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Chapter 47
GARY’S BIG CHANGE
Everything felt completely out of place for Gary as he reported for duty on the DEA strike force
he had been assigned to in New York City. Unlike the IRS’s beige downtown office building,
which was surrounded by a blockade of federal monoliths and local courthouses, his new workplace
was above Fourteenth Street, nestled in among hipster bodegas, cupcake shops, and the Chelsea-
Elliot housing projects.
At the IRS, every cubicle was as tall as a man, which afforded privacy for agents and their
spreadsheets. Yet the cubicles in his new office were low and open. As a result, when Gary sat down
at his desk, no matter which direction he looked, he found himself gazing directly into someone else’s
eyes. (This was all intentional, Gary was told, designed to get people from different government
agencies—NYPD, DEA, IRS, and local and state police—on the task force talking to one another
about their cases.) He had no privacy. People in his new office dressed differently too, wearing
“casual” street clothes, like sneakers and T-shirts. Gary didn’t own any of these, so he had to go
shopping with his wife to buy boots and jeans, which made him feel like he was wearing someone
else’s clothes. Buttoned-up Gary felt completely out of place.
The most dissimilar aspect of the new task force was the open-door policy. People shared the
information they had gleaned from their investigations with everyone else. It was all for one, not a
cadre of solo IRS suits counting pennies alone.
Before arriving, Gary had done his homework, scouring news articles, forum posts by the Dread
Pirate Roberts, and research about the Dark Web, all to get acquainted with the case he was about to
join. While reading these pieces, Gary had come across the first white paper that had been published
about Bitcoin, written by the creator of the digital currency, an anonymous man who went by the
pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
Gary read the paper once and nothing stood out. He read it a second time, and still nothing. But
the third time he noticed something, in a section of the paper that referenced the “Gambler’s Ruin
problem,” a theory that no matter how much money you have in a betting scenario, the casino (or
house) has an infinite amount of money, and therefore, if you keep making bets, the house will
eventually win. Gary reasoned that the same theory was true for DPR and the Silk Road. The U.S.