundred million dollars worth of bitcoin. The cryptocurrency is now trading at $2,000. Dan is sweating and pale, both knees bouncing under the table.

“We must sell.”

I see him switch to his bitcoin exchange app.

“No, wait.” I place my hand over his screen. “It’s going to go up more.”

“We . . . we . . . have . . . we have to sell. Right freaking now.” He’s like a trapped animal.

I take my hand away. “Fine, sell ten percent every ten minutes. We can lock in our gains.”

Bitcoin analysts must be observing the transactions, and they’ll have spotted the purchases doubling in size from the same bitcoin address. They’ll be monitoring to see if that trend continues, with their finger (or more likely code) on the trigger, waiting to see whether the repeat buyer continues the trend of escalating purchases. If not, the analysts will auto-sell their own coins, attempting to cash in before the market collapses. Automated trading bots will be doing the same, magnifying the impact of any trends.

Meanwhile, somewhere inside Tomo, engineers are undoubtedly racing to figure out what the hell is happening. The bitcoin-buying code probably hit account transaction limits back around the time it exceeded a hundred thousand dollar buy. The code has a list of backup accounts, a list it pulls from a database with a SELECT query. Instead of the normal two matching rows, the query now returns the entire list of Tomo bank accounts sorted in descending order by their transaction limit along with the necessary account credentials.

In a worst case scenario, this could financially harm Tomo, but I have strong confidence in the ops team. They can freeze the bank accounts, change the bank authorization, or find the server and kill the running process or the server itself. The thing is, nothing would seem wrong for the first hour. Probably at an hour and half, they’d discover the problem. It’d take them ten, twenty minutes to assign the right people to work on the problem. Those people take time to come up to speed, then they’d be racing to solve the problem . . . I know what they would do.

At two hours and twenty minutes, two teens sitting at the next table are using the library’s free computer terminal, looking at pictures of their female classmates. One of them yells, “Damn, dude. Tomo’s down. They kicked you off.”

“Sell,” I say to Dan. “Whatever’s left. Now, all of it.”

Dan’s been near catatonic with anxiety for so long that at first he doesn’t move, then he jerks upright and jabs at his phone.

Now I’m biting my nails.

“$7,600,” Dan says in a squeak.

Bitcoin is up almost twenty times what we bought it for only a few hours ago. Counting our combined contributions, and gradual sell-off, Dan has three hundred thousand in his bitcoin account, of which $220,000 is mine.

Tomo is almost certainly off the net because someone smart realized killing all outbound traffic would stop the purchasing server from making its next buy. They’re probably triangulating on the specific server right now. In the meantime, they stopped a tens of millions dollar bitcoin purchase by shutting down the entire network. It’s what I would have done.

“They’re going to know.” Dan says, still pale. “Trace it to back to me. It’s not anonymous you know. They’ll see I made all this money in a couple of hours. I don’t want to go to jail
—
I’ve got a girlfriend.”

“Think about it. How many people made money today? How many need to cash out? Hundreds of thousands. Not just you. Bitcoin miners and speculators around the world. Millions of transactions occurred. You made a half dozen of them. They aren’t going to trace anything to you.”

Dan looks modestly reassured, and nods along with my explanation.

Of course, if that was really true, if there was that little risk, then I could have made the trade myself. There is some risk, though Dan is squeaky clean. He’s not the one doing anything illegal, and if it comes down to it, there’s nothing he can go to jail for. I can’t withstand that level of scrutiny.

“Don’t withdraw the cash all at once,” I say. “Anything over $10,000 requires notifying the fed. Take out six or seven thousand in cash, every week. You take your percentage, meet me here on Friday mornings, and give me my cut. Sound good?”

He nods. “My book.” He points towards
Neuromancer
like it was a poisonous snake.

I pass it toward him, and as I do, I look down at my hand. My fingerprints are on the book. I pull it back toward me.

“I’ll keep this. You report it lost in a few weeks.”

“You can’t keep a library book. It’s public property.”

“Don’t worry, you can afford the fine. See you later, Danger.”

M
AT MENTIONED
IndieWeb, and when I first research it, there’s almost too much for me to read: the grassroots effort has spawned a sprawling wiki and dozens of web sites. There are principles, how-to pages, protocol specifications, history, and nobody is in charge of any of it. It’s decentralized, self-organizing, and rapidly changing.

The first principle is so compelling, I know they’re onto something important: When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.

My reading increases my desire to meet Amber, but only when I’m done with my bitcoin manipulations do I have the time and energy to meet. We make contact and plan dinner at Bamboo Sushi.

Amber’s already here, sitting at the sushi bar, easily recognizable from her profile picture. She’s American, but chatting with the chef in Japanese, fluently as far as I can tell.

“Amber? I’m Angie.”

Amber glances up from the chef and smiles. Without hesitation, she bends her right arm at the elbow and touches her upper arm to mine. It’s rare to meet someone who knows the right protocol for greeting an amputee, let alone carries it off so smoothly.

“Have you been here before?” Amber asks. “It’s my favorite.”

“First time.”

Soon we’re chatting about the menu. Before we order, the sushi chef brings over several plates, and says something in Japanese.

“Hiro says they’re compliments of the house.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Sorry. I travel frequently to Japan, and Hiro told me to visit his hometown. I met his mother. Ever since then, he gives me sushi. But you probably didn’t set this up to discuss fish.”

“No, I really want to talk about IndieWeb.”

Amber stares at me like she’s assessing my worth. “So you said in your email. I looked up your profile. You work for Tomo. IndieWeb is . . . well, the exact opposite of everything Tomo stands for.”

“I left Tomo. I’m working on a new project.”

“What’s that?” She grabs a piece of sushi with the back end of her chopsticks, then passes the serving plate over.

“Decentralized, decomposed social networking.”

Amber smiles and laughs. “I love it. Even the employees of the Evil Empire are peeling away to join the Rebel Alliance.” She takes a bite, then continues. “IndieWeb is about returning the web to what it was before
—
a bunch of home-brew websites. People create content, they should own that content. Too many companies went out of business and lost all of their users’ data.”

My heart beats faster. She understands!

“Yes!” I jab at the table. “Users are completely dependent on the goodwill of companies for access to their own data. If Tomo changes their retention policy, old photos disappear. Or private photos turn public with a change in sharing policy. When I joined Tomo, it was about empowering the user. Now it’s about controlling the user to maximize ad revenue.”

Amber nods. “That’s why the first principle of of IndieWeb is each person is in control of what they create. Take a basic website, the way it worked in the old days, before blogging services and social media. If you wanted to share ideas, you’d write HTML, upload a few files on your server, and share the link. Five or ten years later, your data is still there, still readable, still linkable. If you want to take the data away, you remove your file from the server. You’re totally in control.”

“How do you bootstrap?” I ask. “How do you solve the empty network problem?”

“How do we convince people to adopt IndieWeb in a world where nobody cares about it?”

I nod, and grab a piece of fish.

“Metcalf’s Law is a bitch,” Amber says. “The IndieWeb solution is POSSE. Post on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You create content on your own domain, then copies are automatically shared to Tomo and other networks, with links back to the original version. Your friends and family keep using whatever silo they’re on to read your stuff.”

It strikes me that I want to build a new type of social network, but I don’t have a circle of friends and family to read my posts, or anything to even share. The only thing I ever talk about online is hacking in conversations hidden away in darknet forums. What would I post about? Who would read it? There are precisely two people I give a damn about: Thomas and Emily.

How can a social isolationist expect to make a social network? I’m crushed under the hopelessness of what I’m trying to do.

Amber looks expectantly at me, and I replay what she was talking about
—
oh, yeah, syndication.

“How can you expect Tomo to allow you to do that indefinitely? What if IndieWeb, or something else, becomes a threat? Won’t they shut down the ability to replicate content on Tomo?”

Amber shrugs. “IndieWeb content is the web. That’s it. Is Tomo going to shut down the Internet? Make it so you can’t see public web articles? They aren’t that powerful.”

My mind immediately jumps to PrivacyGuard, and the plan to filter webpages with private data. The web turned dystopia. Oh yeah, Tomo could do that, and they will. Unfortunately, I can’t share those details with Amber.

“Tell me about what you’re working on,” Amber says. “Decentralized, decomposed social networking. You must have your own ideas.”

I explain how I want to break apart the pieces of social networking
—
content authoring, content storage, notifications, user identity, friend networks, content selection algorithms, feed readers
—
and make them all interoperate. “I’m prototyping now, defining and building RESTful interfaces. With a complete protocol definition, anyone could build an interchangeable component.”

Amber shakes her head. “There’s a better way.”

My first thought is stupid kid, what do you know? She’s half my age and doesn’t have any idea what I’m capable of. She probably writes database queries that iterate over a single row at a time. I don’t possess much of a poker face unless I’m trying. She must see what I’m thinking.

“Obviously you can define messages in JSON. You absolutely can. But according to IndieWeb principles, you’re doing it backwards. You’ve looked at RSS, right?”

“Of course.”

“It’s totally pointless. It’s an XML representation of a blog post, in theory to make a machine-readable version of the content. But why? The blog content already exists in HTML. HTML is XML. If you want a machine-readable form of a blog, instead of defining a secondary representation, mark up the HTML with extra tags. It’s what we call micro formats in IndieWeb, and you already see little bits and pieces of this in the semantic web and HTML5.”

The individual words make sense, but I don’t grok the whole.

She grabs a laptop from her bag.

“You want to exchange information between two sites about a person. Your way, the protocol-first approach, would have you define JSON to represent that person. Something like this . . .” She cranks out text in an editor.

{

“Person”: {
“Name”: “Angie Benenati”,
“Url”: “http://angiebenenati.com”,
“Email”: “[email protected]”,
“Photo”: “http://angiebenenati.com/angie.png”

}

}

“Yeah. Of course.” In fact, my protocol does look similar to this.

“You’d agree we could represent the same thing in XML, and it would be functionally identical?” Amber bangs out a little a few example lines.

Angie Benenati
http://angiebenenati.com

“Yeah, that’s the same.”

“Now, isn’t that information already present?” Amber brings up my website, and there it is, sitting in the upper-right hand corner: my name, my email address, my photo, my bio.

“It’s not machine readable like the JSON or XML,” I say. “The HTML used to display this is unstructured, just a div and some paragraphs. It’s impossible for me to write code that can tell the email address from the phone number from my bio, because they’re all just strings of text.”

“So structure it.” Amber goes back to her text editor, copies the source from my site and adds class tags to my HTML.