Your Healing Voyage With Money

Money, money, money. It seems that wherever you go money is there, coloring intentions, facilitating commerce, and populating wishes and fantasies. And it seems that everywhere you go people are having more money troubles.

Beginning in childhood, my life was a constant of money worries... until I learned that money was only energy, not the paper and coins that so many covet.

Money is energy. And since energy cannot be destroyed or created and there is an infinite supply of energy universally (everything is made of energy) then it stands to reason that a lack of money is an illusion. It's an illusion created by how you see things.

The Matrix

The Matrix is one of my favorite movies of all time. But this is not what I'm referring to in the subtitle of this section.

The matrix I'm referring to is the one Max Plancke spoke of in this quote:

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of an atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

What this tells me is that all things are the expressions of one thing.

And since that one thing is not a material thing but a universal field of consciousness (the matrix), and that the basic building blocks of all things is the atom, and it is the one universal consciousness that upholds the atom, then nothing is as it appears to the eyes nor what we believe in our minds.

And it is our mind that channels the power to create how and what we see, what we experience and what we interpret as true. The same power that upholds all things seen and unseen - all elements, laws, galaxies, and dimensions - is the same power that fuels our learning, growth, and reality and is directed by our choices, which are based on our beliefs.

Our beliefs are the mold in which universal consciousness, teeming with infinite possibilities, finds its unique expression in you, through you, as you.

If your belief is that you can, or can't, then your performance will follow accordingly. If your belief is in forces of good and forces of evil, then your perceptions and interpretations will follow accordingly. If your belief is that life is dangerous, or joyful and magical, then your experiences will follow accordingly.

This is the matrix. And the matrix does not exist or operate independent of you. You are in the matrix, of the matrix, and the matrix expresses as you.

What Does the Matrix Have to Do With Money?

Everything. Money is an idea, first and foremost. Money is not the paper or coins in your pocket. Money is energy. The paper and coins only symbolize money. They are not money.

Supernations, Mega City-States and Virtual Countries

Writing speculative fiction gives a writer the opportunity to have a go at predicting the future. For me, the best tool I always find useful, in order to build the world in which to set the novel, is looking at the past. 'To see the future one must look to the past' and follow the trends.

I began by asking 'What is a nation? A state? A country?' and then went on to research different types of sovereignties throughout history. I followed the trends and discovered the future of the world's political landscape is a mixture of obviousness and surprise. The one prediction that seems most definite amongst all the others is that the nation states we live in today are not static, rigid institutions, but evolving, changing political creatures.

Supernations

One of the obvious developments is the trend of nations moving towards supernationhood. Historically, growing and successful communities constantly expanded to accommodate the increasing power of the citizens of these states. A town grows into a city-state; a city-state turns to empire. Up until last century 'empire' was a natural progression for any nation blessed with the position of economic power. However, empires that refused to evolve by the time the twentieth century came along struggled to survive. The spread of democracy made sure of this. Ever since the city-state of Athens experimented with mixing democracy and empire (a fail in my opinion), large dominions struggled or faltered once injected with representative government. Successful empires were the ones that dealt with democracy by absorbing the ideal into its political composition, alas the advent of constitutional monarchy and republicanism. As these forms of sovereignties become irrelevant into the twenty-first century, new forms are beginning to arise.

Economic Blocks initially were sold to citizens of developed (democratic) nation as mere trade treaties, political union was never in the sales pitch. Yet the promise of prosperity hooked the entire continent of Europe. Political union has always been at the forefront of European history hence why all those large-scale wars, but for a modern empire to take flight, a new approach needed to be implemented. Instead of conquering, the Eurocrats resolved to forge an empire by having nations willingly enter subjugation. Independent peoples are today willing and eager to give up their sovereignty for the promise of prosperity. Forget the wars and struggles for liberty their recent ancestors went through; access to cheap money was all it took to stamp out nationalism.

It is not hard to foresee that when the EU arrives at the crossroads, the Eurocrats will issue their constituents with an ultimatum; federalism, political union, or die in poverty. Europe is on the road to empire, to become a supernation, and compete with all the other, old and new, supernations.

Spheres of Influence are as old as empires. In ancient times, all regional powers asserted a sphere of influence over their neighbours. Control that sphere for a substantial period and that region is theirs, until another power comes along and takes it from them. The Persians did it to expand the empire as an alternative to war. The Greek city-states did it against each other. From the Romans meddling in foreign politics, to the Cold War, the tussle between spheres of influence determined the fate of imperial aspirations. The winner usually takes all, and builds an empire with the spoils.

The United States, a supernation by definition, established its sphere of influence as soon as it became powerful enough to do so. Without really conquering new territory, it maintained an empire for over a hundred years, culminating with the Cold War of the Twentieth Century, which divided the entire world into two spheres of influence. This is nothing new. Cold Wars have been fought between the Mycenaean and Hittite Empires, Hittites and Egyptians, the aristocrats of Sparta and the democrats of Athens, the fundamentalist Hellenes and the theocratic Persians, Romans and Carthaginians... each time the winner taking all.

Today all the major powers are carrying out their own mini Cold Wars. The Russians are forever trying to resuscitate their former Empire status over their satellites nations. Since outright conquest has proved in modern times vastly expensive, maintaining a sphere of influence over them is proving more effective. Economic war is much cheaper, it seems. Far less fallout. China has also become an expert in establishing its sphere of influence, one that stretches far beyond their immediate neighbourhood. They buy love and affection in continents as far away as Africa and Australia, in the hope that they will hang on to this influence long enough to not warrant gunboat diplomacy.

To survive, just like in business, smaller nation will need either to join with an Economic Block or enter a foreign power's Sphere of Influence. Either way, independence and sovereignty is lost whilst the Supernation dominates.

Mega City-States

Cities, by nature, have always been economic powerhouses throughout history. Like the laws of gravity, centres of urbanisation attracted wealth and power. The greater the mass a village, town or city has, the more attractive power they possess, syphoning human resources away from rural communities. It is easy to see how these centres of concentrated wealth evolved into the first political states. Babylon, Athens and Rome grew into city-states, powerful enough to influence and have a central role in civilisation. Epicentres of science, arts, religion and trade, these cities gave birth to empires, monarchies, as well as regional and national states. A thousand years later City-states such as Venice, Florence and Genoa in Italy, and the Free Imperial Cities, sovereign city-states in Germany and Switzerland, rose to prominence, challenging the might of European monarchs, such as the Byzantine and Holy Roman empires.

Few modern city-states exist today; include The Principality of Monaco, Singapore, Vatican City, and the world's oldest republic and only surviving Italian city-state, San Marino. Aside from Singapore, they do not wield the power and influence as nation states, but as populations in cities around the world continues to grow, syphoning more and more resources away from rural areas, towns, and even rival cities, the shift of power away from nation-state, and towards the city-state could feasibly occur.

Generating more and more of the world's growth, these mega cities will become increasingly influential as the city-states of the past. Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. Nation States pool the wealth extracted mostly from their big cities, and redistribute it to the wider regions they encompass. Citizen of cities with populations over thirty, forty, million people could justifiably view this redistribution of their wealth as unfair. If a particular city is in the position to gain self-sufficiency in basic needs, like water, and not have a great over reliance on regional resources, its citizens could seek to protect their wealth. Greater autonomy or breaking away altogether could be on the cards for the megalopolis of Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou, the mega-cities growing in Japan, Mexico and Brazil, or any others currently forming in India, West Africa and The Middle East. In old world nation-states where nationalism and federalism are entrenched, this development is unlikely. However, in new economies this may indeed occur.

The rise of the Refugee and Corporate City-State. To avoid their wealth from being taxed into oblivion by supernations and liberate themselves from convoluted trade agreements, wealthy elites could decide to buy territory from struggling nation-states, outright or on hundred year leases, and build their own city-state. All they need, is a few countries to recognised it as a sovereign state, invest to set up an international air and sea port, establish an international capital exchange for global companies, create a currency, and open the doors to the rich, the poor, and to refugees seeking to build a new life.

Unlike the supernations, which promise easy and immediate prosperity but deliver oppression and totalitarianism, these mega city-states promise hard work initially, but after a long investment period these cities could become the last bastions of true democracy and deliver their citizenry the kind of prosperity and power not seen in living memory.

The Virtual Countries

Countries without borders have been around since prehistoric times. Migration has always been part of human civilization. When tribes or whole communities of people set off to find new territory to settle, fleeing natural disaster or hostile invasion, along with their pots and pans, spears and sheepskins, they also take their culture, language and politics with them. Nomadic peoples are cultures on the constant move; true mobile nations, which naturally brought them into conflict with the rising new territorial nations that locked down more and more land, closing migration routes.

Conquered peoples, especially ones relocated as slave in foreign lands kept their cultures, their religions, forming communities within communities. These slave or migrant Diasporas were the first virtual countries. Similarly structured to family clans, business associations, military institutions, these early, mostly religious, movements or virtual countries, grew in power and influence regardless of the lack of territory ownership, and flourished in the face of oppression. Christianity became a powerful virtual country that lasted for centuries before acquiring territorial status, turning into a land-based empire for nearly two thousand years, and settling down into city-state status in the modern era.

What limited virtual countries in the past was the supreme economic power of the land based nation states that locked down resources within their borders. Today, and more so in the future, this lock down is slowly being bypassed. The invention of The Internet has blasted open the door for the creation of border-less economies. While the old school nation-states try to insulate their domains from the advent of virtual geography, the rise of The Virtual Country will threaten their very existence.

The Internet gives peoples with similar ideals, cultures and gaols the ability to congregate and organised themselves without the need to be physically present.

The online world is already host to millions of nascent virtual countries. When the 4chan and Tumblr communities went to war with each other, it displayed an aspect of what countries, virtual or territorial, have been doing for millennia.

The Anonymous movement also demonstrates how these early stage decentralised communities can evolve in time into powerful virtual countries. All they need is economies to underline them.

With the development of cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin, large online communities can feasibly build powerful economies, powerful enough to rival the traditional economies of the nation-states.

Corporations could also get into the action. Instead of catering only for the pockets of shareholders, companies can also include customers and employees into the voting membership mix. Structured similarly to nation-states, global corporations could build virtual empires in practically any geographical based nation-state.

Social media companies like Facebook or Twitter could harness the power of their users to build such Virtual Countries. All they have to do is provide them with banking and finance, communication, insurance and health services, (traditionally nation-states services provided through taxation.) and support it with a solid currency in the form of reward points, cryptocurrency, gold or fiat backed by shares.

Giant corporations like Microsoft or Google can easily achieve this. Instead of progressing through the corporate life cycle of growth, merge, transition and decline, they could reinvent what corporations are. Instead of buying out their competition to dominate one economic sector, they could branch into every sector and attempt to dominate them all. Energy. Retail. Housing.

If members of virtual countries get better benefits than from what they get from the Nation-State they belong to, then it is easy to predict which system would triumph in the end.

This is possible for any conglomerate to achieve. Used correctly, technology's ability to transgress borders and the unification of customers, employees and shareholders are both powerful empire building tools, and once religious groups, Diasporas, political and social movements, and multinationals start to understand the benefits of the Virtual Country, then the rise of such entities, including Supernations and Mega City-States, could set the agenda for the next five hundred years.

Internet Anonymity: 5 VPN Providers That Are And Aren't Serious About Privacy

Not all VPN providers are the same. Among the differences that are the most common worried about by the customer, (besides cost and reliability,) are logging, and who the provider answers to when information requests are made. But often this information is difficult to distinguish when it is contained in the complicated legalese and documentation that is called the "Terms of Service."

Because of this, many are looking through the terms, and asking VPN providers a lot of questions, so here is a simplistic outline of how serious 5 highly popular takes the Anonymity issue. The most common questions to be addressed here are:

Are any logs kept that would enable a 3rd party to match time stamps and IP addresses a particular user, and if so, what information is actually logged?

What jurisdictions does the provider answer to in the event a query for data is made, and what are the requirements in which they will release the information requested.

1) BTGuard

Maintains absolutely no logs of any kind. According to their Administration they would have to maintain at least 4TB of information daily to store the logs.

The company is in a Canadian jurisdiction, but because they maintain no logs, no information can be shared, either with 3rd parties or governments.

2) Private Internet Access

They also keep no logs of any kind, and instead of using Static, or Dynamic IPs, they use shared IP addresses. This makes it impossible to connect any user to any IP address or time stamp. On their website they also encourage their customers to use anonymous payment forms, like bitcoin, and anonymous emails, to help maintain the anonymity.

They are in the US jurisdiction, but have gateways in Canada, the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Their choice of the US jurisdiction was intentional though, as the US requires no data retention. Information is never shared with third parties, unless there is a warrant or court order. In these cases though, there are no logs to surrender.

3) Torrent Privacy

Maintains connection logs, but doesn't keep the IP addresses in them. They only keep these logs for 7 days, and maintain that it's still impossible to find out who has been using their service.

Seychelles is their jurisdiction, so a special lawsuit is required to force them to relinquish the logs, though they do have servers in the Netherlands, US, and Sweden.

4) TorGuard

TorGuard maintains logs that are deleted on a daily basis., and say that they can't keep them any longer due to storage capacities that would be required. Since no IPs or timestamps are kept, determining who used the connection at any given time would be impossible.

Based in Panama, they have servers in the Netherlands, Ukraine, Panama, and Romania. Information is never shared with any third parties, unless court orders compel them to do so. Even with this requirement satisfied, the lack of logs would comprise a lack of data to satisfy the request.

5) iPredator

They maintain that no IPs are stored, and that few issues have occurred, and that accidental divulgence has never happened.

The main jurisdiction is in Sweden, but they intentionally keep the organizational data mixed, which makes it virtually impossible to legally gain access to any kind of data they do not want to divulge.

All of the providers listed above are high quality personal VPN services and seem to take their customers privacy and anonymity very seriously. If there are ever doubts as to the security of data that could possibly be shared with outside sources, the "Terms of Service" should be read slowly and carefully, then reread. Legalese is a language all unto itself, and if not taken in a bit at a time can serve to confuse more than clarify.

5 Tips to Ensure Your Secure Data Destruction Is Really Secure

Secure data destruction is an issue of great significance to many people nowadays because of the prevailing shift of information to electronic media. What used to be kept in lockboxes and safes before is now placed in a single hard drive: even money, in fact, can be stored in data due to many bank transactions now being carried out electronically instead of personally. This means when it comes to today's heists, your average laptop or personal computer is a better bet for would-be-thieves than the wall safe. The latest BitCoin hacking scandal this weekend goes to prove this.

Whatever the reason requiring the purging of data, there are many ways to clear a hard drive, with some being more certain than others. People have many options from which to choose. The trick to smart data erasure, however, lies in the following practices, considered standard for companies and organisations that give much attention to the way they decommission their electronic systems:

1. It may seem like common sense for secure data destruction, but a startling number of people forget to keep a close eye on their computers before they being the data purging. What this means is that you should reduce the chances of someone tampering with your data before you even get around to clearing it, either by keeping close to your computer at all times or simply establishing a strict filter on who gets to touch the computer prior to the purge. It is also advisable to change passwords on the computer prior to the data purge, just to ensure that no one shall be able to perform an 11th-hour act of espionage or treachery.

2. If you have an active "guest" account on your computer prior to the secure data destruction, delete it immediately. This further reduces the chances of you suffering from an unexpected attack. All equipment that has supplementary user accounts beside yours should be cleared of these if they are not to be used any longer.

3. If your secure data destruction method is overwriting, be sure that you employ the prescribed overwriting patterns from the experts to reduce the chances of any trace data or signatures remaining on the drive. The seven-pass pattern is one of the most commonly prescribed ones. A lot of experts in the field actually agree that a single wipe is sufficient for most people's purposes, even though more sensitive data is usually given stronger data erasure treatments.

4. Try degaussing for your secure data destruction technique. This shall most likely require an expert to do the work for you, but it is easily one of the safest methods available, as suggested by the fact that many government agencies use degaussing for their data erasure. Be aware, however, that degaussed drives often end up being inoperable or unusable until you have them fixed by their manufacturers, so as to return the necessary low-level formatting that will have been wiped out by the degaussing method.

5. If you must use a physical secure data destruction method, then be sure to commit to it completely. This does not mean releasing some steam on a decommissioned disk by attacking it with a baseball bat: rather, it means a controlled eradication of the object with precise attention to detail. Use incineration methods, as they are generally quite effective when it comes to most disks.

Secure data destruction requires conscientious execution to be truly effective, which means most people should turn to professional services if they wish to be certain.

When looking for such companies, be sure to look for those with excellent customer reviews and who are known to have meticulous record-keeping when it comes to the destruction process. You need to be assured that every person who might touch your disk shall be known to you, so that you know where to turn if something ever goes awry.

Potential Risks Faced In the Binary Options Market

The popularity of binary options started in 1973 and has grown over the years to more than 3 billion by 2007. Options provide many benefits including lesser risk, cost efficiency, higher potential returns and more strategic alternatives. Furthermore, there are online brokerages providing opportunities to the option market through the internet at competitively low-commission costs. Therefore, the average investor has the opportunity to use powerful tools to invest just like the professionals. However, like all investments options bear some risks. Some of the potential risks traders may face in the options market include:

· Market risk

Like other investments, trading in options involve market risk. Having an awareness of the presence of this risk can help reduce some of the uncertainties. This will help traders or investors to focus on the investment, knowing where some of the pitfalls lie. Markets have a tendency of moving in various directions, often with little or no warning. Although, there are several ways of predicting potential market movements, the most thorough analysis may not pinpoint exactly all the market directions.

· Precise profit & loss points

Unlike most of the other investments, options are determined by the slightest movement or tick. Therefore, the value of options can be determined by as little as 3 or 4 decimal points. In other words, even 0.0001 points can make a difference between making a profit or loss.

· Capped profit amount

Although risks cannot be eliminated completely, option traders should be aware of the fixed profits. The gains and losses can be fixed to ensure there is ideally no unlimited upside potential with the investments.

· Illiquid

Generally, options are not deemed "liquid" type of investments. As a result, because they cannot be exercised at will investors or traders need to wait until the expiry date of the options before they can take profits or losses.

· Sparse regulation

The greatest risk associated with trading in options, markets are not regulated. Although there are several regulations, there is the possibility of some traders using unscrupulous practices. By reading through the customer reviews you will be able to know the experiences of real investors in the hands of a particular financial trader.

· No ownership of the assets

Options are generally a wager towards the direction of the underlying asset. Therefore, traders do not invest in the ownership of tangible assets. Although many of the investors have no problem with this kind of investing, some of them see a potential risk.

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Nakamoto's Neighbor: My Hunt For Bitcoin's Creator Led To A Paralyzed Crypto Genius

I've just asked him if he was involved in the creation of Bitcoin. The 57-year-old man's almost imperceptible eye movement is his only way of telling me that he was not, and that I've spent the last week caught in the same futile windmill-tilting that has ensnared so many other reporters trying to solve the puzzle of Bitcoin's mysterious creator known only as Satoshi Nakamoto.

Finney is seated in an elaborate wheelchair, flanked by medical equipment and his wife and son, both of whom are wearing blue t-shirts that read "Hal's Pals: Fight ALS." ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is the name of the terminal disease that has locked Finney into a body whose muscles no longer obey his mind's commands. His eyes are among the few parts of his anatomy that his will still controls. He uses them to manipulate voice synthesis software running on a computer attached to his wheelchair with an eye-tracking camera. Until recently, this setup allowed him to speak fluidly in a computerized voice.

But as the disease has progressed, even Finney's eye movements are deteriorating. He's often reduced to yes-and-no conversations like the one we're having now. His engineer's mind, which has written some of the most important code in the history of cryptography, is unaffected by the disease and remains as lucid as ever. But its last lifelines to the outside world are growing thin.

I ask Finney if he has any connection to Dorian Nakamoto, the man Newsweek has a week earlier named as the creator of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has come to represent an entirely new digital form of money, and whose total value has risen as high as $16 billion at some points over the last year.

His eyes glance downward again, and this time Finney grins. His son Jason explains that involuntary movements are less affected by ALS than voluntary ones; Finney can't easily smile on command for a photograph, but he can smile when he's amused, and he's clearly amused by my questions.

Finally, in a plea that must sound a little desperate, I ask Finney to show me what "yes" looks like, just to be sure I haven't somehow misinterpreted his denials. He raises his eyes and eyebrows unmistakably, still grinning.

Amazing, I think, how quickly a raised eyebrow can shut down the most elaborate theories.

A week earlier, I was following clues that seemed to point to either Finney's involvement in the creation of Bitcoin or one of the most improbable coincidences I'd ever encountered. Today, I believe those connections were in fact random, that Finney is telling the truth when he denies helping to invent Bitcoin, and that I am only the most recent of a long string of journalists to succumb to the mirage of a Satoshi Nakamoto-shaped pattern in a collection of meaningless facts.

But in following the clues that led me to Finney, I found something equally significant: a dying man who had been something like a far-more-brilliant Forrest Gump of cryptographic history: a witness to and participant in practically every important moment in the recent history of secret-keeping technologies. From the development of the first widely used strong encryption software known as PGP, to early anonymity systems, to the first Bitcoin transaction, Finney was there.

The rabbit-hole journey that led to my meeting with Finney began on March 6th, the day that Newsweek released its bombshell cover story on the man who it claimed had invented Bitcoin: Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year old ex-engineer and programmer living in the small exurb of Los Angeles known as Temple City. Nakamoto had even seemed to give Newsweek a tacit confirmation of its theory when he told the magazine's reporter that he was "no longer involved in that," a quote confirmed in essence by local police who witnessed the interaction.

Just hours after Newsweek's story hit the Web, I received an email from an old cryptography community acquaintance of Finney's who has asked to remain anonymous. The email was titled "What are the odds?" It pointed out that Hal Finney had lived for almost a decade in Temple City, the same 36,000 person town where Newsweek found Dorian Nakamoto. Finney's address was only a few blocks away from the Nakamoto's family home.

This was an uncanny link: Finney is known to be the second-ever user of Bitcoin after Satoshi Nakamoto himself. He had been one of the first supporters of the idea when Nakamoto floated it on a cryptography mail list, and even received the first Bitcoin test transaction from Nakamoto in early 2009, as Finney himself wrote in a post to the Bitcointalk forum.

In other words, the possibly-first and confirmed-second ever users of Bitcoin lived just blocks apart.

"What are the odds in a country as large as ours, or as large as California is, or even as large as the general LA area is, that [Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto] and Hal Finney both live(d) in Temple City at the same time, about 1.6 miles from each other?" my contact wrote. "Did they know each other socially, through some club? Did one help the other?"

Already, the theory was percolating through the Texas Bitcoin Conference I was attending that day in Austin, where one Bitcoin podcaster independently rehearsed a more extreme version of the same theory for me over drinks: Had Finney invented Bitcoin himself and simply used his neighbor's name as a pseudonym? On Reddit, a user traced Finney's IP address and found that he was in the Los Angeles area. "Dorian [Nakamoto] probably could've been a drop," wrote a user called Ikinoki, using the hacker jargon "drop," a patsy whose personal information is used to hide online exploits.

I didn't suspect Finney of anything nearly so malicious. Instead, I began to believe he might have been Bitcoin's ghostwriter.

At the request of my Forbes colleague Matt Herper, the writing analysis consultancy Juola & Associates had already compared Dorian Nakamoto's various online comments and postings with Satoshi Nakamoto's writings on Bitcoin before his total disappearance from the Web in 2011. (Read the details of their analysis in Herper's post here.) Unsurprisingly, they found a total mismatch: Dorian Nakamoto's half-broken English hardly matched the elegant technical style of Bitcoin's creator.

Hal Finney's writing, on the other hand, was as fluid and precise as the whitepaper that first introduced Bitcoin in late 2008. Maybe, I thought, Finney had served as something like Nakamoto's amanuensis, crediting Nakamoto for the idea, but using his own superior writing skills to explain Bitcoin to the public. I collected a 20,000 character sample of Finney's writing from various forums and mailing lists and sent it to Juola & Associates for analysis.

In the mean time, I emailed Finney a few times. When I didn't hear back--he's been mostly absent from the Internet as his paralysis deepens--I called his wife, Fran, who now works as Finney's full-time caregiver. She explained her husband's medical situation, and patiently relayed my questions to him. Using his eyebrows and eye movements, as she described to me over the phone, he confirmed that he had corresponded with Bitcoin's creator, but denied any connection to the invention of Bitcoin or the Dorian Nakamoto Newsweek had named, just as he would when I visited a week later. "For all Hal knew, Satoshi Nakamoto could have been next door, or he could have been in Japan," Fran said.

She also politely invited me to visit her and her husband in Santa Barbara, where the couple now lives. In person, she said, it would be easier to convince me that Finney wasn't involved in Bitcoin's invention despite the one-in-a-million geographical connection. She also requested that I include in any story I wrote her plea to the media and the Bitcoin community not to flock to their home and stalk Finney for interviews the way reporters had immediately done at Dorian Nakamoto's house following Newsweek's story.

"He's very fragile," she told me. "We have him on ventilator support twenty-four hours a day. He has difficulty communicating. It would be nice if people would not harass him."

Just hours after that phone conversation, I received the results from the writing analysis from Juola & Associates. The firm, its chief scientist John Noecker explained in a phone call, had previously tried analyzing candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto named by older investigations performed by the New Yorker, Fast Company, and various Bitcoin enthusiasts. None of the results had been promising enough to publish, according to Noecker.

Hal Finney, by contrast, was the best Nakamoto candidate whose writing the firm had ever analyzed and the first who Noecker believed might have actually written the Bitcoin whitepaper.

"So, it seems to me," he wrote in an email, "that you may have found the real Satoshi Nakamoto."

Hal Finney grew up in the idyllic Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia, in a two-story cottage-style house just an eight-minute drive away from the Nakamoto family home in Temple City. Dorian Nakamoto, then known by his birth name of Satoshi Nakamoto, was seven years older than Finney, and the two never attended the same school. But Nakamoto's brother Tokuo Nakamoto tells me that Satoshi commuted from the Temple City address to college at California Polytechnic Institute well into the early 1970s, when Finney was attending Arcadia High School just a few miles away.

None of Finney's friends at Arcadia High whom I spoke to had any memory of an older friend or acquaintance of Finney's named Satoshi Nakamoto.

They do remember Finney as an unusually intelligent and thoughtful student, who at times carried around an impressively large copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and seemed to have adopted its lessons about libertarian free thinking. Friends recall him quietly sitting in the back of a physics class, only to approach the teacher afterwards to correct an error or suggest a better way of articulating a problem. At math team competitions, Finney would ring in with an answer to most questions before they'd been fully asked. In 1974, his senior year, he was voted "most brains" by his peers.

"He had this uncanny feel for numbers," says Richard Lewis, a friend of Finney's who is now a Stanford physiology professor. "To him, they seemed like living things that had behavior, that you could learn from."

Finney enrolled in the California Institute of Technology, and soon switched his focus from mathematics to computers, staying up through the night and often missing class to obsess over his coded creations. When he graduated, he married his college girlfriend Fran and took a job writing video games for Mattel. In 1982, the Finneys moved to a house in Temple City, again less than two miles from the Nakamoto family home. (Dorian Nakamoto wouldn't return to the Los Angeles area from New Jersey until 1987, according to Newsweek, and then lived in other neighborhoods like Buena Park and Costa Mesa. But Dorian Nakamoto’s mother and then a Nakamoto a family trust maintained ownership of the Temple City house through Finney's nine years living in the neighborhood.)

It wasn't until 1991 that Finney discovered the movement of anti-authoritarian encryption gurus who would define much of the rest of his career: the Cypherpunks. Centered around the Cypherpunk email list, the group advocated encryption tools as a means to shift power from the government and to individuals. Like many cypherpunks, Finney was inspired by the work of David Chaum, another Los Angelino cryptographer who had proposed theoretical systems that would use encryption tools to enable anonymous communications and even untraceable financial transactions. Chaum had developed the first-ever virtual currency known as DigiCash, with some of the anonymous and decentralized properties of Bitcoin, though it never gained widespread adoption.

"It seemed so obvious to me," Finney would write on the Cypherpunks Mailing List in 1992. "Here we are faced with the problems of loss of privacy, creeping computerization, massive databases, more centralization - and Chaum offers a completely different direction to go in, one which puts power into the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations. The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them."

Finney put his programming prowess to work building the tools to enact that cryptoanarchist vision. "Our motto was 'Cypherpunks write code,'" says Tim May, a co-founder of the group, referring to a line in the Cypherpunk's Manifesto written by his co-founder Eric Hughes. "Hal was one of those who actually wrote code."

When word hit the mailing list that privacy activist Phil Zimmermann planned to release PGP or Pretty Good Privacy, the first freely available encryption program strong enough that not even government intelligence agencies could break it, Finney contacted Zimmermann and became one of his earliest collaborators. He worked almost a full-time job’s worth of hours developing PGP 2.0, widely considered to be the first truly secure version of the program, and pioneered its "web of trust" model of key-signing, a method to establish trusted identities through the peer-to-peer vouching of a community of users. "The trust model was a very complex part, and this was of crucial importance to PGP's success," says Zimmermann. "Hal made an enormous contribution."

(When Zimmermann first wrote back to my query about Finney, he also noted Finney’s extraordinary humility and strength of character: “Hal is a rare genius who never had to trade his emotional intelligence to get his intellectual gifts,” Zimmermann wrote. “He is a fine human being, an inspiration for his attitude toward life. I wish I could be like him.”)

In fact, decades before anyone suspected Finney of ghostwriting Bitcoin, Finney ghostwrote much of PGP. Because of the legal controversy around the encryption tool’s distribution on the Internet--Zimmermann was nearly indicted for arms export control violations--Finney's role was downplayed in Zimmermann's public discussion of the program. Though Finney told me that he worked closely with Zimmermann to code "the bulk of the changes" from PGP 1.0 to PGP 2.0, he's rarely been fully credited for that work.

As PGP’s usage spread, Finney was also the first to integrate the encryption software into "remailers"--free services that acted as proxy servers for email, bouncing messages among third parties so that they couldn't be traced to their source. "Two people could communicate using email, with both of their identities being protected from the other," Finney explained on the Cypherpunks Mailing List. Those tools would eventually evolve into strong anonymity services like MixMaster and Tor, used by millions around the world today.

Meanwhile, Finney never gave up on Chaum’s ideas of digital, pseudonymous currency. “With digital cash and smart cards, you should be able to engage in…transactions with no organization or institution able to violate your privacy or steal your money,” he wrote on the mail list in 1993. “You can protect yourself, rather than having to trust others. This puts more power into the hands of the consumer.” A few years later, Finney would even develop a “proof-of-work” system that closely resembled the one Bitcoin would later use, requiring that participants of the system solve complex computer problems to create a barrier to entry and keep out those who would corrupt the system.

So when the idea for Bitcoin first appeared on a cryptography mailing in 2008, posted by Satoshi Nakamoto, Finney says he was immediately enthusiastic, and responded with curious questions. Nakamoto's announcement otherwise got a mostly skeptical reception. "Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs,” Finney wrote on the BitcoinTalk forum in 2013. “I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it.”

Finney downloaded the early Bitcoin code and began running it on an IBM Windows desktop tower machine. He's widely believed to be the first person other than Nakamoto himself to do so. He kept it running for weeks--just how long, he declined to tell me. With no competition, he was able to mine as much as a hundred coins a day using only his old PC’s off-the-shelf CPU. But sometime after mining a thousand coins, Finney turned the machine off--he and his son were worried the computer was overheating. The stash of bitcoins sat on Finney's hard drive and were later burned to a DVD, left to gather dust on a desk. “I thought it was just an altruistic thing he was doing for a friend,” says Fran Finney. “And we thought the PGP thing had been enough altruism already.”

During his Bitcoin experimentation, Finney corresponded with Nakamoto, sending him a series of bug reports and suggestions for fixes. He would later write that while he had no idea of Nakamoto's real identity or location, he imagined Bitcoin’s creator to be “a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere.”

In early 2009, Nakamoto also sent Finney the first ever test transfer of bitcoins. Finney said at the time he'd repay the ten coins back to Nakamoto. He never did, Fran Finney recalls with a laugh. He had other things on his mind by then, she says: Finney inexplicably began to fatigue quickly, slur his words, experience strange tingling, and lose coordination in his right hand. His doctor diagnosed him with ALS in August of 2009.

As Finney’s muscle control declined over the next years, he continued to write code for Bitcoin. At one point he wrote up an improvement to its elliptic-curve cryptography that would speed up its transactions by as much as 20%. Even after he lost the ability to type with both hands, and then to type at all, he continued to use eye-tracking software to write code, including a program called bcflick aimed at better securing Bitcoin wallets. “I am most proud of my work on PGP,” Finney wrote to me in an email, “ Although I would not be surprised if my small contributions to Bitcoin, particularly my optimization of the elliptic curve math, may be the lasting contribution of my work."

As for the bitcoins Finney mined in those early days, he writes that he was relieved to rediscover them in 2010, still intact, as the currency suddenly began to gain value. He transferred them to the disc, and then later stored it in a safety deposit box at the family’s bank. But as Finney's medical bills mounted, Finney sold the majority of the coins at an exchange rate of around $100, just a fraction of the more than $500 they’d be valued at today.

“[Our son] Jason is always saying ‘what if, what if,’” Fran says of the decision to sell the coins. “It’s fine with me if it means we have enough money to keep Hal alive, at home and comfortable.”

Fran declines to say just how much the family’s remaining Bitcoin savings are worth, but adds that the family has never had as much cryptocurrency wealth as is often rumored. Last year, she says, an extortion attempt threatened to release private information about the family online if Finney didn’t transfer a large number of bitcoins--more than he even had remaining after his medical expenses.

Finney himself doesn’t seem to dwell on what could have been, as much as his good fortune in becoming Bitcoin’s earliest-ever adopter. “I'm pretty lucky overall. Even with the ALS, my life is very satisfying. But my life expectancy is limited,” he wrote last year. “I'm comfortable with my legacy.”

Virtual currency Bits and bob

MILTON FRIEDMAN famously called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, which he thought ought to be replaced by an automated system which would increase the money supply at a steady, predetermined rate. This, he argued, would put a lid on inflation, setting spending and investment decisions on a surer footing. Now, Friedman's dream has finally been realised—albeit not by a real-world central bank.

Bitcoin, the world's "first decentralised digital currency", was devised in 2009 by programmer Satoshi Nakomoto (thought not to be his—or her—real name). Unlike other virtual monies—like Second Life's Linden dollars, for instance—it does not have a central clearing house run by a single company or organisation. Nor is it pegged to any real-world currency, which it resembles in that it can be used to purchase real-world goods and services, not just virtual ones. However, rather than rely on a central monetary authority to monitor, verify and approve transactions, and manage the money supply, Bitcoin is underwritten by a peer-to-peer network akin to file-sharing services like BitTorrent. 

The easiest way to store Bitcoins is to sign up to an online wallet service through which all transactions are carried out. This, of course, means trusting the provider of that service not to cheat, or go out of business, taking clients' savings with it. Warier users can install a personal digital wallet on their own computers. They must then, however, keep it safe from viruses or physical damage. If a laptop went up in smoke, so would the virtual coins stored on its hard drive. (Keeping back-up copies would do the trick.)

All transactions are secured using public-key encryption, a technique which underpins many online dealings. It works by generating two mathematically related keys in such a way that the encrypting key cannot be used to decrypt a message and vice versa. One of these, the private key, is retained by a single individual. The other key is made public. In the case of Bitcoin transactions, the intended recipient's public key is used to encode payments, which can then only be retrieved with the help of the associated private key. The payer, meanwhile, uses his own private key to approve any transfers to a recipient's account.

This provides a degree of security against theft. But it does not prevent an owner of Bitcoins from spending his Bitcoins twice—the virtual analogue of counterfeiting. In a centralised system, this is done by clearing all transactions through a single database. A transaction in which the same user tries to spend the same money a second time (without having first got it back through another transaction) can then be rejected as invalid.

The whole premise of Bitcoin is to do away with a centralised system. But tracking transactions in a sprawling, dispersed network is tricky. Indeed, many software developers long thought it was impossible. It is the problem that plagued earlier attempts to establish virtual currencies; the only way to prevent double spending was to create a central authority. And if that is needed, people might as well stick with the government devil they know.

To get around this problem, Bitcoins do not resemble banknotes with unique serial numbers. There are no virtual banknote files with an immutable digital identity flitting around the system. Instead, there is a list of all transactions approved to date. These transactions come in two varieties. In some, currency is created; in others, nominal amounts of currency are transferred between parties.

In the very first transaction the creator's computer forged 50 units of the currency. The next transaction would have involved subtracting some amount from the creator's account and crediting it to a recipient's. These actions, and any subsequent ones, were automatically broadcast to the entire network. At first, when the network was small and transactions few and far between, verifying them was been straightforward. The first person to confirm the new transactions would offer his updated log as the one against which any future transactions ought to be judged. Once everyone else agreed that this candidate register was indeed accurate, it would be adopted and the new transactions included in it confirmed. If anyone tried to game the system by erasing an old transaction (so he could re-use the same money again) or adding an unwarranted new one (transferring the same money as before, say), he would be promptly found out, his proposed log discarded, and the transactions rejected as invalid.

However, as the network expands from dozens of users to thousands, and transaction volume grows, so does the number of logs vying for the official crown. Getting everybody to scrutinise the first proposal aired across the network for inconsistencies soon becomes impractical; the whole system grinds to a halt. Some way is therefore needed to ensure that the official register can be updated and agreed on in real time (or nearly), while preventing individuals from tampering with it. Mr (or Ms) Nakomoto's ingenious solution involves two related cryptographic techniques: hashing and forced work.

A hashing algorithm converts a message into a number called a hash value, or a digest. If this number is big enough, it provides a unique representation of the original (since the same algorithm could not conceivably yield identical hash values for different messages). Moreover, it is impossible to reconstruct the original on the basis of the digest alone. Nor is it possible to predict what the digest would be for even a slightly tweaked version of the original message; fiddling with a single letter will produce a completely different digest. In that regard, digests appear to be generated at random. As a result, hashing is what computer scientists call an irreversible process.

Consider a hashing algorithm which converts anything fed into it to a whole number between one and 1,000. For random sets of data, the algorithm would spit out a value below 11, say, once in every 100 tries, on average. Now suppose some data are given in advance. How does one find a number that needs to be appended to these given data to produce a hash value below 11? Because hashing is irreversible, and digests are essentially random, the only way to do this is through trial and error: by splicing different numbers onto the old data and hashing the whole lot until the desired result pops out. On average, this will require 100 tries. However, once the answer is found, everyone else can verify whether the problem has indeed been solved by running the hashing algorithm just once, with the proposed solution. This type of puzzle can only be cracked using brute force, which is why it is dubbed forced work.

With Bitcoin, all new transactions are automatically broadcast across the entire network and analysed in portions, called blocks. Besides any new as-yet-unconfirmed transactions, each block contains the digest for the last block to have got the nod from the network. That last block will always come from tip of the longest chain of blocks currently on the network. This chain is, in effect, the official log—confirmation that all the previous blocks tot up.

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For a new block to be deemed valid, some computer on the network must create a transaction log for it that dovetails with the previous blocks. To prevent acceptance of bogus logs, giving it a seal of approval has to be prohibitively costly to any individual user, but relatively cheap for the network as a whole. This is done by making it into a forced-work task, which involves using the valid blocks and the new transactions to generate a digest consisting of 256 bits (ie, any number between 0 and 2256). The task is complete when the system's algorithm spits out a hash value below a preset target (like 11 in the example above). The target is set so that the puzzle is solved by someone on the network, and a new block approved, every 10 minutes. To keep this rate constant as the network's ranks swell and its combined computing power grows, the target is lowered in order to make generating a value below it harder. (Conversely, if the network were to shrink, it would get easier again.)

Creating the doctored block and having it validated and attached to the official log would thus require outpacing the network's combined computing power. This can only happen if a fraudster controls more than half of the network's total number-crunching capacity, which is possible, but extremely expensive for any one person.

The system can thus rely on users to police it. As a reward for giving up some computing power to that end, the first user to crack the forced-work task gets 50 coins for the effort. This is done by always making the first new transaction in each block the conjuring up of 50 coins out of nothing. When other participants agree to append the new block to the official chain, they also validate the creation of the new money (they would, of course, reject it if someone tried to game the system by minting more than 50 coins).

This is also how Bitcoin niftily gets around the problem of increasing the money supply without a central mint. Since blocks are created at a constant average rate, and there is a set number of coins minted per block, the total money supply, too, increases at a steady clip. For now, this is 300 coins every hour on average. Every four years, though, the minting rate is set to fall by a half. It will drop to 25 coins per block in 2013, to 12.5 coins in 2017, and so on, until the total supply plateaus at 21m or so around 2030.

The idea is to mimic the extraction of minerals (the transaction-validating software is called the Bitcoin miner). As the most readily accessible resources are exhausted, the supply dwindles. Unlike real resources, however, there is no as-yet-undiscovered, hidden lode a fortunate prospector can strike to disrupt the money supply. Should a powerful new computer be introduced to the network, the difficulty of the forced-work challenge would soar, keeping the rate at which blocks are approved—and new money created—unchanged.

In theory, then, the system ought to keep a lid on inflation—making it attractive to critics of interventionist monetary policy of the sort practised since 2008 by America's Federal Reserve under the label quantitative easing. (The mineral analogy, in particular, appeals to proponents of a return to a gold standard.) It offers other apparent benefits, too. The currency can be used by anyone (unlike credit cards, for instance), anywhere. Transaction costs are also likely to be lower than those for traditional payment systems, though these are not in fact zero. Some are reflected in the hardware and energy used to police the system. Some surely creep in whenever those who have no wish to mine Bitcoins themselves purchase them for dollars, euros and several other currencies at specialised sites like Mt. Gox. 

Legally, Bitcoin exchanges are subject to the same regulations as ones trading commodities. For example, an exchange must report any transaction above $15,000, a policy meant to stem money laundering. For the purposes of taxation, meanwhile, reimbursing somebody for a product or service in BitCoins is treated as barter. The tax code makes provisions for such practices, though, admittedly, they can be tough to enforce.

This has not stopped some American politicians from expressing grave concern about the virtual currency. Charles Schumer, a prominent Democratic senator, has inveighed against it, claiming it is just what drug dealers have been waiting for. All the clever cryptography means Bitcoin dealings are difficult to trace. But not impossible. According to Bitcoin's defenders, its users may be more difficult for a government agency to pinpoint than someone paying with a credit card. But they are easier to catch than those using cash. Moreover, any drug trade involves sending physical products to recipients. Authorities already track many packages sent by groups under investigation. When it comes to physical delivery, the method of payment is irrelevant. Another worry, for the authorities at least, is that, in theory, a Bitcoin account cannot be frozen. But, like cash, Bitcoins can be nabbed by seizing the computer on which they are stored. 

Ordinary folk, meanwhile, have different concerns. They fear being bilked by a cabal of clever boffins, who can insidiously fiddle with the system's software to take advantage of less geeky types. This queasiness, though understandable, may be misplaced. As an open-source project, the computer code which undergirds Bitcoin can be viewed, and modified, by anyone. As with all such ventures, however, if a change is introduced that most participants do not accept, they will simply refuse to download that version of the software. Since the self-professed geeks who make up the web's open-source communities often delight in (and excel at) scrutinising seemingly impenetrable lines of computer language, it is highly unlikely that someone could get away with surreptitiously inserting a command to create excess Bitcoins and siphon them off to his account, for instance. For the same reason, the open-source nature of the project is also a bulwark against hackers or malware. Indeed, as cybercrime goes, Bitcoin may be safer than traditional financial institutions, which are often on the receiving end of such attacks.

And then there are the currency's economics (discussed in more detail in this week's print edition). These have engendered a surprisingly lively debate. One particular bone of contention is whether it makes sense to decrease the rate of money creation with time. Some people think this will entail disastrous deflation if the demand for Bitcoins grows at a faster rate than new coins are minted. As recent wild swings in their dollar price amply demonstrated, they are not the most predictable of vehicles. The volatility is largely down to the fact that the currency remains illiquid—only 6.5m currency units (divisible to eight decimal places) are currently in circulation among some 10,000 users (including several hundred merchants who accept payment in Bitcoins). This seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, as even Bitcoin's most ardent supporters admit. That is not because people are queasy about intangibles. After all, much of modern pecuniary activity already involves bits rather than bob and consumers have embraced credit cards, electronic transfers and the like.

The difference is that established fiat currencies—ones where the bills and coins, or their digital versions, get their value by dint of regulation or law—are underwritten by the state which is, in principle at least, answerable to its citizens. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a community currency. It requires self-policing on the part of its users. To some, this is a feature, not a bug. But, in the grand scheme of things, the necessary open-source engagement remains a niche pursuit. Most people would rather devolve this sort of responsibility to the authorities. Until this mindset changes, Bitcoin will be no rival to real-world dosh.

Magical Thinking: Bitcoin Gathers at Disney

The hotel is a tomb of hopeful thinking. Built in the 1980s, the single tower of the Wyndham Lake Buena Vista Hotel at Disney World juts up from the Orlando ground as if tectonic forces pushed skyward a sheet of pure, brown stucco. A soundtrack of Mickey Mouse anthems plays around the clock. The carpets are damp. And for a weekend in October, a group of men and women who mean to change the future of civilization were staying there.

The inaugural Coins in the Kingdom conference had been billed as a three-day stretch of "bitcoin partying," but the hotel swimming pool was desolate the evening I arrived. "Baby I Love Your Way" drifted from a speaker as the sun went down, while a handful of immobile guests—none of them bitcoin enthusiasts—loafed nearby. A shirtless man with a large marijuana-leaf tattoo scolded his son.

Bitcoin culture, like Bitcoin, is still an emergent phenomenon. The virtual money, uncontrolled by any government or bank, came to the general public's attention with some notoriety, thanks to the Silk Road, the now-defunct website that employed bitcoin to help you easily buy and sell heroin and other contraband. But any publicity can be good publicity: After Silk Road, the all-but-unregulated new form of money became a tech phenomenon and a currency speculator's dreamscape—the exchange rate for one Bitcoin rose from around $11 in November of 2012 to a peak of more than $1,100 a year later.

It has subsided since, but some proponents say it could go on to $100,000 or a million. Why not a trillion? The enthusiasm had always seemed silly to me—bitcoin was a neat technology concept, but it was hard to see why it should exist. Who really needs a decentralized, deflationary digital currency, other than drug dealers and Reddit recluses?

But the bitcoin people generate their own purpose: The security of the system against forgery relies, in lieu of regulators, on a communal effort called the "blockchain," a distributed ledger system that stores transaction records on the computers of the network of bitcoin users. The blockchain, collaborative and protective, was the technical foundation of this new economic fervor but also, it would soon become clear, a sort of metaphor behind the faith.

I'd flown to Orlando and made my way to the hotel—adjacent to "Downtown Disney," (an outdoor shopping area that resembles what you imagine the nice parts of Pyongyang to be) and quite far from the familiar Disney magic—to see if their bitcoin belief could be contagious. Might bitcoin be not a childish, cultish delusion, but what they held it to be, the next great human invention?

But first there was the emptiness of this other, aging vision of the future: the sprawl of dangerous intersections, poorly laid walkways, and artificial lakes. The hotel did not offer, and never would offer, any indication whatsoever that we were in the state of Florida, or even on Earth, or even alive. It was a solid block of fluorescent-lit corridors and large beige rooms. There were no windows anywhere occupied by the conference.

*** BTC @ $354.95

I was rescued from poolside suicidal ideation by Jeremy Gardner, the 23-year-old head of the College Cryptocurrency Network and the co-organizer of Coins in the Kingdom. Gardner is a recent University of Michigan dropout who'd gained prominence in the internet money community for cashing out his bitcoin holdings at $1,000. A sort of gangly hybrid of Ryan Phillippe and Michael Cera, if they were both debate team captains, he has what seems like infinite enthusiasm. He speaks a lot, and loudly. In his striped polo shirt and cargo shorts, he could have passed for someone walking through Downtown Disney for entirely non-bitcoin reasons.

But unlike everyone else strolling with us past animatronic dinosaurs and kiosks selling Aladdin pins, Gardner thinks about seemingly nothing but bitcoin, at every single hour of every single day. He is wholly dedicated to a very, very particular kind of software, and thinks it's going terrifically: "I'm one of the only people in bitcoin with no enemies," Gardner said, beaming, on our way to a Disney approximation of Italian dinner.

His community is at once filled with both profound enthusiasm, profound trust, and constant paranoia. As far as bitcoin boosters go, Gardner is a moderate—he doesn't see eye-to-eye with anti-statist hyper-libertarians, which he tells me this conference is flush with. But he does see his pet technology in us-versus-them terms. The world is divided between those who "believe in the blockchain" and their foes, of which there are many: banks, politicians, universities, and perhaps above all, Western Union—"motherfucking remittances," Gardner remarked again and again, are a chief evil on the bitcoin moral plane.

There were so many people waiting in line to buy things with dollars, we were ravenous by the time we found an open restaurant. It's not unimaginable that one of Disney's overpriced restaurant simulacra might accept bitcoin someday. Over $180 million in venture capital has flowed into bitcoin-related companies this year alone, backed by A-list boosters like Marc Andreessen and the Winklevoss twins.

That's enough money to create a small industry of people whose sole work is just sort of talking about bitcoin all the time. Bitcoin conferences are sprouting across the country (and globe) fast enough to make you think people actually use bitcoin. Some are geared at educating us cash-users about the advantages of the new way of doing things. But most are just gatherings of people who have agreed on the internet gathering in some conference room to agree more.

Even if bitcoin is still far from the mainstream, the chatter circuit keeps the backers and believers occupied (except when they're defrauding each other through fake conferences, which Gardner said happens quite often). It seems like a lucrative—if not kind of imaginary—career path: With bitcoin expertise, "anyone can get a job," Gardner told me. Was this a job interview? Or even something shy of expertise: "If you know anything about bitcoin, I can get you a job," he repeated, too earnest to be bragging.

Gardner travels constantly, hotel-hopping between bitcoin conferences, gulping Adderall, consulting for extra income, and generally spreading the good news to anyone within earshot. He was inexhaustible, with the bottomless positivity of someone who hasn't read tech coverage over the last year. He and his peers are "changing the world," he insisted. They turning bitcoin into something that will be "bigger than the entire internet."

Bitcoin is galvanizing in the way no other current technology is. In 2014, smartphones are boring. Digital cameras are disappearing. In 2014, bitcoin is where hope and imagination run free.

As we finished our family-sized pasta and whiskeys, I offered to pick up the bill, as a thank-you for rescuing me from sitting alone in an Orlando hotel room. Not a chance. "Trust me," Gardner said, "I think I make more money than you."

"There are those who just want to be left alone, there are those that just won't leave 'em alone! It's no more complicated than that. You think it is, but it's not."

Podcaster Ernie Hancock, who takes credit for Ron Paul's "rEVOLution" campaign logo and once brandished a weapon at an Obama rally, provided Saturday's opening remark before an audience of about 12. If you've ever wondered where the carpet that was removed from your parents house wound up, it appears to be in a Disney conference ballroom now.

Hancock delivered his comments urgently, as if stormtroopers from the Federal Reserve would storm the room at any moment. "What we want to do," he went on, with the lilt of a carny, "is try to make sure that bitcoin develops in such a way that it is supportive of the rights of the individual."

I would hear this again, and again, and again: bitcoin is a weapon for liberty that we dearly need to wield against government. Bitcoin isn't just a way to buy gift cards online, but an act of civil disobedience, a democratization of the global financial system. There's no denying how radical that idea is.

But before we resisted them, we needed to be scared of them.

"Can they?" Hancock asked the audience, invoking every conceivable form of big government malice. "Then they are." It was up to all of us in the uncomfortable chairs to stop this. "If it's technologically possible to advance the interest of those with coercive power, then it will eventually become politically inevitable." The audience nodded along—it starts with regulation, with Wall Street acceptance, and before you know it, a prison state. Or something. If anyone disputed the notion that the very concept of government was just one fat obstacle in the way of unobstructed bullion exchange paradise, they kept quiet.

Hancock was in good company at the Magic Kingdom. Down the orange-tinted hall from his orange-tinted conference room was another chasm of hellish textiles, set up with folding chairs and tables as an exhibitor hall. At one table stood Mark Edge and Carla Mora from the Free State Project, a campaign to get 20,000 people who hate and fear government to move to New Hampshire and live near each other. Carla, asking me if I were "liberty-minded" (the actual word "libertarian" was rarely heard), touted New Hampshire's permissive laws about bar closing times.

I wasn't ready to commit to a new life in a liberty-minded colony, but I was curious what any of this had to do with bitcoin. Orlando was a long way from Manchester.

Edge provided a cheery answer with his radio host's tenor: "Wide [bitcoin] adoption needs to happen to decimate the state." Edge always said the word "state" with finger air-quotes. "The state is the most killing-minded thing," he explained. As a pacifist, he saw bitcoin as his best means to hurt the U.S. government back, by ditching its dollars.

Edge's outlook may have sounded fringe-y, but in this particular magic kingdom, there is no lunatic fringe. Edge isn't a bitcoin outsider: He boasts of his friendship with Gavin Andresen, who was selected as bitcoin's engineering successor by the software's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, before the latter decided to completely vanish. He's plugged in. He was the rule, and I was the exception. He kept smiling.

Mora still seemed a little put off by my reluctance to move to New Hampshire, but remained enthusiastic about the blockchain: "Bitcoin represents pure freedom," she beamed. It was something untouched by the "tentacles of the state."

She was new to the bitcoin community ("the community" or "the space" for short), but the group zeal had taken her already. It was pervasive, even in the ugliest of conference rooms: "There are so many people starting companies… it's a beautiful thing."

Edge stepped out briefly with a skinny, rough-bearded young man from central casting, and they returned with a large Dominos pizza. "This was 27 fucking dollars," the skinny companion announced. The Disney Dominos did not accept bitcoin, but he offered to sell me a slice for five dollars' worth of coin.

I hadn't brought any, and didn't plan to buy, so I'd have to choose from one of the other available options: room service, a cantina by the pool, or a $25 buffet for children that included visits from costumed characters.

*** BTC @ $333.11

The exhibitor's room was uncomfortably big, with more people sitting and waiting to talk about bitcoin than there were pre-registered pairs of ears. Some of the tables had been temporarily abandoned, leaving behind only scattered business cards and crumpled QR codes. But the tone was genial, that of a high school reunion (if you attended high school inside a subreddit and spent the intervening years growing hateful of the government instead of getting fat).

Men in Bitcoin shirts, some sporting Mickey ears, shook hands with internet friends. Children were herded toward a "Kids Room" with "blockchain-inspired activities," though one seven-year-old named Alexander idled by the table where his father was selling bitcoin-logo mugs. For a conference centered around money, very little of it seemed to be changing hands. I asked Alexander what he liked about bitcoin, and he just shrugged back: "I dunno, I just like it." Alexander didn't yet fear the tentacles of the state.

Fear was everywhere else. In another conference room session, Brian Soveryn, the self-described "baddest boy in the blockchain," railed against CFL light bulbs (forced upon us by regulators), warned against radio chips in door knobs, and deemed the U.S. government "unfit to exist." The reasoning behind all of this was never much more substantial than Alexander's explanation of why he likes bitcoin.

There was nothing to do between the panels, which all ran late. There was no way to leave the hotel complex without a car, which I didn't have. Even the shuttles drove you further into Disney occupied territory. When I'd run out of people to talk to, I took the elevator up to my room and looked out the window and wondered what the view looked like before roller coasters and resorts peeked above the tree line.

A few hours later came the day's keynote address, delivered before a crowd of literally dozens of people. Andreas Antonopoulos (Twitter bio: "Security guy, entrepreneur, coder, hacker, pundit, humanist, pacifist.") delivered another refrain of minor paranoia and galaxy-eyed encouragement.

"Welcome," he began. "We're all crazy." The room filled with hoots of approval. The moral of the day was to ignore bitcoin's many skeptics, for "history vindicates the people who take a chance." It all started to feel less like an alternative-currency conference and more like self-help.

Antonopoulos began with an analogy: Once upon a time, governments feared the automobile, and tried to clamp down on its use (not mentioned: the tens of thousands of people who died gruesome deaths before safety glass and seat-belt laws were forced on us by government tendrils). Even electricity had its skeptics, callow souls who thought indoor wiring would burn down homes (not mentioned: electrical fires).

Every technology has its doubters, Antonopoulos argued. Bitcoin has doubters. Ergo, bitcoin (or something like it) would be as widespread as electricity in the near future.

"Be comfortable in [your] position," he urged, "in the position of the weirdo, of the outsider." More applause. "Let them laugh at you." Nods all around. Bitcoin believers were rhetorically perched on the shoulders of Tesla, and Curie, and Edison. "You're not taught that every single person in the history of technology was ridiculed," Antonopoulos exclaimed (not mentioned: the ones who've deserved it).

At his side and serving as a sort of personal moderator and hype man was anarcho-capitalist celebrity Jeffrey Tucker. Tucker was an odd sight in a room full of people in bitcoin shirts and cargo shorts: impeccably dressed, with a fey demeanor and theatrical voice verging on stage accent. Reports from the 2008 presidential campaign fingered Tucker as the author behind Ron Paul's notoriously homophobic and racist newsletters, a charge on which he's demurred.

In the Horizon ballroom, Tucker dazzled: He decried bitcoin critics as "Luddites," praised the robber baron mansions of Newport (monuments to "early adopters"), urged us to browse rare coin shops ("an authentic part of the social order, a symbol of an age that's gone by"), and of course, denounced the federal hand. "The regulatory books are stuffed so full of hundred years of crufty laws," he said.

The content was the same as every diatribe, but the air was tinglier. This man didn't speak like he'd skulked out of an internet message board, but with Hollywood confidence. He wore a bow tie. He used large words, and gestured artfully with his hands.

Even so, the stock talking points were numbing. The government will clamp you if you give it a chance, so trust in this esoteric internet technology. Our enemy: Wall Street, the state, the White House. Our ally: the blockchain. Oppressor and liberator. Regulation and liberty. Them, and us.

I'd never seen the bitcoin community as monetary Manichaeism, but now it was the only way it made sense. How else could what is essentially a group of software enthusiasts act like they're attending the next Vatican Council? The blockchain, basically a fancy ledgerbook of wire transfers, was one thing in which these families could feel absolutely secure. Bitcoin was safety.

Why else travel to Orlando, this cartoon swamp? The government could come for their guns, or their land, or their light bulbs, but it couldn't seize the blockchain. No matter that the blockchain, at present, wasn't capable of doing very much other than serving as a symbol of personal liberty at a conference in Florida.

The conference dispersed for dinner, reconvened for a charity poker tournament (with a bitcoin purse, of course) and slept. There was a wedding the next morning.

I love weddings but dislike the happiness of strangers, so I was ambivalent about the union of David and Joyce, who were to perform the first "blockchain wedding" in history. If you'd told me I would come close to tears at a bitcoin wedding inside a Disney convention center I'd spent the better part of two days inside, I'd have assumed you were speaking to me through a malarial fever.

Yet here we all were, a room of smiling strangers, dressed for a trip to Dave & Busters, seated in neat hotel rows. "Is it bad luck on your wedding day if you get a stuck block?" cracked one guest to another. I didn't quite get the joke.

The bride's parents were watching the ceremony from the Philippines via Skype, the groom's mother next to them, all the way from Brooklyn. They clapped and cried, and I wondered how you'd explain this to your parents and thought how much they'd have to love you not to mind. Jeffrey Tucker officiated with a grandiloquent speech on human volition, beauty, love, and entrepreneurship. Bless his laissez faire heart, he did indeed find a way to compare the union two people to a bitcoin transaction: "Through entrepreneurship, and enterprise, there is also love."

[There was a video here]

But who needed metaphors? They tied the knot with an actual money transfer—David transferred himself 3.5 bitcoins (around $1,300 in criminal statist fiat money) through an adjacent crypto-ATM. The transfer was accompanied by a commemorative marriage memo, so that a statement of their love was repeated across the world, transferred from peer to peer across the whole blockchain.

There was no marriage certificate for the IRS to trample. When the symbolic transfer was complete and pressed into the immutable cyber-ledger, the couple received a printer receipt from the ATM. Say what you will about this modern marriage, but that's more than most couples ever get.

In sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, and "because the blockchain is forever." We were all jubilant. We ate slices of a custom-ordered wedding cake shaped like a bitcoin ATM, bright orange and red velvet. The bride tossed a bouquet. I gave David a strong put-'er-here-pal handshake, not even thinking that I didn't know his last name. "I wanted to give her something special," he told me. The ceremony was the gift. The bride was beautiful.

All the tone-deaf Reddit posting and speculative greed on Twitter, all the arrogance and triviality of "the bitcoin community" seemed to dwindle beside the family in the Philippines crying tears of joy. For a small part of the day, the presiding sentiment wasn't fear. The bitcoin community, such that it was in the Magic Kingdom that afternoon, felt like a community, not simply an opt-out from the rest of the world. It felt like a church.

Faith in the blockchain hadn't amounted to much beyond a mini-bubble of venture capital and a lot of startup confidence, but in the aftermath of the wedding, it was unimpeachable. A hyperactive child stomped down the aisle as the cake crowd dwindled, shouting "I'M SATOSHI NAKAMOTO! I INVENTED BITCOIN!" over and over, to the delight of every guest. If bitcoin amounts to nothing more than a strange mid-decade fad and cautionary lesson for future MBA classes, at least it made a group of people happy for a couple hours.

I decided I'd have some sort of breakdown if I stayed in Orlando through the evening, so I switched my ticket home to an earlier flight and paid a surcharge of U.S. dollars. It worked perfectly. By the time I would reach Orlando International Airport, the price of one bitcoin would have sunk to around $296—the lowest in almost a year.

"The next step is we need a couple of these," the groom told me as I headed out, gesturing to the children of the coin.

"Can't do that with the blockchain yet!" I replied. How else do you talk about unborn children with a stranger at the end of his virtual-currency-themed wedding?