The Untold Story of the Greatest Crypto Project Ever by Paul Rosenberg

Author:Paul Rosenberg
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2019-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

And here’s some explanatory dialog from the site:

Mailvault was our first success and it was used fairly widely in those days. We were proud of it, and justifiably, I think.

Part 4: Rex Forces a Break

Continuing from Part 3 [link]

Surprisingly quickly, Rex’s people put together a community forum called “Dodge City,” complete with a full spectrum of “early Internet”-style graphics. And give them credit: Dodge City quickly became a hub of activity. It fairly exploded with interesting people and ideas.

Dodge’s success of course made Rex all the more confident that pumping things out fast was the way to go. Unfortunately, the security at Dodge City was pretty poor… or maybe barely existent. I think the programmers wanted to add security to it, but security is difficult and sometimes slow. Rex saw no payoff in it, and he was the one paying them. He’d give security some lip service when enough people complained, but not more than that, and Dodge’s security never improved very much.

And then…

Then Rex ordered his guys to build a fast, cheap financial system. In other words, he was putting together an almost fully insecure version of what Orlin was trying so hard to build right. That sent Orlin over the edge.

But in fairness to wild Rex, it must be said that his system was interesting. Not only did he make it possible to buy and sell shares of our project[4] and other things, but he allowed both buyers and sellers to see the live order book. That’s a very useful trading tool and one that simply isn’t seen by 99% of the people who buy stocks and bonds.

Here’s a very simple example of what one of the pages might have looked like (I have no screenshots or archives):

Security: Muni-corp.

Open orders:

Buy 2000 @ 3.00

Buy 440 @ 3.25

Buy 300 @ 3.50

Buy 210 @ 3.65

Buy 55 @ 3.90

Last Trade 4.02

Sell 21 @ 4.25

Sell 80 @ 4.95

Sell 199 @ 5.25

Sell 2040 @ 6.00

Sell 4,220 @ 8.00

Viewing the order book, you can place your buy and sell positions intelligently. It’s actually a very powerful tool, and most of us had never seen it before.

But as I say, Orlin was seriously (and understandably) angry. Making it worse was the fact that people flocked to Rex’s system. It was easy and it worked… and in many minds, all that security stuff was a downer anyway. Except that this system, if it grew to any significant size, would quickly have become a target-rich environment for money laundering “avengers” worldwide[5]. People would be ruined over it, but not instantly… a time lag that kept people coming in.

And so, Orlin had no real choice but to get away from Rex as quickly as possible. He was looking bad merely by association.

And so, in October 2001 or thereabout, Orlin bought his part of the project from Rex. Properly he bought it from the trust, but Rex had taken control of the trust by that point. (The trustee was his direct employee and did as he was told.) And so, in reality, Orlin bought his work back from Rex.

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