In short
Podcast Episode Notes: Genesis
Podcast Title
Search Engine Host: PJ Vogt Editor: Sruthi Pinnamaneni Description: Exploring the world, one question at a time.
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Episode Title
Genesis Release Date: April 2022 Description: The episode delves into the origins of Bitcoin, tracing its evolution from a simple PDF document to a significant movement showcased at a major Bitcoin conference in Miami.
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Key Themes and Concepts
- Origins of Bitcoin
- The concept of Bitcoin was introduced in a white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008.
- The paper presents Bitcoin as a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system."
- Embedded in the Genesis Block: A newspaper headline criticizing government bailouts, indicating a distrust of traditional financial systems.
- Bitcoin Conference in Miami
- A large gathering with about 25,000 attendees, showcasing a mix of regular people and eccentric personalities.
- Attendees paid significant sums to participate, indicating a strong investment in the Bitcoin ideology.
- Visual representation of the Bitcoin movement, with unconventional outfits and merchandise emphasizing anti-fiat sentiments.
- Bitcoin Maximalism
- Definition: A belief that Bitcoin will be the dominant digital currency, often associated with a deep-seated distrust of traditional banking.
- The episode introduces Bitcoin maximalists, who view bank bailouts as personal betrayals that Bitcoin can remedy.
- A panel discussion described a "war" against perceived threats from governments and other cryptocurrencies.
- Cultural and Social Dynamics
- Attendees share a sense of community, with many drawn to Bitcoin for financial freedom.
- The notion of Bitcoin as a vehicle for rebellion against financial elites is prominent.
- Various factions exist within the community, leading to an atmosphere of competition and tribalism.
- Profiles of Participants
- Marnita and Lanu: Represent everyday individuals seeking financial freedom through Bitcoin education.
- Peter Thiel: Keynote speaker who promotes Bitcoin while targeting financial elites as adversaries.
- Celebrities: Athletes like Odell Beckham Jr. and Serena Williams contribute to Bitcoin’s mainstream appeal.
- Contrasting Views
- An encounter with a dissenting voice outside the conference challenges the prevailing Bitcoin orthodoxy, arguing that Bitcoin is being co-opted by corporate interests.
- This segment highlights the ideological clashes within the Bitcoin community, touching on themes of capitalism, freedom, and the role of intermediaries.
- Personal Reflections
- PJ Vogt expresses feelings of unease amid the collective fervor surrounding Bitcoin, contemplating the potential futures shaped by this movement.
- The episode concludes with a sense of ambiguity about the implications of Bitcoin's rise and the motivations of its proponents.
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Major Takeaways
- Bitcoin's Ideological Roots: The white paper serves as both a technical guide and a philosophical manifesto, embedding critiques of traditional finance into its foundation.
- Cultural Phenomenon: The Bitcoin Miami conference illustrates Bitcoin as not just a currency but a cultural touchstone, attracting a diverse crowd united by a common belief in financial freedom.
- Internal Conflicts: The Bitcoin community is marked by ideological divisions, with maximalists fiercely defending Bitcoin against competitors and skeptics.
- Future Implications: The rapid rise of Bitcoin and its community raises questions about the economic structures that govern society and the potential for new forms of wealth and power to emerge.
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Conclusion The "Genesis" episode of Search Engine provides a thorough exploration of Bitcoin’s origins, cultural significance, and the passionate beliefs of its advocates, while also highlighting the dissent and skepticism that exist within and outside the community. The episode culminates in personal reflections on the broader social implications of the Bitcoin movement, leaving listeners to ponder the future of finance in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Hi, I'm PJ Vogt. This is the second of our Crypto Island favorites that we're sharing with you. In this episode, which takes place in April 2022, we were fascinated by the idea of Bitcoin's white paper, the notion that a currency would have a founding document laying out how it should work, written by a pseudonymous author. We wanted to start in that document and trace it to where it had led, to see how something that is so open to interpretation could be interpreted in some very strange ways. We wanted to meet the pilgrims who had followed in Satoshi Nakamoto's wake. I hope you enjoy it. This one is special to me.
0:36We'll play it after some brief ads.
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1:52A lot of people already know the origin story of Bitcoin, but I'm just going to recite it one more time. It is fall of 2008. George W. Bush is president. We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis. Lehman Brothers has just collapsed. ...by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has... Number one movie in the country, Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Number one song in the country, T.I.'s Whatever You Like. This is where I would play a clip for you, but the podcast budget does not really allow a fair use lawyer. You'll just have to imagine it. On Halloween of that year, 2008, a person claiming to be a Japanese man named Satoshi Nakamoto appears on a cryptography mailing list to announce his new invention, Bitcoin.
2:40He describes this invention in a white paper. It's called Bitcoin, a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. This white paper, it's an elegant document. Text runs just eight pages long, minus footnotes. In precise academic language, he describes the problem he set out to solve. Quote, Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Obviously, we don't know who Satoshi really is, but this is as close as I can get to the voice I hear in my head when I read this.
3:30And when I read it, I don't really try to follow the technical description. I just listen for this voice. Calm, academic to the point of being pretty dry. Nothing about this white paper, to me, screams impending revolution. Quote, digital signatures provide part of the solution. but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending. We propose a solution to the double spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. What Satoshi is saying is that there will now be electronic cash, money native to the internet. And when that money is spent, the ledger of who has it and who sold it will be kept by the users, not by a centralized bank, not by a third-party company.
4:18Satoshi's white paper does not explicitly describe an ideology, but a worldview thrums through it. You can find it if you know where to look. For instance, the Genesis block. The very first recorded transaction on Satoshi's ledger, which he himself minds just a few months after publishing the white paper. Satoshi embeds in that Genesis block an actual headline from a newspaper. The London Times, 3rd of January, 2009. Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. This text embedded into the blockchain. Embedded into the blockchain forever. Countries, normally, put precedents on their money. Satoshi instead has stuck a newspaper headline on his that, presumably, he felt a way about.
5:07Government prints money to save bankers' asses. Maybe that's what Satoshi wanted everyone to think about whenever they used his blockchain. I can't help but see this white paper as a Bible of some new religion. Over the next 13 years, Bitcoin will become popular, arguably to some people even useful. And it will certainly find its adherence. This vision Satoshi Nakamoto is trying to call into existence, strangers will see that vision. It'll give them their own visions of the future, futures they want, where they're free from the lives they're bound to. And they will follow this vision with a religious fervor.
5:43Some very weird people will get rich. alongside bitcoin many new coins will spawn each presenting not just a new version of how this technology can work but within a slightly tweaked vision of a different new future and each time led by a different nerdy charismatic figurehead you'll have your vitalik butyrans your charles hoskinsons elon musk will end up in there somehow
6:12Crypto, which outsiders like me will see as a monolithic, coherent world of crypto bros, will actually be a deeply balkanized world of competing tribes, loyal to different futurists. But it's the original group, the Bitcoiners, the cult of Satoshi Nakamoto, who will seem, at least to me, the strangest. And to try to understand them, to understand the world which this white paper has called into being, I will find myself on a very hot April weekend in Miami, alone in a bathroom with a small tape recorder at a very large conference. So here we go.
7:07So it's the first day of Bitcoin Miami, supposedly the world's largest Bitcoin conference. And I've just left a somewhat quiet bathroom to reenter the hulking complex that is the convention center. Miami convention center, a deeply nondescript large building with some palm trees outside of it. Inside, so many people. And they paid a lot of money to be here. The week of the conference, regular passes were going for around$1 ,000. The expensive tickets, the whale passes, were going for 21 ,000. The best estimates I see say that 25 ,000 people are here. The floor feels like a mix of normal-looking people and some genuine weirdos.
7:50It's like a lot of interesting outfits. There's two guys in flight suits. People who look like they got lost on the way to Burning Man or like extras in a novelty rap video. A lot of gold Bitcoin chains, indoor sunglasses, women with QR codes on their butts, another flight suit. I run into a German guy with a t-shirt that's just Satoshi's headline, the one he printed in the Genesis block. Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. You could spend a whole day here just reading the t-shirts. I see a bunch bashing fiat money, money issued by government. Like it's a rival sports team. Anti-fiat social club t-shirt.
8:30I'm in a place where people are rooting for a currency like it's their country. In fact, they've printed out a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a room-sized version, but they've changed it so that now it's about Bitcoin. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the monetary bonds which have enslaved them to a fiat system of government decree and to assume... If I sound like I'm at a funeral here, it's not because I'm a Declaration of Independence purist. I'm just feeling a little self-conscious, standing in a room full of people, talking to a recorder.
9:04But my approach today is to be a rookie grad student. I'm going to go to every panel. I'm going to take lots of notes. I want to document the different groups of people drawn to Bitcoin. The followers assembled at this very strange mecca. Chapter one, the fundamentalists. Go ahead. Let's go. Let's go. Come on. All right. Vamos. All right. So my first stop is this big room called the Genesis stage. All right. That's a bigger room. Mic one, two. Is the mic working? All right. Good. Five men sitting on stage on leather couches in front of a backdrop of the Bitcoin logo against some palm trees. I'd chosen this talk out of all the others because it had a great title, Wartime Bitcoin.
9:50My assumption was that the panelists here would be talking about something I was really curious about, The war in Ukraine. An unprecedented amount of crypto has been donated to the Ukrainian side this year. That's what I thought they'd be talking about. I was wrong. Wartime Bitcoin actually meant the secret war that some Bitcoiners believe is being waged against Bitcoin by the global elites. Yeah, this is definitely a powerful panel. I hope there's not a drone strike that's going to take all of us out. This is going to be a big loss to the freedom community. But I would start off by saying I think it's fair to say that there's a war on for people's minds.
10:23But I would even go further and say that there's a financial war happening right now by a lot of big banks, central controllers. They're launching bombs of inflation. Some people would call it a controlled demolition of the economy. Financial war. Bombs of inflation. A controlled demolition of the economy. It's as if that fairly subtle note of frustration at the banks in Satoshi's white paper, it has blossomed into this potent cocktail of conspiracy and rage. Here's one panelist talking about actually confronting one of the bailouts architects in person, former Fed Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. And I remember seeing Ben Bernanke there after the 2008 financial crisis.
11:05And I went up to him and specifically asked him, how does it feel creating one of the biggest banker bailouts in human history, conducting the largest transfer of wealth, giving trillion dollars to your private banking friends while everyone else is struggling out there to live? Ben Bernanke was a little surprised by that question and then literally tried to take the recorder out of my hand and rip it out of me. Here you go. Luke Rudkowski, the man telling the story, is a YouTuber slash survivalist. His all caps T-shirt reads, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. Just to give you a sense of this panel's vibe, Luke is the moderator.
11:48This rage against the banks, the governments, against central authority, this is what unites the five panelists who have come from all over. Australia, Italy, the U.S., two Canadians, one a spokesman from the Canadian trucker protests, the other a French-Canadian who's wearing a camo vest with a patch that says in Latin, if you want peace, prepare for war. I'm Francis. I'm the founder of BullBitcoin. I got into Bitcoin to destroy the Bank of International Settlement and to bring an end to the era of central banking. And then I got interested in, you know, removing the power from governments into the hands of the citizens and decentralize the governance system.
12:28But now I'm staying into Bitcoin to take revenge on the governments and for what they did to us, and we will make them pay.
12:39These guys on stage, I'm realizing, are what are called Bitcoin maximalists, maxis. I've seen them online. I've never seen them in the flesh. The most hardcore maxis believe that Bitcoin will become the only digital currency, perhaps the world's main currency, full stop. They're Bitcoin fundamentalists, essentially. To spend time with Maxis is to spend time in a world where the bank bailouts of 2008 were not just bad policy or an example of corrupt American elites protecting their own in a crisis. For Maxis, those bank bailouts had the emotional valence of watching Santa Claus get dragged out of the mall by his beard and shot in front of children.
13:19No one here is over it. No one wants to be over it. Bitcoin will be their revenge. The plan goes like this. The government has power because it controls the money. So take that power away from them. Convert your dollars to Bitcoin. Create a world where there's no bank bailouts, no printing money out of thin air, no Fed chair announcing that inflation is going to rise. Fix the money, the maxis say, and you can fix the world. That's the idea. But interestingly, these maxis are equally fired up about the threat to Bitcoin just posed by other cryptocurrencies. All those other coins that toddled after Bitcoin with their own little white papers, those are shitcoins.
14:02Those are apostates. Here's another panelist. And to the point of wartime Bitcoin that we're discussing here is that during wartime, we're going to have governments to battle. We're going to have central banks to battle. But guess what? We're also going to have a whole lot of fucking shitcoiners to battle. And as much as I love the organizers here, like the larger these communities get, the more we get infiltrated with fucking retards who come here and try and shill, try and shill their own shitcoin. Crypto is the attack on fucking Bitcoin. Make no mistake about it. It's the most effective attack.
14:39There's a bunker vibe to the Mexican community, a feeling of perpetual besiegement. As I dutifully walk from talk to talk, notebook in hand, Excuse me, do you know where meeting room 229 is? I'm realizing these bunker vibes permeate the stages of Bitcoin Miami. I believe in the future and I believe in Bitcoin. There's no critique of Bitcoin to be found here in any of the talks. I just think that we focus so much on the energy narrative and we shouldn't. We should focus on what Bitcoin does for the world. There's one panel devoted to discussing Bitcoin's environmental impacts. It's called You Are the Carbon They Want to Reduce.
15:16Like, the people who say that we should reduce Bitcoin carbon emissions are talking about getting rid of you, a carbon-based life form. These nervous, prickly capitalists. They're a movement. They're fired up. But they have no leader. Satoshi is anonymous. He does not issue marching orders. Which means that other populists step into that vacuum. I see one of them that afternoon in the Nakamoto Arena. Okay, I'm walking into the Nakamoto Arena to see Peter Thiel address a very excited crowd. Peter Thiel is the keynote speaker here. Billionaire PayPal founder, the largest single donor to Republican politicians this year.
15:57Well, actually, he's tied with a man named Ken Griffin, who happens to own a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Small world. Anyway, Thiel is gracing the Nakamoto Arena today. An enormous room that could house TIE fighters. Orange laser lights and strobes, thousands of seats. It looks pretty full. Up at the front, the seats reserved for the whales. Those people who spent as much as$21 ,000 for their wristbands. The whale seating for Teal's talk, particularly packed. Thank you so much for having me here. It's, uh, you know, there's so much I was wrong about in 1999, But I thought I'd reflect on some of the things I was thinking at the time.
16:40Teal's on stage in a white polo shirt, brown hair, ruddy cheeks. He's holding up what looks to me like a couple hundred dollar bills. Hard to see from my seat. But he's using that paper money as a prop for his talk. And when I was running PayPal, when I was getting it started, the standard way I'd start an investor pitch would, I'd hold up several hundred dollar bills and would always get people's attention. It's kind of hypnotic, you know, even though, you know, it's really weird. What is this? I mean, it's probably not very good as toilet paper. It's not good as wallpaper. It's sort of this crappy fiat money.
17:13At this point, Peter Thiel wants to do something that I think he and this room would consider kind of punk rock. Like their version of smashing a guitar. Throw the money into the crowd. You know, would the gentleman in the front row like to have the money? But the distance is a little far. Money, not that aerodynamic. Just somebody come up and get it. but they don't know how to throw it out at people. In the end, he settles for folding it up and tossing it underhand like a rookie high school softball pitcher. I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists, you know? And so... From there, he continues to serve up more red meat.
17:54He shows a slide of Bitcoin versus its biggest competitor, Ethereum. You know, so if we... By the way, I took this slide from Vitalik himself. Bitcoin, represented by a picture of a burly dude in a MAGA hat, machine gun pointed at the camera. Ethereum, just a picture of Ethereum's inventor, Vitalik Buterin. Very skinny fellow who often dresses like he's wearing his favorite pair of pajamas to a sober rave. The crowd eats this up. So this is sort of a question, how do we compare and contrast them? And so if we look at the current market caps,$830 billion versus$386 billion of Ethereum. Thiel moves briskly through his argument that basically, while Ethereum is fairly valued, Bitcoin in the future could have parity with the equities market, meaning the price could rise 100x.
18:48This here is the truest rallying cry for the Bitcoiners. Obviously, Thiel is a Republican. But with this, he is uniting a room filled with all sorts of political beliefs. All these people rooting for this one future. Rooting that the number will go up. And now, Thiel moves to the encore, to his big finish. And so I want to maybe end with, you know, an enemies list. A list of people who are holding back Bitcoin. He starts naming those enemies, posting their pictures on the Jumbotron. Enemy number one. I think the sort of the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha is, you know, is perhaps the most honest and the most direct in it.
19:36The sociopathic grandpa from Omaha is how Teal's referring to Warren Buffett, a 91-year-old billionaire who's committed the high crime of disparaging Bitcoin. He called it rat poison squared. Enemies list goes on. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon won't invest in Bitcoin. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has also so far abstained. They are the finance gerontocracy, Teal closes by telling the room. And it's up to them, the youth, to prevail. And we have to just go out from this conference and take over the world. Thank you very much.
20:17a break, and then we're going to have an amazing session that's going to be moderated by my friend Alex Bastie. So we'll be back in a few minutes. Sitting here as people stream out Atil's talk, I have this feeling I'll get over and over again in Miami. I feel uneasy, like physically, in my stomach. I feel like I'm watching the genesis of something bigger than I can really comprehend. In how many large rooms have groups of Americans met to share strange ideas, mocked by outsiders, bound together by outrage and paranoia, ignored until they become unignorable. I keep getting that feeling in different moments at Bitcoin Miami.
20:57Or maybe it's just my nicotine patch. I'm struggling with the nicotine patch. I go outside to get some air. I breathe. And I notice right away, there's sort of a refreshing disconnect between the amped up war machine on stage and its intended audience, the actual people at this conference.
21:18Outside, there's no army massing for war. I just see a festival. There's loud music from the sound money stage. It's a currency pun. There's a line of food trucks where you could spend$18 on a poke bowl if you're not careful. And then there's this. Every festival, of course has the thing you're supposed to take a selfie in front of. Here it's a gigantic plastic statue they're calling the Miami Bowl. It's like the Wall Street Bowl but instead of old bronze this one looks like a robot. Glossy black, body covered in circuits, eyes laser blue. Like an actual real-life transformer, everyone makes a stop at this bowl.
21:58What do you think of this bowl? Oh it's beautiful, amazing. I want to make one of the similar ones, put it in my house. I think it's Cool. I wish it didn't look so plasticky, you know? It feels really transformative, like crypto. People here are celebrating. It's a party. I keep walking past people getting just snatches of conversation where someone's telling someone a tip for how they could make more money. Lock it in. I'm going to shoot you a text. We'll link up. The phrase I hear over and over again is financial freedom. Either the freedom to not work, or the freedom at least to just leave a soul-crushing job.
22:43Floating among people, catching sentence fragments about nodes and ASIC mining rigs. Honestly, I feel kind of thrilled just to be here, understanding the lingo. I feel like I've been learning French at home for many months, and now I'm gamboling around Paris with a baguette under each arm.
23:06By early afternoon, the heat is staggering. It's that kind of Florida heat that makes your brain slow down and sputter, like a computer from the 90s. I pilot myself inside to the air-conditioned exhibitors hall. All right, this is the exhibition room.
23:25Smells like new rugs. This big room where the conference's hundreds of sponsors are all trying to outdo each other with elaborate spectacles. Cash app, who is sponsoring it, has a huge display. There's a giant, like, actual volcano with smoke coming out of it and a quote from Nakamoto. The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime. Oh, and it's an enormous stone. God, I wonder if Satoshi Nakamoto knew how much marketing copy he was writing.
23:58It's here, wandering around the exhibitors' hall, far away from the maxis on stage with their microphones. that'll meet the people whose faith is the real engine for this movement. After the break, chapter two, Pilgrims.
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26:18Welcome back to the show.
26:22Chapter 2. Pilgrims.
26:36So I'm walking through the sponsor area, genuinely just appreciating all these lunatic brand activations. This is a weird sort of light chamber that I don't understand. It's very cool looking. It kind of looks like the set for Mo Money, Mo Problems. I noticed two women in the tube who just seem to be having a wonderful time. Can I ask you guys, are you guys having fun? Oh, we're having the best time. I saw you taking pictures in that tube of light thing. Yes, the Nexo Tunnel. What is that? What is the Nexo Tunnel? I have no idea. It is a space of enjoyment, imagination, and power. It looks like a good place to take your picture to go on Instagram.
27:18Hello.
27:23Lanu and Marnita. Lanu flew from Hawaii to be here, 16 hours. She's Polynesian, curly hair, floral blouse, high heels. Marnita came in from Colorado. She's black. She's dressed more casually. Bright pink sneakers, dreads dyed half white, half this color that's almost like neon kelp. I'm Marnita, the queen connectress. What is a queen connectress? Yes, sir. I am connecting people to financial literacy, investments, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology. Marnita, not a maxi. She's not preparing for war against the global elites. But Bitcoin's cultural power, it probably owes more to the fact that so many normal people like her have fallen down this rabbit hole.
28:05Hello. How long have you been in crypto? Okay, so you guys, I've only been in crypto for three years, and I still feel like a little baby, right? What got you in? Okay, so check this out. I was looking for something different, right? You know, like every one of us, we struggle with day-to-day life. We're looking for something that can give us financial freedom, something we can base a foundation on, right? So I started praying. Nothing happened. All of a sudden, I'm on Facebook. Yes, Facebook, right? And I'm scrolling, and I hear this voice, man. And this voice is yelling about how cryptocurrency is going to bring about the greatest financial revolution that we have ever seen.
28:48That voice, it belonged to her cousin Brandon, someone Marnita feels extremely grateful towards. My cousin, Brandon Ivey. All right. He is actually a cryptocurrency and blockchain educator. Crypto educators. Some call themselves tutors. They're a big part of the scene. I've been really hoping to meet one here. I wanted to talk to Marnita's cousin Brandon, and she wanted to make the connection, but right now he was AWOL. Oh, he was sitting here. Can you call Brandon for me? Okay, for... Oh, I don't have a card, but he's here. Okay, so check it out. While we wait, she continues the story of how she got into crypto.
29:26She'd seen Brandon's post, hadn't initially been that interested, but then she'd noticed something about the comments beneath it. Just a mix of people there. And it wasn't just like, let's say, people who are less fortunate. It was like people who had a lot of money. It was blacks. It was whites. It was Hispanics. And all of these people were there for a common reason. Freedom. Right? And where were you at in your life? Like what were you doing for work? Okay. So check me out. I was working at the bank. $17 an hour. Talk about irony. In the credit card department of all places. That's where I was.
30:05I started learning about cryptocurrency and I walked away. I was like, this is not the way, dude. I walked away and I started learning about cryptocurrency and I thought because he's my cousin that it was going to be easy. No. Right? He made me go to work, but that was the best thing he could have ever done for me. And what do you mean he made you go to work? He said, you got to learn this stuff, girlfriend. I'm not going to tell you. I could have had it to where I say, hey, I have$500, Brandon. Where should I put it? He said, no, no, no. Do my course. Learn about what cryptocurrency is. He said, do you know who Shytoshi Nakamoto is?
30:44I said, no. He said, don't ask me where to invest your money if you don't even know who that is, right? There are a lot of these crypto groups on Facebook, on Telegram, Discord. Some charge, some are free. Many are definitely scams. Crypto tutors who charge money for obvious advice or even accept bribes to push certain coins on their followers without disclosing. There are also legitimate ones where groups of people invest together and try to just trade good information. At Bitcoin Miami, I will meet person after person who will refer to the groups or to the crypto tutors who have led them here.
31:20Sometimes I'll think, obvious scammer. But a lot of times I'll just wonder, not being able to tell how legit some specific tutor is. Partly just because the Bitcoin price shot up so much after the stimulus during the pandemic that all boats had kind of risen. So the only information I really have is how the people I'm talking to feel about their experiences, what they tell me. Marnita was really happy with her cousin Brandon. He made a big promise about financial freedom. Three years later, that promise was paying off. But of course, it didn't always work out that way. lanu marnita's friend was also talking to me about financial freedom and i said to her you know the hard thing about those words is i hear them and i just sort of want to pat my pockets to make sure my wallet's still there in my experience some of the people that'll say to you like i'm trying to free you or trying to scam you and i feel like you guys ran into that as well right oh yeah absolutely that was the first thing i encountered i thought i was being freed but instead i was scammed and how'd you get burned well okay so i'm polynesian and so there was a self-made billionaire in crypto who was tongan and i was tongan so that was very appealing and attractive to me and like a dummy we're just like here's our money take our money like you know because we're just like trusting him to you know take the helm and guide us but he was actually a con artist and he scammed us took all our money and ghosted us so we lost 57k collectively as a family and that's It's awful.
32:50Yes, it is. And it took a big toll on me, and I told myself that I wasn't going to let that happen to anyone. It didn't have to just be my family. If someone was interested in learning more about crypto and I had something to share with them, then I was going to pay it forward. So then I had to take a seat and start learning and start getting educated. Lanu's education happened in Facebook groups and online meetups. She actually met Marnita at one of those online events. This conference in Miami is their first time hanging out at IRL. Lanu believes that understanding crypto means understanding society.
33:21Understanding that rich people hoard wealth and hoard information they only share with each other. Crypto, for her, it's a way for the 99 % to start to help each other the way rich people do. I don't know. Call it outsider trading. What were you doing before this? I own pawn shops on Maui. So I'm in the pawn industry. That's why Bitcoin made sense to me when I was first introduced to it. Because Bitcoin is like digital gold. Lanu's a miner. She mines crypto. But not Bitcoin. The computing power required to mine actual Bitcoin is too expensive for her. That space has mostly been taken over by large corporations.
33:57So Lanu mines smaller, more obscure coins. Can I ask how much you're getting a day in mining? $15 ,000 passively. $15 ,000 a day? Not a day. So a day, well, it's$15 ,000 a month. So we maybe divide that. How many computers do you have set up? I have currently 14 in my office and then my husband is working on 22 more. Did you ever think this would be your life? No, I didn't. I love it. It's pretty amazing. I'm going to go get a Bitcoin tattoo right now in the front. You're for real? You're getting a Bitcoin tattoo? Yeah, Cash App paid tattoo artists to give Bitcoin tattoos for free during convention.
34:34So what are you getting and where, if I may ask? So you have to choose from what they have available. And they had a cute Bitcoin symbol that had an X for mining. and it shows the rock. So yeah, because I'm a miner, that's the one I'm going to go with. Lanu and Marnita left for the tattoo booth. Brandon Ivey never appeared. Something I never knew exactly how to feel about, but saw over and over again, were just people pulling other people into Bitcoin. Every Lanu and Marnita had a Brandon Ivey and were themselves a Brandon Ivey to several others. It boggled my mind sometimes, just the scale of it.
35:11One idea from a white paper PDF, reproduced over and over, transmitted person to person, gave me that feeling in my stomach again. Of witnessing something enormous without knowing yet what that enormity would mean. The place I felt that enormity at its maximum strength was when I saw a panel essentially of three Brandon Ivies, well, crypto educators, who also happen to be world famous celebrity athletes. It was at a panel called Pay Me in Bitcoin. I am so excited to be chatting with three legends right here. Let's get, how are you guys doing? I didn't think there was going to be this many people here.
35:49We're good. We're excited to hear and talk about this. Chapter three, the celebrities. Well, let's just get right into it. On the Nakamoto stage, wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and tennis star Serena Williams All three athletes had signed deals with Cash App, the event's sponsor. Cash App is like Venmo, but with a lot more crypto training. So Cash App wanted to convince their customers to direct deposit their paychecks and auto-invest the money in Bitcoin. Like, whatever you get paid from work, just instantly put a percentage towards Bitcoin investing. These athletes on stage were not directly making that pitch.
36:32Instead, they were saying that athletes should get paid in Bitcoin. Here's Serena Williams talking about diversity among Bitcoin holders. I think a lot of people don't realize that women and people of color actually will probably invest sooner and more. And so that's important to know. But it's just having that opportunity, right? So I think we're all here to kind of talk about how we can get that opportunity through Cash App. And it's such an easy way to invest. And it's like you don't really think about it. But you just... Serena Williams of the three was the most conscientious about using the sponsor's name.
37:07Odell Beckham Jr., mostly quiet. Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay Packers quarterback, most famous recently for his alternative views on COVID vaccines. He convincingly says that he's taking his NFL salary in Bitcoin now. He describes his journey to that decision like any athlete, explaining to the hometown why he signed up to play for them this season. So I personally talked to people who've been in the space for a long time who think it's going to$500 ,000 a coin. And I talked to the crypto analysts at my financial institution who believe it's going to zero. And just because I wanted to hear both sides of the story and enjoy the conversation.
37:48And to me, it was a no-brainer. Dressed all in black, with a leather jacket and a slicked-back ponytail, Rogers really comes across as a true believer. Extolling the virtues of doing your own research, very big Bitcoin thing, generally reciting Bitcoin or bromides that the room eats directly from his hand. If the Fed keeps printing trillions of dollars, you know, the best defense against inflation, I believe, is Bitcoin.
38:18I leave the conference that day just sort of in awe that Aaron Rodgers, Serena Williams, and Peter Thiel are rallying around the same. anything. That night, my journalist friend Liz lets me tag along to this party thrown by a crypto exchange. They've rented the local museum. The party's set in this cavernous room. A woman dressed like a ballerina is doing ballet stuff with a bunch of L-wire lights on her and a ballerina tutu.
38:54It's a pretty good spectacle. Feels like what you'd see at a nice wedding party for two crypto barons, I imagine. Pretty soon, I run out of nicotine patches and I head home.
39:12The next day, I'm back at the conference center for another round of talks. But that feeling of dutiful grad student is beginning to wear off. I see my friend Liz. Hey, how's it going? Exhausting. It's just like really exhausting. I'm just getting sales fatigue. Like I've had to watch 24 hours of a QVC pitch for one product. So around 4 p.m. that day, I decided to skip the next talk. And I leave the building. Outside, the Miami heat continues to swelter. 80 degrees verging on 200. I pass back by the conference entrance, where organizers are handing out schwag. Orange Bitcoin sunglasses and bottles of water.
39:53I'll take one of those. Everything Bitcoin is always orange. I find myself out on the sidewalk on a cloudless day on the corner of Convention Center and 17th. Two street preachers have set up shop. One is the traditional kind, an older woman with a sign preaching that Jesus is the only way. I try to listen respectfully, but I'm a little distracted because someone's playing a song on an electric violin nearby. And I can almost but not quite figure out what it is. Only one song, only one. You got one song you're going to give it for me? Look at me. Look at this lady. No! I can't stop coming here because, Father Lord, nothing is impossible for God.
40:34He takes me. Isn't she lovely? It's isn't she lovely. You see? Okay, so your sign says Jesus loves you, he's coming, repent. Father Jesus, because when you buy one insurance, I don't speak good English, okay? You do great. No! If you buy one and shoot us, you don't pay. After that. About 10 feet away, there's another street preacher. This one is different. This one is actually a kind of person I thought I'd never see at Bitcoin Miami. A dissenter. That's after the break.
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43:58For two days, I've been in a place where pretty much everyone seems to share the exact same beliefs. Bitcoin is financial freedom. You should buy Bitcoin. You should convince your family to buy Bitcoin. Here, outside on the sidewalk, I'm going to witness this movement encounter a person who disagrees with them. An apostate. I have a soft spot for all apostates, but this one in particular. This street preacher, wearing a Gilligan's Island bucket hat, standing outside the Bitcoin convention, peddling an anti-Bitcoin message. How's it going? How's business? Oh, great. Okay, so say your name and what you're doing out here.
44:40My name is Abram Horner. I'm from California. And I'm out here preaching the gospel to people and trying to tell them that Bitcoin really cannot save them. It cannot save the world. Only Jesus Christ can. Tell me what your sign says. One sign says, the love of money is the root of all evil with a little Bitcoin symbol because Bitcoin, a lot of people are thinking of it as the new money. So a lot of people are here because they believe in the promise that Bitcoin can decentralized finance. But then a lot of people are just here because they want to show off their Lambos and like, I got rich off Bitcoin and you can too.
45:18But really, they're just creating a new Ponzi scheme. When Abram read the white paper, he saw a promise, not of a world where people got rich, but of a new tool that everyone could use. So what he sees at this conference, it disappoints him. Plus, he points out, wasn't the whole point of the white paper to create a currency unencumbered by profiteering middlemen. So, like, this event is sponsored by Cash App, another middleman. So why would Cash App be sponsoring a Bitcoin event? Because in theory, they're the competition, right? Bitcoin, if it worked. Right. They would lose their profit, their margin.
45:54So why would they be doing this if it's a peer-to-peer? Because they figured out a way to stay in control using Bitcoin. So I got to say, I don't usually talk to street preachers with such a cogent take on the financial system. Well, Craig Wright, the inventor of Bitcoin, who won the lawsuit here in Miami, proving that he is the inventor of Bitcoin, himself was a pastor.
46:21Craig Wright. I should tell you, there's another side to Abram's sign, the back, where he exhorts people to follow Craig Wright. Craig Wright, very much persona non grata here at Bitcoin Miami. His crimes, he claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, which they don't like. And he's encouraged people to turn away from Bitcoin to use a different coin. So that's the conclusion to Abram's whole argument, that everyone is here worshiping a fake Bitcoin and they should follow the real one, Craig Wright's alternative Bitcoin. If none of what I've said upsets you, you probably weren't at Bitcoin Miami. The most dramatic moment I will witness in my time here, and for me, of course, my favorite.
47:04It starts because this man who's simply walking by, middle-aged guy in a polo shirt with a software company logo on it, he comes up, reads the front of Abram's sign, the less provocative part, and asks a little angrily, Are you saying Bitcoin's evil? I'm not confused. Are you saying that Bitcoin is evil? Well, I'm not saying Bitcoin is necessarily evil the way it was designed, But the question is, why would Cash App sponsor this event? I don't know. Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, right? Yeah. So why do you need Cash App? You don't. So why would Cash App sponsor it then? Because they're helping to implement Bitcoin.
47:43I mean, it's an open protocol. Anybody can use it. It's not like controlled by the US dollar where only the Federal Reserve 12 banks are allowed to participate. I could write a software application tomorrow that runs on Lightning. You know, Cash App can write one too. It's an open protocol, just like the internet. It's an open protocol for anyone. This guy's getting pretty heated up. And he hadn't even seen the back of the sign yet. Abram's spiel about Cash App is working much less well on him than it had on me. And then Abram decides to escalate things a little bit more. He invokes the holy document.
48:15Lightning is not in the white paper. There's nothing about second layer solutions in the white paper. That there's no centralized control. There's no evil person controlling lightning. Also, how is there centralized control? This third voice you hear, that is a new fighter who has entered the arena. A white guy holding a drink, younger in a bucket hat with piercing blue eyes and a whale wristband. I later find out he's a Bitcoin rapper named Captain Youth. Right now, Captain Youth and the Polisher guy, they're teaming up. I think Bitcoin is the furthest thing from evil. I think Bitcoin is probably the most godly thing there is.
48:50The real Bitcoin, the real Bitcoin, Craig Wright, the inventor, was actually a pastor. before. What does that mean, though? Well, that means that he made Bitcoin to benefit rich and poor people. But right now, poor people cannot use BTC. I've been in this conversation before. I mean, not this one, but I've seen pro-life people ask pro-choice people, when do you think life begins? These passionate, angry, completely talking past each other conversations. They're basically what America is made out of. But I've never heard it happen over two different kinds of Bitcoin.
49:53message. What block? What block? Now that he won the case, why doesn't he move the coins? The thing is, he just won a lawsuit here proving that he is the sole inventor. And who's the determiner of won a lawsuit? A jury. A jury. Related to a government. This is where Captain Youth rests his case. Not by pointing to other possible holes in Abram's argument, but on the idea that Abram would ever place his trust in a jury. A symbol of centralized authority. I don't know how you prove anything, really, if all centralized authority is suspect, but no one solves that problem, or any other problem here on the sidewalk.
50:29So you don't believe in a jury? The apostate keeps fighting as the afternoon sun begins to dip. He was accused of fraud. They tried to sue him for 500 ,000 Bitcoin. Yeah, man, I mean, you've got brochures here that are saying the theme. Chapter 5. The Crypto Tutor. this whole time i've been wanting to meet a crypto tutor an educator and it finally happens because of abram a few minutes after captain youth leaves and discuss another man comes up to argue with abram this man has a long beard platinum grill three or four gold chains this man and abram their debate doesn't last very long it ends with abram inviting the man to a party he's hosting?
51:14Abram, the street preacher, also apparently hosting a party. Who knew? Where's the party, man? It's at the treehouse. You know where the treehouse is? Here in Miami. Come on down. It starts at six o 'clock. Get a free drink or don't drink. It's up to you. You have a wonderful day. You too, man. The man with the beard is part of a crypto crew called the KP Primates. They bought a mutant ape from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. They built a whole community around it. I started asking him about the KP Primates crew, and he motions me over to to the BMW that they're packed into. I can meet the guys. The community right there waiting on me, in the car, you know, so.
51:47These guys in the Beamer. Yeah, we can come over here and talk. Yeah, yeah. We can come over here and talk. We can, hey man, you wanna know about what we got going on, you know? Yeah, I'm curious what you guys are up to. The man in the front passenger seat is a crypto tutor. He says he's on a mission to educate people about crypto. I'll just say our nationality group, there's not too many people that are actually pushing crypto or actually pushing knowledge of crypto. No, we're actually doing it with no charge. We're actually not charging nobody. We're just trying to get more and more people to get into crypto so that we can all teach each other together.
52:19You're saying like, because a lot of the people here are white. Yeah. Well, yeah. Or just not black. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, we're like at like 25 to 1 out here as far as not being our people here. So as far as that, we're trying to show people that these assets are what we need to be getting into. Because as kids, we were never taught to actually invest in assets or banking or taxes or nothing like that. They really just set us out here to crash for ourselves. And so we're actually trying to come back and double back and teach people how to actually use assets to just reach financial freedom.
52:59So how did you get into all this? I started with XRP and I ain't gonna lie, I started following a guy's TikTok because he was talking about spiritual planes and celestial guidance and stuff like that. Are you into that stuff? Yeah, for sure. And then from there... So he went from celestial guidance to XRP. The coin XRP has a less than sterling reputation in crypto. The company behind it is being sued by the SEC. But that didn't seem to be an issue for the KP primates. So I got into XRP and then from XRP I got into all crypto. And what year is that? That was last year. Oh, so you're pretty new to all of it.
53:34I am. I'm new. I sold my Rolls Royce for crypto. Really? Yeah, I sold my, I have a picture. I had a Rolls Royce on 26's. I was the only person with a Rolls Royce, a ghost on 26 inch wheels. And I sold that to more cars and I got straight into crypto. Like, that's a beautiful car. Is that your handle? Crypto Pimp.eth? Yep, that's my handle. Crypto Pimp.eth. How do you feel about the Bitcoin white paper? Have you read it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've read a couple white papers and it's like centralized, decentralized. At the end of all of this, I feel like we're going to have to have it centralized.
54:16I don't believe that America or even the EU is going to allow us to be free. That's it. And sorry, like I know that we're centralized, decentralized, but at the same minute I say for full adoption, we're going to have to be fully regulated and fully doxed. Not that anyone asked me, but the Crypto Pimp's predictions about both the likelihood of crypto regulation and the inevitability of systems towards greater centralization totally mirrors my analysis. He tells me where to find his Instagram and his Discord, and then he and the crew take off. and those gentlemen just drove away in their very nice BMW.
54:58I'll look them up later and see that the KP Primates are trying to build a strip club in the metaverse. What a world. That night, I pop by a party run by a DAO where I learn how small talk works at a Web3 party. Are you in the NFT space? No, are you? Yeah, I like them. What have you got? I got some good stuff. I got some nice stuff. I got the A's. You got Ape? Yeah, more Ape, you got new Ape. Nice. Clonex is my favorite though. What's Clonex? Murakami and Artisan. I feel like I've seen enough. I go back to the hotel to sleep. The next day is the final day of the conference. Walking in for the last day of the Bitcoin conference.
55:43They've turned it into a music festival against everyone's better judgment. Outside, on the big lawn, Warmongering and crypto-shilling have given way to a music festival. Steve Aoki is playing later, but first, several hours of warm-ups. I am seeing the most motionless music festival I've ever seen in my life. Somebody's DJing, white guy in a white t-shirt DJing on stage, and no one is moving. There's just like some people sitting. Oh, one woman. They found one woman dancing and they've immediately put her on the Jemotron because she's a kind of miracle.
56:25That's outside. Inside, standing next to the giant Cash App volcano, I find Ryan Broderick. Hey, how's it going? Great. Ryan's an internet culture reporter. He has this newsletter called Garbage Day. Ryan was at the conference with his dad, Paul Broderick. Conveniently, the last type of person I was hoping to meet at this conference.
56:56Ryan's dad started investing in crypto during the pandemic, but he had never met crypto people before. Miami was his introduction. Ryan's dad is a pure investor, a middle-class guy, a retired former assistant clerk magistrate. Not here because he believes in the new world order. Not here because he believes in financial freedom. Just a guy playing around in a weird new kind of stock market. I was very, very curious to see how all this insanity had landed on him. The problem was, Ryan's dad was nowhere to be found. He'd wandered off to a virtual reality yacht experience. You're on a yacht and then you put on VR glasses to see it?
57:34Yeah, but you pay a lot of money to do it, though. Oh. Obviously. Obviously. It's less money than just a normal yacht. Eventually, we tracked him down. Forewarning here, you're going to hear me giggling a lot off mic in this interview. I'm sorry. Just really something about the way Paul Broderick spins a yarn. He told me his crypto adventure started one night when he and his son Ryan were drinking and talking about the price of Bitcoin. Seven months ago, my son and I were sitting at a bar and he said, hey, historically, it dips in October and it bounces in November. I said, you really believe that?
58:12He said, yeah. And he's a liberal, but he saw that on a conservative news channel. I said, OK, let's put a thousand each on Ethereum and Bitcoin. I don't want to do a thousand, he said, but we'll just do 500. So we put$500 each on each one. While we're sitting there having dinner at the bar, it went up$800 on our investment.
58:39And I was the son he's talking about, yes. And he's talking about a Fox business host. I think her name is Susan. And she's pretty good. And I opened Twitter and she's like, you should buy the dip now. And I was like, I wonder what that would do. Let's see. And it worked, yeah, for a little bit. And then we kind of lost those gains. But yeah, Susan on the Fox business, she's very credible. In matter of fact, she'll contradict the host a lot. Prior to coming to this, how much were you participating in Bitcoin like culture? No, I wasn't in the culture at all. See, back when in the 80s and 90s, I used to raise and sell Arabian horses.
59:20I had a farm in New Hampshire, 50 acres, indoor riding hall, show barn. and we would have conventions very similar to the one we're sitting in now, where all the side booths, insurance, transportation, I would... They were conventions like this, except they weren't selling Bitcoin, they were selling horse semen. Semen or horses? Horses. And semen to make more horses. So I read up on the Arabian horse market, and kind of a crazy moment in 1980s America. The Arabian horse craze happened because at the time, a quirk of Reagan-era tax laws meant that the ultra-wealthy could buy expensive horses, but then use them to slash their tax bills.
1:00:07That drove up demand, which created middlemen like Ryan Stad. If you wanted to buy a horse from him, you'd fly to Kansas City, where a four-seater jet would pick you up to take you to the breeding farm in nearby Glidden, Iowa. For Ryan's dad, it was expensive. Paying for the farm, training the horses. Housing was$400 a month. Then we had our trainer who trained them, would take them to shows and show them off. How do people make money off of... We sell them. But what's the horse market? And what you would call now is a pyramid. We would sell it to him, he would sell it to her, she would sell it to you, and somebody ended up with a hot potato at the end.
1:00:51With an Arabian horse. The 80s were crazy. Now this was the 80s. For a glorious moment, Ryan's dad was making money hand over fist. And he was learning a lesson he could apply later. Just because something was kind of ridiculous, it didn't mean he couldn't make money off of it. Just so long as he wasn't the one stuck holding the hot potato in the end. All this insanity in Miami, he'd seen it before. He'd survived the horse-crazy 80s. I am seeing basically the same thing going on, just it's probably their kids doing it now. When you say the same thing going on, what do you mean? All the side hacks.
1:01:32You know, we've got the mining, we've got the insurance, we've got the... What do you call it? The pick and shovel? These are the pick and shovel guys in this exhibit hall. So in the gold room. You can't have gold, but if you're selling them the shovels and the picks, very lucrative how do you explain this to your friends i don't you know i my day he tried for a while my days of selling people you know but and it's just it's kind of like uh what your pants in a gray suit it really feels good but no one notices so ryan you're you're a very well-versed internet culture reporter this is your dad he's investing in bitcoin what do you think when you see that?
1:02:14I'm like, it's just like Arabian horses. I went to a few of those conventions. They're a weird vibe, but they're not. He's right. They are very similar to this. So I obviously when he first told me he was investing in cryptocurrency, I was extremely worried. But it turns out like he was pretty good about it and he was making pretty decent money. It was also good timing for me because I started like covering it through him. And I was very up front about that in my newsletter. I was like, my dad's investing in Bitcoin. I'm going to just study him like a little lab rat. But I honestly think it's an interesting experience to be with someone who's actively trading it and has been at it for a while, watching the markets with him.
1:02:59I think it's useful. Bitcoin Miami, besides being an unlikely bonding experience, it also helped Ryan just get a better understanding of diehard Bitcoiners. These people that actually both he and I are used to seeing online where they're shrouded behind their laser eyes avatars, but who neither of us had really met in the real world. Now we shared our sort of updated Game of Thrones opening scene map topography of what the crypto landscape looks like now, having been here. So I went in thinking Ethereum people are the freaks and the scammers and they're bad for the world and Bitcoin people are actually the reasonable ones.
1:03:35I have come away with a more nuanced idea of that dichotomy. Ethereum people, I mean, here they're accused of being too woke, which is blowing my mind. But they're younger, they're a more vibrant cultural space. One kid we were just talking to outside at the techno party that's happening right now was saying that Ethereum is not currency, it's technology. And I think that is like a good way to think about it. Ethereum people, they want to run the whole internet on the blockchain. It's what they call Web3. That's like they're trying to reinvent information technology. and combine it with finance.
1:04:11Interesting idea, horrifying, depends on your point of view, I suppose. Bitcoiners, I have learned, are much more militant about Bitcoin. The Bitcoiners are much more obsessed with redefining how society works in a way that I don't see in the Ethereum community. And what's the society they want? I think they want to live like medieval barons, but like in Arizona. I mean, we were talking about this, but one of the things that I found, like a dawning realization I had was that if everyone at this conference is right and they are scooping up all the money that is going to be the money of the world, they do kind of on some level believe that like they are the new haves and they're ahead of the have-nots.
1:04:54That was the dark realization I had. In fact, just before this interview, the group of kids we were talking to, one of which was a libertarian YouTuber, kind of dropped his mask in a way that a lot of Bitcoiners do if you talk to them for long enough or have enough drinks with them, where they start talking very openly about acquiring generational wealth. And I'm not sure if your listeners are familiar with the book Neuromancer, but it's basically about a rich family that lives in space and uses cloning to store wealth over centuries, and then they get robbed, thankfully. Spoiler. But that's kind of what the people here are dreaming about.
1:05:28They're dreaming about a way to store their wealth for centuries or millennia and have it be able to leave Earth. And they're very serious about it. And it's kind of goofy. It's like, oh, wow, you're wearing a Rick and Morty t-shirt and walking around Miami. But then you're like, oh, you are literally preparing for a world in which you are an oligarch in space. It's a grim prognosis. It hangs in the air for a minute as conference goers mail past. Are these people going to be my grandchildren's feudal space lords? I think about the white paper. About all the people it sent on pilgrimage here. for all their strange and personal reasons.
1:06:06Even me. Thank you both. You're welcome. You're welcome, PJ. Ryan and Paul Broderick head outside. They want to go see the music festival. They recommend I check out the egg roll guy. Apparently, that's the best food truck. Highly recommend the egg roll truck. Really good. I walk upstairs, pass some booths to talk to some more people. I'm supposed to meet up with that Bitcoin rapper, Captain Youth. He promised to wrap some bars for me. But now I start to feel really weird. A little bit scared, a little bit of this unreal feeling. My chest starts to tighten. That panicked, uneasy feeling in my stomach, it starts to go off like a fire alarm.
1:06:45I don't know why it's happening. I go to the bathroom to try to find some quiet, but now the bathroom feels really small, and I'm trying to find the main door. My tape recorder is still on. I feel like I'm in a dream. Like, I feel like I'm having a dream.
1:07:01I don't know why I'm just like
1:07:08I just walked out of the bathroom past like a very wealthy Bitcoin rapper wealthy from Bitcoin not from rapping past a friend of mine interviewing Ross Albrecht's mother Ross Albrecht who's in prison for the rest of his life for inventing the Silk Road and then just like the conference room is like swarmed with people who have invested like some portion of their future in a thing that like literally like I don't know if I'm going to look back at this and think oh this is like all these people who are about to get like wiped out or all these people who are going to be like future oligarchs of like a moon planet like I genuinely feel like I feel like I'm I feel like the feeling of like seeing too many futures at the same time and and it makes me want to pass out.
1:07:57It's really confusing. Like, I'm not joking or being literary that it's giving me a stomachache. And now I'm passing by a giant robotic bull that's like, oh, what if we took the Wall Street bull and made it not so classy, and like, a woman in a midriff shirt is posing in front of it, with her hair blowing in the wind. This is like what it would have been like to be around when they invented acid, but it's money instead.
1:08:26Oh, and now this is the music festival for Bitcoin, a money. The music festival for a kind of money. How did this happen?
1:08:45Order number 526. Look at this. Look at this. Y 'all get one shot. That's going to be$40.70. God damn! This shit right here ain't gonna look like this soon. Y 'all. I find myself collapsed on the sidewalk while the guy who runs the egg roll truck calls himself China Man blares out mixtape-style endorsements of his own food. Y 'all, them egg rolls serious, man. Y 'all on the curb tearing them up. That's what I'm talking about.
1:09:23I'll later realize I'd slapped on two full-strength nicotine patches, the shortest route I've ever found to a panic attack. That's later. For now, heart jitterbugging, I pull myself up to do the one last thing I need to before I can go home.
1:09:50That's it for Crypto Island this week. at the Bitcoin Miami conference. This podcast, I hope I don't need to say this, is not financial advice. If you listen to a person's fever dream in Miami, do not buy Bitcoin off of it. Fact-checking from Elizabeth Moss. Sound design and scoring by the very talented Phil Demahuski and Stephen Jackson at the Audio Non-Visual Company. Theme music from Christine Andrews. You can find more episodes of Crypto Island at pjvote.com where you can also subscribe to my newsletter. Thank you for listening. see you next episode
1:11:06Outro Music
From the publisher
This week: Bitcoin. We trace it from its humble origins in a .PDF to the movement it has spawned, all over three days at an enormous Bitcoin conference in Miami. (This summer we’re publishing some of our favorite episodes from our previous series, Crypto Island.)
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