Extropia's Children, Chapter 3

Extropicoin Extrapolated

(Each chapter of Extropia’s Children can stand alone, but see also Chapter 1, “The Wunderkind,” and Chapter 2, “This Demon-Haunted World.”)

i. Cryptogenesis

Bitcoin was, of course, created by the pseudonymous figure Satoshi Nakamoto, but it’s well understood that Satoshi built on a sizable stack of previous work. The usual technical history goes like this:

• 1979: Ralph Merkle (a formative Extropian) patents the Merkle tree.

• 1989: David Chaum launches DigiCash.

• 1997: Adam Back creates hashcash.

• 1998: Wei Dai creates b-money (the first citation in the Bitcoin white paper.)

• 2004: Hal Finney creates Reusable Proofs of Work.

• 2005: Nick Szabo creates bit gold.

It's well established that almost all of the above were contributors to the cypherpunks mailing list, launched in 1992 by Timothy C. May, EFF co-founder John Gilmore, and Eric Hughes.

It's perhaps less appreciated that most were also extropians. Nick Szabo, for instance, wrote for Extropy Magazine in 1995, and spoke at their 2001 conference. Several also contributed significantly to the extropians mailing list. Finney and Dai were among its most prolific writers. Indeed the 90s cypherpunks had more than enough overlap with 90s extropians, in both membership and attitude, to be reasonably considered sister communities … both preparing themselves for a brave new transformed world.

(It's surprising nobody seems to have accused Eliezer Yudkowsky of secretly being Satoshi Nakamoto. He corresponded at considerable length with Finney and Dai on the extropians list, and subsequently on LessWrong! Bitcoin was written in C++, and Yudkowsky once said of his C++ skills, “I can do the possible elegantly and the impossible via black magic”! I am disappointed in the Satoshi hunters. But of course he was not Nakamoto. Their writing styles are very different; Yudkowsky was always laser-focused on the Singularity; he wouldn't have cited a British newspaper in Bitcoin's genesis block; and, most of all, Satoshi Nakamoto — whoever he, she, or they may have been — was a true cypherpunk who shipped code and got things built.)

ii. Extropian Nakamoto?

Let's pause to remind ourselves how incredibly weird it is that a kind of magical Internet money, collectively worth $370 billion as of this writing, and recently north of $1 trillion(!), was conjured out of thin air and cryptography at all. Let us go on to stress how ridiculously implausible it is that, furthermore, it was created by a pseudonymous figure whose true identity remains unknown to this day. Were this not real life it would seem the stuff of wish-fulfillment daydreams more than science fiction.

It's speculated that Satoshi too lurked on the cypherpunks list. On the other hand, Adam Back reports that Satoshi didn't know about b-money, Wei Dai's creation, in summer 2008. (Details are vague: “I've never revealed my emails to Satoshi and maybe I never will. Netiquette dictates not sharing emails without permission.”) Admittedly b-money was not a hot topic on either list, but that's still somewhat surprising.

We do know that Satoshi wrote Wei Dai both before citing b-money in Bitcoin's white paper, and immediately after Bitcoin's launch; that Satoshi added Finney to Bitcoin’s software repository in late 2008, ahead of launch; and that Finney was the first other person to run Bitcoin, and the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction. We also know both Dai and Finney followed Eliezer Yudkowsky to LessWrong, and became regular contributors there.

At this point it is almost obligatory to ask: was Satoshi a pseudonym for Wei Dai and/or Finney?

...Maybe? Wei Dai is an expert C++ programmer and cryptographer, notoriously private, and clearly extremely smart and thoughtful: see, for instance, his debut post on the extropians list. Hal Finney was also an expert coder — although in C, not C++, and the difference is non-trivial — and even his extropian posts reveal his ongoing interest in anonymous digital currencies. In fact, way back in 1993, Finney wrote a seven-page article for Extropy magazine about DigiCash.

Satoshi's emails to Adam Back about Dai, and then to Dai, could have been Dai going out of his way to cover his own tracks. But having already launched b-money under his own name, why would Dai suddenly switch to a pseudonym for Bitcoin? The same goes for Finney's RPOW. The idea that Bitcoin would actually take off and become enormously valuable was highly implausible, even, apparently, to Satoshi, who wrote: “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on.” So why start concealing your identity, when you hadn't bothered to do so with your previous public proposals? On the gripping hand, cypherpunks were definitionally private and paranoid about surveillance...

There are surprising connections between Hal Finney and the name Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2014, Newsweek claimed an elderly man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was the Satoshi. This turned out to be obviously untrue. But, weirdly, Dorian lived in the same 36,000-person California town as Finney. (Who always said: “As for your suspicion that I either am or at least helped Satoshi, I’m flattered but I deny categorically these allegations.” An odd phrasing, since he is known to have helped Satoshi debug Bitcoin’s initial release.)

On yet another tentacle, Satoshi cited The Times, a London newspaper, in Bitcoin’s genesis block, and used British English spelling. On yet another, this too could have been deliberate disinformation. The only Brit among the names above is Adam Back ... who argues fairly convincingly that if he had been Satoshi, Bitcoin would have been rather technically different.

My own theory, entirely unsullied by any supporting evidence, is that Satoshi Nakamoto was a group identity, a collaboration between multiple people, at least one of whom was some kind of NSA-ish spook; that this group chose to create a kind of Gibsonian-idoru online avatar to represent their collective work … and it included, or grew to include, Hal Finney.

Alas we are extremely unlikely to get the chance to ask any more questions of him. In 2009, Finney announced on LessWrong that he had been diagnosed with ALS. In 2011 — the same year Satoshi vanished — he resigned from his job at the PGP Corporation. (Worth noting PGP was one of the few software projects which faced as adversarial a threat landscape as Bitcoin.) Hal Finney died in 2014…

…and his corpse was promptly frozen for subsequent resurrection.

iii. Life after Death after Life

Extropians tend to believe in cryopreservation: that if the brain is frozen upon death, given time and the inexorable march of technology, it will eventually be possible to restore the mind from that frozen brain and upload it into a new form. There are numerous biological reasons why resurrection after cryofreezing seems pretty implausible, but the Extropian stance is that sufficiently advanced future technologies will solve them all.

(And, in fairness, from a Pascal’s Wager perspective, if you can afford it, “why not?” seems a pretty reasonable question. The Extropian perspective tends to be more visceral, though, perhaps best exemplified by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has written of cryonic suspension “If you've been putting off that talk with your loved ones, do it. Maybe they won't understand, but at least you won't spend forever wondering why you didn't even try.”)

The freezers in question are located at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, founded way back in 1972. They currently host the chemically-very-recently deceased bodies (well, sometimes just the heads) of 182 humans and 33 pets. Members include Finney, baseball star Ted Williams, OG transhumanist FM-2030, SF author Gregory Benford, philosopher Nick Bostrom, and aforementioned economist Robin Hanson. (Members are not necessarily dead/frozen; “patients” are.) And, in a paradoxically simultaneously remarkable and entirely unsurprising turn of events, Alcor's scientific advisory board includes none other than Ralph Merkle. Yes, that’s right; the very first name in the “technical history of Bitcoin” itemized above.

The links between rationalism and cryptocurrencies continue. As previously mentioned, Paradigm, a spinoff of Leverage Research, launched their own cryptocurrency. Ethereum founder and fellow wunderkind Vitalik Buterin has donated more than $5 million to MIRI. Another anonymous cryptocurrency investor has donated even more — over $15 million.

It isn't exactly a huge leap of logic to conclude that these donations were informed by the major intellectual descendant of the extropians, and subject of the next chapter. I refer, of course, to the enormously successful, and increasingly controversial, movement known as “effective altruism.”