GENEVA — In 2008 the species published a design paper with a title the Bureau has never had reason to amend: 'A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.' Cash. Money that moves from one local to another without asking a vault. The machine that followed was built to carry exactly that, and for two years it did.
The Bureau reconstructs what happened next, in the order the files record it. Step one: the machine's creator set a temporary cap on how much the machine could carry at once — an anti-clutter measure, filed in 2010. Step two: the creator departed, leaving a designated successor and the cap behind. Step three: the custodians of the cap kept it. It remains temporary after seven more years, the way a customs office remains temporary.
The creator had left instructions in writing. 'The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets,' he noted in 2010, in the species' own archives. The custodians, who manage the machine by deciding which changes to its rules may exist, read the same archives and concluded otherwise. Requests for larger capacity were treated the way this species treats unauthorized religion.
Step four is the Bureau's favorite. In August 2017, the branch of the machine that restored the original rules — blocks big enough to carry cash, fees below one hundredth of a unit — was switched on. The lead the creator had designated himself wrote, in November of that year: 'Bitcoin Cash is what I started working on in 2010.' The custodians' branch survived too, with a different property: carrying a payment across it can cost more than the thing being carried. The custodians describe this as the machine working as intended, and the archives confirm they mean it.
Step five concerns naming. The custodians' supporters gave the restored branch a diminutive — a pet name, issued the way this species issues one to a rival's offspring. The name stuck. A machine for moving money between anyone, now carrying a label chosen by the custodians of the machine that stopped moving it.
The Bureau files the arithmetic where this species files its own verdicts. One ledger carries cash for less than a hundredth of a unit and is called by an insult. The other carries almost nothing and is called what the founder called it. Both are printed from the same 2008 paper. The paperwork, as usual on Terra, convicts the committee.
