Pumpers, Dumpers, and Shills: The Skycoin Saga
On an April afternoon in 2011, a twenty-seven-year-old tech entrepreneur named Bradford Stephens arrived at a stucco bungalow near the canals of Venice, California. He had recently started a new data-analytics company, and had come to speak with a coder named Brandon Smietana, whom he hoped would get involved. Stephens had already met Smietana online, where he uses the handle Synth, and where he often debated minute points about math and programming. When Stephens and Ryan Rawson, an employee who tagged along, arrived, Smietana invited them into a carpeted den. A computer sat on a table, its casings removed to reveal a tangle of circuits; a sleeping bag lay on a sofa. Smietana was in his early twenties, with dark hair and a youthful face. Rawson told me, “He had the air of this mad scientist couch surfing.” Stephens pitched his new company, but got no traction. Smietana had turned his attention to a new technology: cryptocurrency. “The only people who have to work for money are the people who cannot create it or print it out of thin air,” he told them.
The first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin—released in 2009 by an anonymous programmer (or a group of them) called Satoshi Nakamoto—was a feat of computational brilliance. A bitcoin is an abstract unit of value that people track and spend with digital wallets. When someone contributes her computer’s power to process Bitcoin transactions, the computer also races to solve an equation, a process called “mining.” Each solution that meets certain criteria mints new coins. The number created decreases by half every four years or so—an event known as the Halvening—which keeps the supply limited, guarding against inflation. The whole economy is maintained on a blockchain, a shared ledger that keeps a tally of every Bitcoin transaction. As miners add transactions, the Bitcoin software coördinates and finalizes their contributions, making the ledger transparent and unchangeable and the system nearly impossible for governments to shut down.
