The Segregated Witness v2 Autosaved

11:30 UTC-2, Southern Atlantic Ocean

He flinched as the sea spray blurred the view of his phone, suddenly becoming aware of the peril involved in holding it in the open so close to the edge of the platform as the helicopter blades still roared. As he sheltered his phone with the arm of his jacket, the futility of his effort was made clear by a disheartening “No Service” in the top right. His vision proved to be as unhelpful as his phone; although the biting cold breeze enabled unheeded visibility, nothing but Antarctic ocean could be seen in all directions from the brief shoreline. Icebergs, snow drifts sailing atop the jagged surface of the rough waves, pebbled the otherwise nondescript horizon.

The short man with the briefcase ungracefully disembarked the helicopter as if to signal that use of the handgrip would be seen as a sign of weakness. A few harsh words were barked in mandarin at the few remaining in the helicopter as the pitch of the rotors whined higher, preparing to climb back into the sky. A cigarette was frenetically pulled from its box and lit with great difficulty as the effects of the rotors could still be felt.

The hurriedness of the man’s actions gave some indication as to the length of the flight. As he tried to piece together how long exactly they had been in the air since they left the airfield in southern Chile, a sobering thought drained the blood from his head. Though they had left in the early morning, he must have fallen asleep on the plane and struggled to recall any details past being offered a cup of coffee. He had been drugged. The organization that had invited him and requested his discretion apparently was unwilling to discover whether he was a man of his word. The short man’s withdrawal abated, now turned and seemed to look through him at something off in the distance behind him. “D”, he told him.

“What?”

“Call me ‘D’” came the clarification in perfect English. “It’s short for Demosthenes which I’m sure someone somewhere thought was clever, though it doesn’t quite roll of the tongue. Welcome. ”

“Where-“

“South Georgia”, came the response to the unasked question, apparently having derived his intentions from the phone still clutched in his right hand now hanging at his side. “Well, technically an unincorporated area that abuts South Georgia Island. Even if you had service, you wouldn’t find us on the map. We’ve had it erased from the servers.”

“You erased the label from…”, he began fishing for clues as to the extent of this organization’s influence.

“Not the label. The island.” D said through a cracked smile, letting his pride slip through to his countenance. “Come.”

He hadn’t yet looked down. The jarring dissonance at the foot of the platform steps took him aback. A beach beckoned them from the foot of the platform’s disembarkation. A rocky, sandy beach completely absent of snow and ice. He removed his gloves – and noticed the temperature to be pleasant. “Why is it warm out? Aren’t we -”, he trailed off as it become obvious D either couldn’t hear him or had no intention of answering the question. Gripping his briefcase, D fumbled across the beach swearing to himself crossing through the area where the fine sand blended into scattered stones, his flat soled shoes struggling to grip the uneven surface. He followed D, realizing it to be his only option as he considered the icebergs in the distance.

As they crested the dunes forming the barrier between the beach and rocky interior of the small island their damp suit pants became covered with the fine sand betraying their air of professionalism. Brushing it off only served to transfer the sand to his hands. As he prepared himself to find footing on the jagged rocky hills beyond the dunes, his eyes were drawn to the anomaly in his periphery. A red door built directly into the rocky outcropping clashed violently with the environment – hitherto seemingly unmolested by human activity - around it. D stopped, attempted to brush off his pants, and turned to his left toward the door. Some of the rocks had been cleared so as to form a path which they followed to the door.

The door lacked any sort of handle or access point, though slid down with great speed into the rocks below presenting the two travelers with a small room. D extinguished his cigarette on the rocks on the side of the door and flicked the still smoldering remains into rocks. As D entered the small room, his expression of impatience beckoning him to follow, he turned and observed the landscape as if concerned that it might be the last time he might behold nature’s beauty. This mysterious organization’s intentions were still unclear, but its methods were made apparent by the events of the day. He walked in and tried not to jump as the door shot back up sealing the two in the small room.

“This part takes some getting used to.” D stated distractedly looking at his phone which somehow had a connection. At this point, this was the least surprising event of the day. As if repulsed by the presence of their shoes, the floor raced down from beneath them as their bodies struggled to keep pace. The shock of the initial acceleration yielded to a sickening sensation in their stomachs. He focused on a spot in the wall to try to calm the fluid in his inner ear as the dizziness subsided.

“Prior to the construction of this facility one of the previous records for deepest hole every drilled belonged to the Russians’ Kola Superdeep Borehole. They managed to punch to a depth of seven and a half miles. What gets me is that they did it just to see what would happen. You gotta love the fucking Russians.”

“How far-” he was interrupted by D’s impatience for what he must have considered obvious questions.

“Ten miles. We actually drilled to a depth of twelve miles before we ended up hitting the Earth’s mantle. Magma punched through and killed every poor sap that was down there – set us back almost three weeks.” D’s respect for human life coming through in his lack of empathy. “It wound up being a blessing as that heat is what powers most of our equipment. Drove a wedge right between us and our investors.” The story seemed to become less clear with every piece of new information.

He waited for D to continue, not bothering to be interrupted again, correctly judging that D got some pleasure drip feeding the story, amused by the confusion the asynchronicity was causing. “Those clowns at Squandering Resources, Inc. are how this whole thing got legs. When we were first looking for seed capital nobody took us seriously. I don’t blame them; half our business plan was effectively redacted and covered in black. I was there for the original pitch to their board – a bunch of suits wearing blank stares until we got to the slide on our energy requirements. The load was completely unprecedented and was usually when we got laughed out of the board room but for some reason this got them excited. They funded everything we needed to get started on the condition that they could be the sole energy partner. While we started digging out this facility, they drew up plans for the generators.”

He looked around for some sort of indication for how far they had travelled. The walls were all smooth steel with no readouts or buttons, and they had been travelling downward for an unsettling amount of time. At least the acceleration had subsided.

“Coal. Fucking coal. That was their plan. They wanted to dig a second hole and dump what would amount to roughly half the remaining coal on the planet down like a garbage chute. The world’s biggest tire fire burning ten miles underground. The heat signature would have been visible from Mars with the naked-fucking-eye so it was completely untenable. It was around that time that we realized that they had no interest in what we were fucking doing. When we told them we had found a solution that would reduce cost and allow us to leverage renewable energy it drove them up the fucking wall.”

The elevator showed signs of deceleration. “One of our engineers did some math that showed that we’d be pulling so much heat from the planet that we’d actually be robbing it of some of its angular momentum and potentially be siphoning off the magnetic field keeping out the sun’s radiation. When we shared this fact with them, it somehow put them at ease and we haven’t heard from them since. The money never stopped flowing. Those guys are fucking weird, man.”

His heart rate began to rise in anticipation of the door screaming back open as the elevator came to a stop. He wasn’t sure if he was more worried about the unknown that lay behind it or the jarring speed in which the door would recede into the floor. He bashfully flinched again as his fears were recognized and saw that D definitely took stock of his action. The two looked out at what must have been an airlock door that stood open as if to greet the passengers of the elevator. They stepped in as the foot-thick metal door swung began to close with all the patience the previous door had lacked, the creak of metal on metal filling the small room. The release of pistons and unseen locks sliding into place signaled the completion of it’s duty.

“Compression?” he asked.

“Unless you’d prefer the bends.” D showed signs of boredom as he watched the pressure indicator click on and begin to tick upwards, checking his phone seeming to have forgotten he had done so not five seconds earlier. D sighed and decided the best way to pass the time was to continue to make conversation. “So tell me what you know about blockchain.”

He was caught off guard at the sudden shift to an interrogative tone. “It’s a a cryptographic, distributed ledger which –“.

“I’m not asking you to parrot back the bullshit that industry has used to pollute the global conversation. I’m asking what you know about it. Let’s try this differently – how is it different from what was possible before?”

He collected his thoughts. “It enables trust-less, secure transfer of resources.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. I can do what you’ve just said with a centralized, old school database. What’s innovate about blockchain?”

“Proof of work?”

D snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “Proof of fucking work. That was the insight in our lord Satoshi’s paper.” He tried not to let his face betray his surprise as he watched D perform a quick series of hand gestures following his use of the name Satoshi, realizing that D must have been a member of the nascent Church of the Chain who literally idolized blockchain’s inventor. “A currency backed by kinetic energy. The US dollar used to be backed by gold but that went out the window for good in the 70s. Now it’s backed by the ‘full faith and credit of the government’, and we all know how much faith people have in that today. By backing it with actual, tangible kinetic energy – measurable work done – it secures the network. All of those other proof methodologies just never quite worked out. Proof of work provides a capitalist assurance unpinning the network.”

Eager to show prove his worth, he finished D’s thought. “It makes it pretty much un-hackable. If you wanted to hack the network, overwrite a previous block to eliminate, reverse, or double-spend a previous transaction, you’d have to expend the energy of not just the current block, but all previous blocks back to the target block in the same 10 minutes everyone is looking for the current block.”

Alarm klaxons echoed through the closed chamber triggering the locks on the opposite door – a mirror of the first – to begin it’s dramatic swing open as warning lights swung round. The compression process had completed. D hopped to his feet and began tapping his foot as if it would make the door open faster. He used this opportunity to finish his earlier thought. “Therefore it’s impossible to hack; the network is the first truly secured system of wealth transfer.”

D presented him with an actual smile for the first time since their meeting. “Impossible. Right.” D walked through the door leaving him with no choice but to follow. He stepped out onto what appeared to be a catwalk and was immediately greeted by the return of the nausea from earlier, but from a different source. The room in front of him could only be described as humbling.

D leaned precariously against the railing, enjoying the look of shock on his face as he took in the room in front of them for the first time. The catwalk they stood on seemed to be roughly the middle of the twenty or so other catwalks, each spaced three or four stories apart. The back of the room couldn’t be seen clearly. Florescent lights striping the ceilings seeming to converge to a point in the distance, providing the evidence that the room was unfathomably long. Workers with clipboards and tool-belts traversed every level of the catwalk, all of them hurried. Everything was eerily symmetric with the exception of what appeared to be an LED readout off center in the top right corner of the far back wall, large enough to as to be visible from their vantage point. It must have been a quarter mile tall. The clock slumbered, awaiting its eventual purpose.

At first the shelves that covered the center in the room in hash symbols, interlaced by the catwalks appeared to be bookshelves. As they walked down the catwalk he noticed that they weren’t books but some sort of electronic device, perhaps specialized computers, as he noticed fans and wires and meticulously laid cables connecting all of the nondescript boxes into a literal fabric.

The vista was a breathtaking display of man’s hubris, succinctly encapsulating the primary flaw of it’s culture. For all its past progress and attempts at feigned unification, this room stood as a testament to humanity remaining an amalgamation of fundamentally distinct entities with incongruous objectives. If measured by resources consumed, this single room represented mankind’s ultimate achievement, dwarfing the ancient wonders and modern infrastructure projects that impacted the world much more visibly. The air in the room hung thick with the irony from people having come together to instantiate this monument whose ultimate intention was the pinnacle of mistrust.

“A billion miners. That’s what you’re looking at. We dug out a hole a half mile wide, a mile tall, and almost 8 miles long to house a billion mining rigs.”

“Why on earth would you-“

“Jihan, you were NOT permitted to disclose the existence of our off-earth miners!”

“General”, D made a sloppy salute. He couldn’t tell whether the jean-clad ‘General’ who had intercepted their path via perpendicular catwalk had been serious, or whether he was legitimately a general or it was just another code name.

“Who is he and what is he doing here?” the General asked as he looked up from the tablet he was holding, adjusted his glasses and squinted at the newcomer in front of him.

“He’s the segregated witness.”

“Mmm”, came the acknowledgement. “Has he been told?”

“Not yet.”

The group dropped to their knees, covering their ears as the ear-splitting alarm filled the cavern, reverberating off the concrete walls. The enormity of the room seemed to amplify the lower harmonics such that the alarm filled their chest cavities. The clock in the room snapped to life giving the great room a red hue. The clock measured the number of seconds since the alarms had announced their presence. The sound subsided and the ceiling lights dimmed, replaced by circular lights, pinwheels at every intersection of catwalk, spinning in the now dark red room.

As they rose to their feet, the general apologetically beckoned the two to a room in the direction he had come approached them from. As he looked back over the skyscrapers of miners, they rose to life. Miles of miners synchronously powering up and doing what they were built to do. The smooth walls of the massive room seemed to amplify the sound as if the largest single room ever built by man was filling with bees.

They reached the room, shutting out the buzzing with an airtight seal. Two seats and a coffee table sat in front of a wall of glass, overlooking the length of the underground chasm. D took one of them and casually flicked the orchid plant sitting on the table so that it pointed away from him. Amid the chaos, the General switched off his tablet and held it at his side, as if to signal that the conversation now merited his full attention and stared out over his domain. “What you see before you, is to rectify a mistake.”

“One that hasn’t happened yet.” D added impatiently. “BIP One forty –“.

The General cleared his through, motionlessly glaring at D before continuing. “To have your gospel accepted as truth on the chain requires consensus. The laymen might think that just means controlling greater than 50% of a pool to say ‘we believe this’ and it’s accepted by the network. But that doesn’t consider that the solution that is accepted as truth must be backed by proof of work. Someone has to put in the kinetic energy to hash the damn block before it can be submitted. You don’t get to just decide, you have to root the basis of authority to something that has value in the real world. That’s the whole point. That’s always been the whole point.”

The explanation seemed so far from the miles of machines in a room so large that clouds were forming in one corner.

“So if I’m racing you to hash my block while you try to hash yours, and we both have the same amount of hash power, we each have a 50% chance of finding the new block.”

“So you’ve matched the global hash power with this room?”

“Not quite. The stakes are far too high for such a fair roll of the dice.” D added, one foot listlessly draped over the back of his chair. The clock read 2:00.

“So what, if you wanted to be 75% sure, you’d need 75% of the new total, which means three times the global hash power?”

“95% sure. That requires nineteen times more hashing power than the current global. You’d only be able to do it once before people realized what had happened. We have one shot so we can’t miss. Our problem is that we didn’t know precisely when it was going to happen so we didn’t know which block we’d need to ‘repair’. We couldn’t give away our position, and when we did, we’d only have one chance to be successful.”

“What are you looking to repair?”

“The damage done by those who have lost their way.”

The loudspeaker in the ceiling crackled, “First block hashed!” Cheers could be heard muffled from somewhere behind the messenger. Nobody appeared to be out in the catwalks so he deduced that everyone must be in similar rooms to this one watching the show. “Three minutes, seventeen seconds!”

The General didn’t look the least bit relieved by this news. “You know, if you want to change something on the chain, you have to hash all the old blocks and the new block in the time it takes the rest of the network to hash the one, unaltered new one. So we doubled it again. Thirty-eight times more hashing power than the rest of the network.”

“So that would mean…”

“One billion fucking machines.”

The clock read 6:00.

“You know the funny part is, is that there’s still randomness to the process.” D mused, surprisingly calm given the flurry of both human and computing activity going on around them. “There’s part of this that’s just fucking luck. Someone might hash the next block pretty quickly. And all this would be for naught.”

The General watched the clock as it ticked past eight minutes, D’s point not lost on him. The loudspeaker screamed to life with more urgency than celebration: “SECOND BLOCK HASHED.”

“Fuck yes!” D slapped the glass with his open palm. “We did it Roger!”

“Pack it up, let’s go!” the General furiously tapped commands into his tablet, hesitating before a final tap whilst looking wistfully over the rows of machines. The orchid vase started drifting across the table as vibrations rippled through the room. The vibrations blurred the large glass window obscuring the view of what was elapsing outside. The far wall of the room was separating down the middle, revealing huge steel interlocking teeth hundreds of feet wide. As the entire side of the room yawned open, lava – molten magma so hot it was too bright to behold – poured over the edges of the steel teeth. The rows of racks instantly gave way, melting into the viscous waves of magma annihilating a billion specialized computers.

They followed the General out the back of the room they had observed the event into another hyperbaric chamber. This one lurched upwards, though at a much more manageable thrust than the voyage down – a compression chamber and elevator in one primed for a quicker escape.

The noise and the chaos faded as the elevator creaked upwards. “What do you want from me?” he asked.

“Nothing. Your job was to bear witness to what just happened. You’re a journalist seeking the truth. We needed somebody independent, segregated from our organization, to know what went down today. Just so if things don’t unfold how we expect, someone knows our side of the story.”

“But, I still don’t know what that was for!”

D sat down across from him and took a deep breath, but was nudged by the General, who had been fixated on his tablet. The General looked up, his face pale. “This didn’t come from us. We had three years to prep this and I knew my code inside and out. I can tell you with absolute certainty, this wasn’t part of it.”

D squinted at the tablet. “It’s only 6.25 bitcoins transferred. Legacy bitcoin. Not even the valuable stuff. What’s the big deal?”

“It means someone else knows.”