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Martti Malmi.
    This was clearly not the voice of a grizzled veteran of the Cypherpunk movement like Hal. But Martti displayed something more important at this point: eagerness.
    â€œI would like to help with Bitcoin, if there’s something I can do,” he wrote.
    Satoshi had gotten a few promising e-mails since Hal had disappeared two months earlier, but Martti was already demonstrating more commitment than the others.Before reaching out to Satoshi, Martti had written about Bitcoin on anti-state.org, a forum dedicated to the possibility of an anarchist society organized only by the market. Using the screen name Trickster, Martti gave a brief description of the Bitcoin idea and asked for thoughts:
    A widespread adoption of such a system sounds like something that could have a devastating effect on the state’s ability to feed on its livestock. What do you think about this? I’m really excited about the thought of something practical that could truly bring us closer to freedom in our lifetime :-) Now we just need some convincing proof that the software and the system work securely enough to be taken into real use.
    Martti included a link to this post in his first e-mail to Satoshi, and Satoshi quickly read it and responded.
    â€œYour understanding of Bitcoin is spot on,” Satoshi told him.
    M ARTTI ’ S ENTHUSIASM HELPED CONFIRM the shift in strategy Satoshi had made since the beginning of the year. Back when Satoshi had first launched the software, his writings were drily focused on the technical specifications of the programming.
    But after the first few weeks, Satoshi began emphasizing the broader ideological motivations for the software to help win over a broader audience, and privacy was only a part of it. In a February posting on the website of the P2P Foundation, a group dedicated to decentralized, peer-to-peer technology, Satoshi led off by talking about problems with traditional, or fiat, currencies, a term for money generated by government decree, or fiat.
    â€œThe root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work,” Satoshi wrote. “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”
    Currency debasement was not an issue the Cypherpunks had discussed much, but Satoshi made it clear with this posting, and not for the last time, that he had been thinking about more thanjust the concerns of the Cypherpunks when designing the Bitcoin software. The issue that Satoshi referred to here—currency debasement—was, in fact, a problem with existing monetary systems that had much more potential widespread appeal, especially in the wake of the government-sponsored bank bailouts that had occurred just a few months earlier in the United States.
    Throughout history, central banks have been accused of debasing their currencies by printing too much new money—or reducing the precious metal content in coins—thus making the existing money worth less. This had been a passionate political cause, in certain circles, since the end of the gold standard, the policy by which every dollar was backed by a certain quantity of gold.
    The gold standard was the most popular global monetary system at the start of the twentieth century. Not only did gold link paper money to something of physical substance; the standard also served as a mechanism for imposing restraint on central banks. The Federal Reserve and other central banks could print more money only if they managed to get their hands on more gold. If they ran out of gold, no more money and no more spending.
    The restriction was suspended during the Great Depression, so that central banks around the world could print more money to stimulate the economy. After World War II, the world’s leading economies went back to a quasi–gold standard, with all currencies having a set value in gold—though it was no