Camila Russo - The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum

Before anything else, you are a writer, my mother likes to say.

This is for her.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

I dont consider myself a computer geek. I dont spend hours on end hacking away on my laptop. Im also not into financial speculation. Watching it from a distance and writing about it, I love. Putting my moneyand my stomachthrough nauseating ups and downs, not so much.

So why spend years devoted to cryptocurrencies? The answer is at least slightly different for everyone Ive asked this question to. For me, its about freedom. If you push me a little, I might even say its about revolution.

The first time I learned about Bitcoin was in 2013. I was living in Buenos Aires, reporting on the Argentine market for Bloomberg News. But I was more than reporting about it; I was also living it. As I wrote about double-digit inflation, the pesos I earned for those stories quickly depreciated. I started exchanging my salary to dollars as soon as I got it, until one day the president woke up and said, Nope! You cant do that anymore.

Could it be possible that the government was able to ban the purchase of the US currency, something Id been able to do with a click on my banks website? I went to check, and sure enough, the option to exchange pesos from my local currency account into dollars to deposit in my foreign currency account was nowhere to be found. One day it was there, the next day it was gone. The government was depreciating its currency with populist policies, and now it wasnt even going to let me protect my own savings against its economic mismanagement. This was perfectly legal. It was the government doing it.

Who could I turn to? Around that time, a colleague in another office told me about some weird digital currency called Bitcoin, which Argentines were using to get around this problem. I decided to write about it. The people I talked with for my article had been living with some form of inflation and/or currency controls all their lives and so had their parents. They understood right away how significant it was to be able to buy a currency thats not controlled by anyone and, therefore, cant be stopped or seized. Its issuance rate was dictated by algorithms and computer code, not by the whims of politicians and central bankers.

I thought this innovation was incredibly powerful and continued to watch Bitcoin and the growing cryptocurrency market until, in 2017, I got a chance to write about it again. By this time I was based in New York, still reporting on markets with Bloomberg News, and noticed that crypto was heating up. I started covering this strange market, at first sporadically, but as prices kept climbing, and more tokens kept getting issued, and crypto startups were raising millions in seconds, and everyone from celebrities to fund managers to CEOs was talking about it, it was soon consuming most of my time. By the end of the year it was clear we were witnessing a full-blown bubble. One of the most fantastic speculative manias the world had ever seen, and I had been privileged to cover it at one of the most respected financial media organizations.

At the end of 2017, when I took stock of what I had just witnessed in crypto, I thought, This needs to be permanently documented. From an early age, my dream had been to write about the real world with the drama and excitement found in fiction. I set out to find the best story to tell in crypto. I found that, while some great books of the kind I wanted to write had been written about Bitcoin, there was no history of Ethereum, the second-biggest chain, which had fueled much of the craziness of the past year. More important, Ethereum was unique in that it tried to take blockchain technology, underlying Bitcoin, even further than what the original cryptocurrency had. Bitcoin wanted to be peer-to-peer money. Ethereum wanted to be peer-to-peer everything. It wanted to be the world computer, behind a more decentralized, freer world. Even if it failed in its ambition, the innovation in itself and the frenzy it caused were book-worthy.

Thats how I set out to write the first book on the history of Ethereum.

To write it, I started with interviews with the small founding group of this network, the original cofoundersalthough you will now read theres some contention around that termincluding the creator of the platform himself, Vitalik Buterin. From initial conversations, I established the basic chronology of how Ethereum developed, the major milestones and themes. Then I sought out the protagonists of each major stage of the project, those who saw its history unfold firsthand. They led me to contact others closely involved, who led me to talk with yet others. Then I went back and talked with many of them again. Thats how after two years of work, with roughly six months focused on research full time, I compiled more than one hundred interviews, and many more hours of recorded conversations.

I also tried my best to follow them wherever they met. The Ethereum community lives all over the globe by design, so conferences and hacking contests are especially important as theyre the few times during the year where many see colleagues and fellow Ethereans in person. At the dozen or so events I attended in the United States, South America, Europe, and Asia, I got a chance to meet even more people and get a better sense of what the broader community looks like, from what they talk about to how they dress and party. In other words I got colorand theyre a colorful bunch.

Some of my sources were also generous enough to share their emails from the time, pictures, chat logs, and recorded conversations. In addition, I relied on other primary material, such as archived websites, blog posts, and videos.

My goal with this research was to reconstruct Ethereums history as accurately, and as close to reality, as possible. Everything I narrate is based on interviews with people who were there and materials from the time. I havent reconstructed or condensed scenes for dramatism. The closest elements to fiction are dialogues, which I crafted from how those involved in these conversations or events remember they happened. All of the characters in the book are real people, and the names used are their real names. I didnt create composite or fictional characters. In only one occasion, I accepted a request to use a pseudonym, as it was a minor character and excluding his name didnt impact the documentation of Ethereum history. It is disclosed in the book.

One of the biggest challenges when writing this story was to decide on a single version of events when those involved remembered it in different ways. This was especially difficult when there wasnt supporting material, other than interviews. On those occasions, I went with the account that was shared by most participants, and the one that, based on my research, made the most sense. Readers will have to trust my judgment on those few cases. I did my best to make those decisions responsibly.

Of course, enthusiasts will hopefully enjoy learning even more about the network they support and work on, and get a peek at how it developed from its very early days. But if youre a non-techie person like me, and even if you had never heard of the word Ethereum until maybe just now, this book is for you. My intention is that anyone, anywhere, will be able to pick this up, without prior knowledge of blockchain technology, and be captivated by a fascinating story: an idealistic hero, his band of misfits, and the challenges they face to make their incredibly ambitious dream a reality.

By the final pages, I hope you will have learned more about this dream, about how this army of hackers is building an alternative to the way the world works right now, that is, concentrated in the hands of a few powerful entities. Theyre seeking to put that power into the hands of individuals, so that people can have greater control over the things they own, from assets to data, and more freedom to use those things in the ways they choosethats what I meant when I said cryptocurrencies are about revolution. I hope you will also have learned about this technology, which I believe is here to stay and will be increasingly prevalent in the future.