Chapter 19 – Special Agent N00bcake (Part II)

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Shodan didn’t appear to mind, as he waited to find out what would happen next, another message popped up:

“You’ve been asking about Bitcoin on the forums. I don’t know how much you’ve googled on the subject, but I think that I can answer most of your questions directly if you don’t want to wade through all the fanboy gibberish replies to your most recent post.”

“Sure,” he typed back.

Another confirmation box appeared. “Shodan wants to teleport you to her location. Do you accept?” He clicked “Yes” and watched the loading screen spin down. His character resolved in what looked like a dank mineshaft. In front of him, a huge swirling circle of shifting lights blocked his view. His mouse changed when he rolled over it that suggested that he could interact with it.

“Walk through the portal and let’s go,” she wrote.

A loading screen swished by and deposited him into a large cavern filled with very angry looking humanoids. Shodan, resplendent in her glorious mage armor, stood in front of him and cast a chain of spells on herself and on him. Warren stood patiently and waited for her to finish her apparent ritual and her character turned to face him.

“Follow me, but don’t get too close, and don’t attack anything,” she wrote. “If you get into trouble type something and run towards me. Otherwise keep ten steps back or so unless I tell you otherwise.”

“Understood. But, what can you tell me about Bitcoin?”

Shodan turned without a word and charged full bore into the cavern, she zigzagged and careened through the area sliding through the humanoids there. They stopped what they were doing—digging at the walls with pickaxes and standing around—shouted aloud and ran after her. After the room cleared of hostiles, Warren followed as quickly as he could. The mage moved with a fleetness he couldn’t easily match.

“Bitcoin is a type of virtual currency,” the message appeared as Shodan pulled through another group of humanoids—they clustered around her shouting and swinging in a blizzard blur of torsos, arms, pickaxes, fire, and heads. “It’s a commodity cryptographic product earned by solving extremely complex problems to produce special, unique solutions. There will be more bitcoins to mine until a hard maximum of twenty-one million, but as time goes on it will get harder to earn them. The coins themselves are represented by transactions and cryptographic blocks interchanged in a large peer-to-peer network where a large enough agreement between transactions solidifies a new bitcoin or a traded bitcoin.”

After gathering enough of the mobs in the room Shodan exploded.

A splash of light blossomed from where she stood in the maelstrom of bodyparts and she leapt out, spinning as bodies fell around her. Without pause, she sprang away and rushed for the next group of humanoids and began the process all over again.

“How is this money related to cryptography?” Warren typed.

“Much of computational cryptography is all about extremely large numbers—in most cases very large primes. Bitcoin fits into the crypto crowd because the ‘extremely difficult mathematical problems’ that bitcoins solve to produce their unique solutions happen to be extremely similar. That’s not the only reason why people call it a ‘cryptocurrency,’ however. It’s also because the bitcoin system itself is semi-anonymous.”

She continued to dodge through the cavern, gathering another group and devastating them the same way. She continued in this fashion as Warren pushed to keep up. Each time he replied he had to stop moving to type—Shodan seemed to lack this problem; as far as he could tell, she could type and bound around the room (destroying as she went) without pausing to take a breath.

His eyes fixed on the word anonymous for a moment and Warren frowned. An anonymous currency certainly could matter for matters of exactly what he happened to be investigating. Although, it seemed rather silly that the very person he’d been sent to determine trustworthiness would give away elements of her master plan to some random peon on a hacker bulletin board.

Perhaps there was a way for him to peruse the topics without giving away his intentions. Not to mention that he’d felt already that he was being left outside the main clique on the forums (as a newcomer, they didn’t trust him.) However, it has been days and the undercover boys back at the bureau hive tag-teamed the forums creating a persona for him, doing all the necessary things to make his handles look like a real person. He even had a rather lengthy legend behind his online persona—even Mercer with all her contacts and capabilities would find it difficult to break.

After one group in particular, Shodan walked back a few paces and sat down in front of him. She began drinking from a large mug.

“You’ve gone silent,” she typed.

“Thinking,” he wrote.

“You want to know how the currency can be anonymous?”

Warren pushed himself up in his seat and took a breath. “Yes,” he typed. What he really wanted to know is if people then used the coins to deal in nefarious or black market items. Something he felt that he could have possibly studied further if he’d chosen to—asking about the Bitcoins in the forums had been part of his cover. It made sense and if Mercer happened to be involved in the underhanded dealings with the Dean of Engineering it seemed like something would shake out.

That seed would seem to be bearing fruit now.

The mage sprang to her feet and ran through some doors ahead. “The next guy explodes a lot, stay back,” Shodan wrote.

Warren nodded. Then he realized that she couldn’t see him, so he typed, “Ok.” And he followed behind as she began the ritual of grabbing a group of writhing pixels and blasted them mercilessly. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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