The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin | DOCUMENTARY | Bitcoins | Blockchain | Crypto News | Digital Cash

let me fill in my passwords i used to have a shirt in high school that said technology must be used to liberate the individual and i didn't really know what it meant for years because i didn't really think about it but today i look back and i'm like oh man hell yeah i like that shirt glad i wore that shirt because how i really feel today my name is daniel ross today is may 3rd 2012. go through college and watch the internet come and all these different things and now like bitcoin it's just a single technology built on top of the internet but it's so fascinating because there's so many freaking things you can do with it it's also just a big experiment there's no guarantees with it we might just all be wasting our time concepts and ideas it's like this crossroads of technology and philosophy and politics and everything and just be a part of it it's fun it's crazy though but it's fun um first question is what is bitcoin [Music] i can't tell you what bitcoin is in just a few sentences it takes time to understand it the same way it took people time to understand what the internet was back in 1994 [Music] and then the ring around it see that's what i said um yeah oh internet is uh that massive computer network the one that's becoming really big now allison can you explain what internet is when the internet was taking off i was in college at virginia tech studying computer science looking back it's amazing to think about how much the world was changing hey dan ready for the game i'm just finishing up here with my new kayaking friends kayaking friends on your computer yeah i just got america online that same type of innovation is happening again with bitcoin it's the smartest people in the room that are the most excited about this so what are they seeing the internet changed the way the world communicates bitcoin changes the way money works you can basically put a bank in your pocket wanna buy some secret stuff there is now a new note that people are starting to talk about the bitcoin the money of the future bitcoin was created to provide an alternative to the banking system we are in the midst of a serious financial crisis and the federal government is responding with decisive action [Music] unlike most currencies bitcoins are issued according to a set of fixed rules the idea was to create money whose value couldn't be manipulated by a central authority the government no matter how many guns they draw cannot change a mathematical problem they can point their guns at two plus two but it's always going to equal four it's fascinating to imagine what it means to have global decentralized money and that's what's [Music] happening [Music] so [Music] [Music] my five-year-old's birthday first round of burgers is ready second round's going on in the second first round of burgers ready first round dan's always been an idea guy bitcoin's the perfect combination of how can i change the world and make it better but how can i also be a nerd so mostly i've just been supporting him and this craziness eliza and i met in college and we've been married for seven years we live in pittsburgh where i'm from and we have three boys i've spent most of my career as a database administrator but for the past two years i've been consumed with bitcoin bitcoins come into existence through a process called mining [Music] i build computers to mine for bitcoins i'm glad that it's finally getting a little bit cooler out my wife won't be as angry that the basement is so hot i still got a bunch of mining rigs running right now actually right down here if you want to go take a look here they are so what is bitcoin bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that enables a new way to send payments over the internet you can think of it as an open accounting system where thousands of computers all over the world work together to track ownership of digital tokens called bitcoins when you send someone bitcoins the transaction is broadcast to the entire network after it's verified it's recorded in a public ledger called the blockchain the blockchain contains a record of every bitcoin transaction that has occurred since the system began and it's shared and maintained on the network so everyone keeps the books so to speak most currencies are issued by a central authority that controls the money supply bitcoin is a peer-to-peer system so there is no central authority instead bitcoins are issued to users who help process transactions in the network this is known as bitcoin mining bitcoin miners are specialized computers that do the work required to verify and record transactions in the blockchain as a reward for their work the miners earn bitcoins and this is how new bitcoins are released into circulation the system is programmed so that only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist and as time goes by the mining reward decreases the result is a predictable supply that's governed by scarcity making bitcoin somewhat like a digital gold it's the first currency of the internet and everyone is free to use it with bitcoin you can send any amount of money to anyone anywhere in the world as easily as sending an email [Music] my brother nick is a filmmaker after hearing me talk about bitcoin incessantly for months we decided to start documenting things hey i don't think we'll need the small camera can't hurt no i'd rather leave it behind i have so much equipment you mind damn you really cramped it up huh not that bad geez i was convinced that bitcoin was going to be huge and i knew there were a lot of others like me out there zip my keys in my pocket so i don't forget them later [Music] bitcoin was created by what's believed to be a pseudonym a guy named satoshi nakamoto invented an 09 by a fictitious person named satoshi nakamoto on halloween 2008 someone using the name satoshi nakamoto posted on a cryptography mailing list i've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer with no trusted third party the post contained a link to a white paper in which satoshi proposed a new type of payment system for the internet it described a protocol that used peer-to-peer networking proof of work and public key cryptography [Music] for years computer scientists had been experimenting with these technologies to create digital money but satoshi discovered a way to combine them that had never been done before in doing so he invented bitcoin there are no records of nakamoto's existence prior to the creation of bitcoin on his profile page he claimed to be a 34 year old man living in japan although satoshi nakamoto is a japanese name he wrote in perfect english when communicating online and went through great lengths to keep his identity unknown [Music] nonetheless programmers and cryptographers all across the world recognized the brilliance of satoshi's design and began collaborating with him to further develop bitcoin in october of 2009 the first exchange rate was published listing the value of 1 309 bitcoins at one dollar bitcoins were cheap and through the following year they continued to trade for fractions of ascent in the spring of 2010 a florida man named lazlo decided to try using his bitcoins to purchase something he offered 10 000 bitcoins to anyone who would buy him pizza a man in london accepted and placed a long distance phone call ordering him two pizzas from papa john's this is generally acknowledged as the first bitcoin transaction for a tangible good bitcoin was gaining momentum but in order for it to thrive the coins needed to be more widely accessible a tokyo-based exchange named mount gox was the first on the scene to take hold of the marketplace and trading volume started to pick up by november 2010 already four million bitcoins had been mined and the exchange price briefly spiked to 50 cents per coin the market awoke and bitcoin was starting to look like it might have real potential as a currency his name is julian assange assange and his colleagues collect confidential information and then make it public the release of 250 000 state department documents no doubt presents a serious dilemma for this country following a massive release of secret u.s diplomatic cables donations to wikileaks were blocked by bank of america visa mastercard paypal and western union an article in pc world suggested that bitcoin could be used as a workaround to send donations to wikileaks one of satoshi's last known posts was in response to the article and stated it would have been nice to get this attention in any other context wikileaks has kicked the hornet's nest and the swarm is headed towards us shortly after that satoshi disappeared from the forums and was never heard from again two months later the silk road anonymous marketplace was launched it functioned as an online black market for drugs and other illicit goods and used bitcoin exclusively because it made the money trail nearly impossible to trace the silk road caught the attention of new york senator charles schumer who was outraged and publicly called for a crackdown on the site heroin opium cannabis ecstasy psychedelic stimulants it's unbelievable throughout all this the exchange price continued to climb by february of 2011 bitcoin reached parity with the us dollar sparking an influx of new users and speculators by june the price had soared to a peak of 31 before it came crashing down as the market tanked the mount cox exchange was hacked further shaking the confidence of investors and hammering the price all the way down to the two dollar range by october while bitcoin enthusiasts kept hope skeptics were quick to share their hindsights and rants on blogs and in news articles many thought that the party was over and that bitcoin was on its way out i went online and i bought one bitcoin last night really it's the future i don't know that didn't feel real no real's gonna change just watch today i sent a total of 2 700 bitcoins to butterfly labs i purchased basically a custom designed bitcoin mining super computer if bitcoin fails [Music] everything i have is worthless the bitcoins i have the computers the mining systems was all waste of money [Music] but if it succeeds then [Music] it will have been worth it i think the bitcoin economy was a wild west in cyberspace that was very attractive to hackers and scammers over the years tens of thousands of coins had been stolen and 2012 proved no different users had to be careful if somebody steals your bitcoins there are no consumer protections sorry they're gone you lost your bitcoins they're gone and you're not going to get them back but after months of stagnation on the exchanges the bitcoin price was on the rise again the price of bitcoin today is around seven dollars usd uh which just had a nice little bump this week by the end of the year the blogging site wordpress announced it would start accepting bitcoin payments and in early 2013 the discussion forum reddit also announced bitcoin support they were the first major sites to incorporate bitcoin and these milestones signaled the beginning of mainstream acceptance bitcoin is the most subversive technology on the planet this is a system that is growing around the entire world so if it works if this experiment continues to grow it doesn't just help a few of us in this state or in the country but it actually helps everyone around the world [Applause] as the bitcoin price hovered around its previous all-time high of 31 dollars i visited a libertarian conference in new hampshire it lost 20 and then it gained 20 in 20 minutes it was it was silly libertarians are among the earliest adopters of bitcoin its nature is a currency that isn't controlled by central banks makes it attractive to this community once i was able to kind of grok the basic concept it was just like this is the perfect money this is what a bitcoin address looks like think of this long string of characters as an account number where your bitcoins are stored when you send or receive bitcoins they are sent to these addresses the addresses are long and hard to remember so using a phone to scan a qr code is a fast and easy way to read them another good thing to know is that bitcoins can be broken down to eight decimal places this means that you can send fractions of a bitcoin so any amount of money can be represented with bitcoin every transaction is public everyone can see the amount that's being sent without necessarily knowing the identity of the sender these guys even have one of the first bitcoin atms you just scan your qr code on your phone put in the dollar bills and press the button bam done perfect you now traded your worthless piece of paper for real currency it's like in the fed it's like seriously if you're going to end the fed you're not going to defend you're not going to change anything about the entrance and bypass them but yeah that's what you should do my concern is how the governments will react they can't kill or stop bitcoin but they could impede it and they could get in the way of its development [Music] a few weeks later across the ocean a financial crisis was reaching a breaking point on the island of cyprus cyprus is on the brink of going bust the rest of europe has agreed to a bailout but only if cyprus raids people's bank accounts for quick hard cash people trying to get money out of the cash machines but electronic transfers have been stopped never did i think that they would in a completely unprecedented manner resort to stealing money from people's bank accounts the cypriots had placed their trust in the banking system and it had failed them as news of the crisis spread around the world bitcoin believers were quick to point it out as an example of why a currency free from government control is needed there's actually bitcoin atms apparently being set up in cyprus all of a sudden bitcoin looks like an attractive prospect [Music] while this was happening in cyprus regulators at the us treasury weighed in on bitcoin the financial crimes enforcement network known as fincen issued its first regulatory guidance on virtual currencies the guidance implied that bitcoin in and of itself was not illegal [Music] it was the perfect storm the situation in cyprus suggested that bitcoin could function as a financial safe haven and the approving nod of u.s regulators was a green light for investors the market agreed and the exchange price continued to climb it's moving from the super super early adopter phase to possibly the early adopter phase bitcoin was getting international exposure and people were starting to pay attention this is actually a live updated map of the globe and the lines represent uh bitcoin clients basically where the bitcoin software is running and uh the length of the line determines how long it's been online or how active it's been and every time i look at this i swear it gets it gets more and more saturated you can almost see an outline of the us now uh south america you're starting to get it uh but the big news in my opinion is this china you used to see one two three maybe and this is all within the last you know three weeks or so that's the most i've ever seen in china you look down here indonesia singapore australia new zealand the following week it snowed in pittsburgh i was eagerly awaiting the delivery of two avalon asics state-of-the-art computers with chips specifically designed for mining bitcoins ifuguo is at the forefront of the new generation of hardware and is the first to bring them to market everybody including myself has severely underestimated the mining market how big it is when bitcoin began a standard laptop was powerful enough to mine hundreds of bitcoins in a matter of days the technology evolved rapidly over the past couple of years a lot of people are getting into it we're still trying to catch up i was on vacation with my family when the new miners were scheduled to arrive the price of bitcoin had rocketed to 77 so i asked some friends to wait at my house to get them running as soon as possible all right i hope this is good that was worthwhile oh definitely these are uh new computer parts here excellent from china all right uh it's not official to you simon there we go yeah we'll see maybe uh down the road you guys will start accepting bitcoin one day i bet that's cool a matter of time good luck all right i notified dan and he has a little response here welcome to the financial renaissance 192.168.1.140.2525 192.168.1.1 that's the default gateway my first pool is going to be stratum.ogco.inport3333 port 80 but i can do 3333. when everything's all said and done for at least a little while i should be pulling in like 10 to 12 coins a day that's gonna change though after another week it's gonna get dropped down to like eight just because the difficulty is just going through the roof because everybody's firing these things up so it's always a race to stay ahead try to be the first guy with the hardware you know oh i'm getting pings yep we're kicking we are accepting shares it is live [Music] hey that looks like johan okay i'm going to college because my dad minds bitcoins so uh big day today huh big day look at that 104 current bitcoin price broke 100 today um it is april fool's day price rising so insanely high is kind of a little bit unprecedented so i mean it's bound to pop a little bit maybe i don't know maybe it'll be a 225 in a week and a half so who knows but bitcoin styles could go up could go down as the price passed 100 we took a trip to visit gavin andreessen he is known to have worked closely with satoshi during bitcoin's early days here's the train tracks and he did say that there would be train tracks maybe passing through here we go this is gavin's house gavin is one of the last people to communicate with satoshi before he disappeared morning my brother nick and his wife ashley hi nice to meet you i found the place okay so good we're very excited to be here come in this is my humble house that's where i work this is where i live beautiful home a little higher please right there's great got it how did you first get into bitcoin tell us a little bit of the story of how you got involved i had been working at umass as a staff programmer in the computer science department research group my wife's a professor at umass i actually quit that job before going on a six-month sabbatical in australia i just happened to read a little blurb online in somebody's blog that mentioned this bitcoin project which is an open source attempt to do money and it caught my interest i basically just spent a few days read everything i could about it looked at the source code downloaded the source code thought about it and i really couldn't convince myself that it would not work it seemed like satoshi had thought of everything since then i've just been stuck down the rabbit hole bitcoin is open source software with open source software the code is publicly available anyone can look at it and see how it runs and they can also contribute their own changes programmers like gavin were able to join satoshi to work on bitcoin simply because they were interested over time i think satoshi learned to trust me he could see that i didn't make very many stupid mistakes i never had any personal connection with satoshi it was always purely business and i think that's because he was so worried about people finding out his identity i don't know why my last email to him was telling him that i had agreed to go visit the folks at the cia so whether that had something to do with him deciding to cut off communication with me entirely he had been pulling away before then but the cia invited me to come talk at the cia and i agreed to do that knowing it would surely spark conspiracy theories gavin posted an announcement on the bitcoin talk discussion forum to head off any rumors i think accepting their invitation and being open about exactly what bitcoin is will make it less likely they'll see it as a threat having taken on the lead developer position since satoshi's disappearance gavin found himself facing an increasing number of responsibilities and public scrutiny your neighbors know that you're kind of at the center of one of the most disruptive uh technologies i think i think they know that i do like this wacky bitcoin project i don't think they know quite how big it is yet right now bitcoin's a billion dollar project when i started it was this tiny little experiment and as it gets bigger the pressure to not screw up just gets bigger and bigger two weeks later the price soared past 150 and some bitcoiners woke up to find out they were bitcoin millionaires 23 year old charlie shrem is the ceo of a company called bit instant bit instant was one of the first startups in the bitcoin space in bitcoin's infancy people had to jump through several hoops to buy them one of the only ways was through the mount gox exchange but this process required transferring money through several intermediaries and could take weeks charlie launched bid instant to streamline this process and to help people buy bitcoins quickly yeah that's good great that's pretty nice yeah sure today charlie's being photographed for an article in business week one of the ideas they had was like that you're like throwing stuff up in the air and they're gonna add bitcoins in later on yeah this bitcoin thing can actually change the world but for this thing to succeed you have to figure out a way to get more money in and out of the ecosystem look out the window a bit totally yeah and you can look yeah that's good it does not show that i'm super stressed out right now and you know thousands of orders that are being processed and i'm bugging out trying to get the new site launched no don't look like that i'm trying not to but it's really hard things have been insane i haven't slept in days the price is just rising so a lot of people are putting money into it normally charlie can get bitcoins to his customers in about an hour but with a recent flood of people trying to purchase bitcoins bit instant can't fill their orders fast enough when i pulled up our like customer service interface we have close to 2 000 open tickets and that's just from saturday to this morning nobody was ready for this kind of volume so we're trying to catch up uh with the volume and keep everybody happy can you just sort of describe quickly what the last week or so has been like for you guys the last week or so saw our support staff go from two people to five people when someone offers you a seat on the rocket you don't ask where the seat is you just get on the rocket further our volume has has basically tripled in in the past two weeks going from a few hundred transactions a day to now two three thousand transactions a day you just came on board here right yeah i did actually today is kind of my first day oh yeah yeah yeah how does it feel to be a part of all this madness um well madness yeah it's overwhelming and uh what are you doing i'm a cfo can you give me like a daily estimate of how much money is moving through your system um it's in the in the six figures every day all right well thanks charlie i really appreciate it thank you i don't know how the government will react to bitcoin but i spend thousands of dollars on lawyers every day just to make sure that i'm not going to go to jail it's super terrifying i mean i don't want to go to jail and i don't i don't want to become a martyr either [Music] bitcoin was the talk of the town charlie was in the limelight and could barely keep up with media requests within hours the price passed two hundred dollars first day of spring first day bitcoin is over 200 the start of a new era hi nice to meet you i'm the nice warm loving mom that makes him live at home because we can't uh we can't apart with him yet we love him too much [Music] this is where it all started and this is where it still goes down i've been collecting money from all over the world and it's just like something i did way before bitcoin i've done this since i was a kid so it's funny that like i'm collecting all this fee out it's not worth anything and then all of a sudden i get into this bitcoin thing i realized during high school that i could never work for anyone i made up a term psychologically unemployable i started a bit instant while i was still in my senior year of college bitcoin currently is the largest social economic experiment ever conducted in the history of the world 2013 possibly 2014 will be the two years that really make or break bitcoin bitcoin is a first product that's digital but it's also scarce i got some good news last night that part of our licensing deals that we've been trying to do for the past few months are finally hopefully coming through we got approved to be licensed in 30 of the 48 states in money transmission i've been working very hard on trying to be compliant in the legal realm and with fincen's announcement setting up a way for bitcoin companies to legally exist that really changed the whole game of bitcoin and for us it helped us get that less push that we needed from all the banks and the regulators to finally hopefully get that licensing that we need [Music] today charlie's meeting with a realtor to talk about new office space hi charlie hi i'm mitch waldman how are you pleasure got a minute i have 10 minutes for you we're we're a company with no boss essentially everyone has their responsibilities and just one big executive or it's one big executive board one person doesn't do their job i don't do my job these guys are all gonna yell at me so that's how we do it but we get things done all right we're outgrowing this space as you can see here that's a good problem to have yes now rachel said there was a great concern about security in this space yeah we're regulated so we can't like share an office with another company or they have access to us our asset is our software our software is processing hundreds of thousands of dollars a day really quickly and that's on-site here no this is on the cloud it's all in the cloud but we monitor we have to monitor everything from here and debug fix take down upload more put up more we get a lot of high volume data oriented very very sensitive customer data if there were not a doorman at the very least the space would be designed in such a manner that there'd be a locked reception area if we want to pursue like a guard at some point we could have them in that in that area i absolutely think it it will be at some point it's just a matter of time the potential for theft is huge it's like operating a bank essentially that's pretty much it it's gotcha it's basic stuff yep yep all right any other words for me okay are you willing to handle the task sign me up captain that night the price got as high as 266 dollars every major news outlet had taken notice bitcoin fever was at an all-time high it is getting a lot of attention people are fascinated by anything that makes new highs every day for weeks on end which bitcoin has done in terms of the total number of the people using the currency i'm not sure but you can see that there's a huge amount of fluctuation in the volume of trading and then the price crashed bitcoin lost more than half of its value in six hours from craze to crash it's the talk of many people in the blogger sphere and it's certainly suffering some growing pains the value of the virtual currency bitcoin has plunged it's been a crazy day today i haven't slept in like 40 hours your order process i don't understand why we're still having this conversation we've refunded your order we sent you extra bitcoins i don't care man when it comes to my money i don't [ __ ] around i know man you need your stuff i hear you i hear you it processed your clicks are there man charlie what's been going on today crazy day huh yeah i have mount gox their whole system pretty much failed and their whole training engine is is broken and pretty much caused almost has to shut down for the day further the bitcoin price has just been wildly swinging up and down it was down 100 today it's gaining back up but mostly because people can't buy and sell and they can't withdraw and they can't deposit because the whole thing is just it's just a fritz so what we're trying to do is figure out a way to mitigate orders somewhere else for now with mount gox stuck in a nosedive the ripple effect is creating chaos in the bitcoin markets i'm trying to figure out why our orders aren't going through rachel am i allowed to take another advil if i took one like an hour ago they've been having problems ordering anything off of you yeah i'm getting a lot of customers emailing saying it says executed but it's not showing in the blockchain just got suspended trading really yeah order this place suspended until 2100 what time what's 2100. it's 9 p.m oh my god [Music] if you bought at 150 and then you're at 260 and then you watch it dip down back to 150. do you panic so yeah absolutely i don't know what a bitcoin is i just bought it you see buy orders people buying and selling at such a wide range it doesn't make any sense the api is just constantly failing is that what's going on we're not getting any orders don't care about the price speculators can play musical chairs all day long for all i care i'm i'm long i was focused on expanding my mining operation the only people that are going to be shaken out by this drop are people that are new to bitcoin here's the avalons spinning away mining away and if everything goes as planned uh we'll have 18 more of these guys in a couple weeks bitcoin is a complicated thing you have to spend some time looking into it and understanding it before you really care and now there's droves of people that you know giving it more than just that glance because the price has gone so high and they have you know dollar signs in their eyes like uncle scrooge it's so much more than that and i think that's why the people who are mining and people who believe in it are just kind of holding strong when trading resumed at malcox the price fell even further to around 70 71 on vtce yeah bitcoin it's volatile it's gonna be a long time until we have stability that's the nature of the beast price discovery uh can be violent and volatile and there's gonna be a lot of people that come and go and people that scream wolf but at the end of the day the only thing that really kind of stinks right now is that everybody's trading on one platform that isn't doing the greatest job so over time hopefully we'll see some more exchanges pop up and it's more options and people want to keep using bitcoin i'm sure the infrastructure will come [Music] [Applause] it's just gotten ridiculously busy um i get an email every two seconds now and i'm pretty much you know more email than i uh i can keep up with jared kenna is the ceo of trade hill the first us-based bitcoin exchange to compete with mount cox he's also on the list of bitcoin millionaires this is uh finnegan right here jared runs trade hill out of a 41 bedroom residential hotel called 20 mission that he also owns [Music] mostly rent out rooms to tech people startup people there's a lot of bitcoiners i actually accept rent in bitcoin which is great because we have a lot of international people [Music] bitcoin [Music] came to us from the cryptogram it came out of thin air it saved us from those nasty dollars and one and yen bitcoin [Laughter] digital currency is gonna happen i mean it's it's i mean it already is happening and it will be the future whether that's now 10 years from now 100 years from now we're going to be using digital currencies that don't depend on fiat government jarrod originally launched trade hill about two years ago but ran into problems with a payment processor and was forced to shut down recently he met ryan singer and together they are relaunching the exchange the business we're in is helping people speculate right markets are price discovery mechanisms that's what they're for people uh they buy they sell there's the bid there's the ask and the price moves and when it levels out that's what the market price is i can't even count the amount of people that have said bitcoin is not backed by anything at least dollars are backed by gold i've realized that a lot of people believe that my grandfather he got me into investing when i was a kid i was five years old i could explain a p e ratio and what a bid and an ask was and difference between a limit order and a market order and all that stuff so for me i saw this as a way that the average person could actually take control of their finances i just grew up pretty nerdy i don't know like 15 like i years old i decided i didn't want to be a nerd anymore which was a mistake because now i realize it's pretty awesome in 1999 i joined the marines i was originally with the engineering unit 2005 i went over to afghanistan i was mostly working with the afghan national army it changed me a lot as a person i've always been interested in economics and finance and technology and cryptography i was in a cryptography forum somebody i never met who was anonymously in this forum that i was chatting with sent me 10 000 bitcoins just as a way to test the system out and see how it worked and i got them and i'm like well that's cool but what can i do with him and he said well nothing yet but if people believe it has value it will at the time there was really only one bitcoin exchange it was mount gox i said we need an alternative who cares if the technology is decentralized and the method of transfer is decentralized and the people are decentralized if all the trades are in the same location i thought that building another exchange that gave more people access to bitcoin would be a key part of bitcoin's growth the day we launched we got a quarter million dollars in from user deposits and we said like oh [ __ ] this is this is real we're all fans of the big lebowski so we're going to have a big lebowski party nice very exciting day 30 gallons of white russian and hallway bowling we work hard but we party hard too okay okay i'm good i'm good i'm not dead yeah i'm the first one in the house that opened the trade hill account and it took me a long time to buy the bitcoins because it was the moment where everything was going really really you know ballistics uh bitcoins all the time and it was hard to buy it and it took me like 10 days to get my bitcoins from my european bank i got my euros over here to open a 10k account with trade hill at the moment where they they were 255 bitcoin and within one hour they start plumbing down and the same day they went down to 99 65 or something or 90 bitcoin hey stop [Laughter] smiling straight hill round two we optimized for success we launched expecting to have to do hundreds of thousands of transactions a second right now we've got about 15 people in addition to that we've got about eight attorneys externally a lot of people are depositing dollars a lot of people are passing bitcoin we're getting more trading we're pushing that from the business perspective also we're talking to people who want to do more automated trading on our platform get robots trading against each other we've stress tested this and we can handle you know about 500 times as much volume as mount gox was seeing so we'll see what happens here the interest in us is pretty crazy just the news with bitcoin has really kind of validated everything now people are like oh you're not this crazy person i'm talking about some digital made up currency it's like oh i've read about it in the wall street journal in the new york times it's real we had an investor come in and he said hey i really appreciate your scrappy nature and how you're hustling but i think it's time for you guys to spend 30 grand a month on rent when you have you know a billionaire client they want to come check out your office before they send you a multi-million dollar wire asking them to walk past pawn shops not always the right feel [Music] so we're leaving the mission we're driving into soma right now we're gonna go take a look at what may be our new office space pretty prestigious address one market [Music] right now we're trying to forge this path and we're trying to comply with existing laws and anticipate future laws which is extremely expensive and extremely difficult is there parking here yes okay is that included with no of course absolutely right what is that how much how much does how much does that cost from 450 to 600. it's not terrible that's pretty sexy twitter was here for over a year amazon chromes and go every single year i have my ics i have jcpenney all the big ones they come over they're part of the club sounds good we'll be here tomorrow thank you appreciate it thanks so much we move in tomorrow just like just like that huh just like that that's how we roll it's pretty surprising that that deal just happened so quickly what was it you just liked the space and you said hey there's no point waiting we like the space we like the we don't have the time to spend either we had all kinds of important stuff we're working on and you know if we spend a week trying to find an office and he and i put 20 hours into it or 50 hours into it it's a huge waste of [Music] time [Music] i thought they'd be in multiple bags rather than one big one but hey [Music] i believe that bitcoin will do to the banking industry what email did to the postal service it didn't make it irrelevant what it's forced the post office to do is concentrate on their strengths and less so on their weaknesses mike caldwell is the creator of physical bitcoins known as cassatious coins they are often featured in mainstream media coverage of bitcoin they're a novelty item collectibles that basically act as physical carriers for bitcoins but they do something very important they give bitcoin a face come on in sorry the kids are sleeping so i'm just being quiet each coin has its own bitcoin address and the private key required to spend it is hidden underneath the hologram this is where you make the physical bitcoin yeah it's a random smattering of things but pretty careful about the way i manage you know the basically this is the credential so this is the hologram and the private keys i'm pretty careful about those and don't keep them here i normally do them on this mirror because that helps you know get the fronts and backs right there's so many things that cryptography can do for us that if the world just knew so many social problems could be solved cryptography can bring fairness to elections it's too difficult for people to understand and someone needs to bridge the gap right now we're using bitcoin to send money but many believe it will revolutionize much more the technology behind bitcoin can be used to build decentralized systems with rules that can't be cheated [Music] now see this is my wife in my space this is you know awesome it is what it is the more time goes by the more legitimate bitcoin gets and the more proud i am to be associated with it and now what does your wife do she does craft she's a lot like me we just sit around and make things all day it's just our obsession no i'm not a drug dealer no i'm not a criminal no i'm not a terrorist i believe in the rule of law i believe in structure that builds society i believe in families i believe in corporations i believe in all the essential elements that a civilized society with law and order need to be able to function focal length matters cryptography is the basis for us being able to implement the values we say we believe in this idea will never die the technology that bitcoin brought to the forefront the genie is out of the bottle [Music] since the crash the bitcoin price has been hovering around a hundred dollars bitcoin seem to have weathered the storm but there's still much controversy surrounding the currency the same cryptography that ensures the user's privacy also allows it to be used anonymously [Music] my father decided to retire and he had an old failing print shop i basically took it over and i converted into an internet place we're the only place in la that supports bitcoin right now this is my linux system here it's a system that also mines for bitcoins it makes about a dollar a day i just do it for fun i was really really into the internet like literally in 1990 1991 1992 and i had the hardest time describing what the internet was to people i was tell people well it's like this network of computers and the network of computers can talk with other networks of computers and then you could exchange information and like people would have no idea what it was when people ask me what bitcoin is i have the hardest time describing what it is and i'd surmise it as it's basically money it's basically an anonymous paypal it's one of those things that you have to use before you understand politically i'm not a very big fan of either the banks or federal reserve and bitcoin allows me to get around that one of the programs we support is a protocol called tor and basically what tor does is it allows you to communicate to a website anonymously tor is a program that allows you to get on a silk road and this is silk road basically any drug you want is available there's a lot of weed there's a lot of cocaine there's a lot of ecstasy but there's also unusual drugs like if you want some sort of anabolic steroid you could type steroid you'll get all the different types of steroids that are available silk road itself is not selling the drugs this is basically a matchmaker between buyer and seller both the buyer and seller don't know each other both the buyer and seller are anonymous it goes on this web of trust if you want to let's say by this testosterone you click on this he has 99.3 positive feedback for more than 300 transactions so even though the contracts aren't enforceable by law the reputation system makes it so the system works pretty well oh there's a fireworks section now i didn't know that florida id 1.88 bitcoins which is around 150 something like that a forged auto insurance card forged passport there was over 9000 entries for drugs that's a lot i would say there's around maybe five customers that know about it and use it it's it's a very small percentage of the people that come in but the people who do know about it specifically come here to use it what the customers do with the computers is pretty much their business another day in office if you're gonna do drug dealing of any sort silk road is the place to go how many people are selling cannabis right now it looks like 2011 people are selling cannabis they call me mr bitcoin i probably been dylan dress cause i was like 17. right now i'm 26. i think it's as a global thing when i'm on the computer i'm doing business with the world let's see they have blue drains hard diesel pineapple thai purple crush girl scout cookies purple paste when i first heard about it i was laughing about it it took me a week to just even think about this for real like i can really make money off of internet selling this type of stuff for me are you sure about that it's something i probably may buy right here it has to look like some good kush some of these things only take like a day to get here with no harassment from nobody instead of just being on the streets once you get the hang of it it's actually kind of fun just looking through different things mr bitcoin i'm running with it i like the name you know what i mean i'm not gonna lie i get booty off this i kind of like talking about this stuff with girls like girls like that [ __ ] hot you're not on your street and you got a little nerd knowledge this is great i have like a lot of bitcoin saved up already my business is doing good it's a fun way of doing hustling these days like the future brought a different way to hustle and i like it with so many people using bitcoin in so many different ways it's becoming apparent that it can't be [Music] ignored today i'm visiting fincen a bureau of the us department of the treasury despite having released guidance on virtual currencies there's still a lot of uncertainty surrounding their outlook on the future of bitcoin regulation straight ahead in the big fishbowl looking okay great [Music] i'm not going to say we're going to have every answer for you today but the i mean what i do want to say is that you know we we didn't want to shut down bitcoin um you know we didn't want to attack bitcoin we think uh there's a lot of uh social benefit to it you know i kind of had the google alert on my computer for bitcoin and once a month once twice a month something will pop up but now it's five a day jennifer shaskey calvary came on board as fincens director last year during her career she spent 15 years at the department of justice where she specialized in fighting money laundering and organized crime virtual currencies have been on my radar for a while even prior to coming to this position because of unfortunately the abuse of some of them bitcoin on the other hand is one that really didn't come on my radar probably until i arrived at fincen depending on who you speak to the issuance of our guidance was either the best thing that ever happened to bitcoin or the worst thing that ever happened to bitcoin some accusing us of trying to kill bitcoin and others saying that it somehow legitimized it of course neither of those things i think is is probably true and certainly neither of those things was our intent one of the clear lines is that if you're a consumer who's using bitcoins to buy goods and services the guidance doesn't pertain to you we're focused more on the places where we think we have risks to the u.s financial system from money laundering and terrorist financing and i think that might be kind of a lot of the bitcoin community has a little bit of a fear that it you know bitcoin may be characterized in a way so as to tie it to some bad actor ruining it for everyone when a lot of people that are interested in bitcoin including myself see it as just you know this technology that we don't really don't want to see it you know falling into the wrong categorization of uh with all the potential that's there sure so the innovation around bitcoin and and the virtual economy um is is really one of the more interesting aspects i think of this story the idea that it can be used to potentially serve the unbanked out there just to provide some really new services that are convenient for consumers the flip side of it though is that to be a part of the financial system the u.s financial system the global financial system also comes with some responsibilities and those responsibilities include not allowing your institution to be used by criminals and by terrorists there's always been a concern that the government might try to stamp out bitcoin but perhaps they see the risk of being left behind in may 2013 the biggest gathering to date of bitcoin enthusiasts and entrepreneurs happened in san jose california we're at bitcoin 2013 it's the inaugural conference of the bitcoin foundation [Music] bitcoin is worldwide and the vast majority of people haven't even heard of bitcoin yet it's more powerful than every computer on the top 500 list combined it's an awfully big world an awful lot of things could happen really you know we've been on a roller coaster ride and i expect at least for the next few years we're going to remain on a roller coaster ride i happen to enjoy roller coasters i think they're fun [Applause] just a few weeks earlier cameron and tyler winklevoss known for their involvement in facebook announced that they own a one percent stake of all bitcoins in existence worth around 11 million dollars they also made a 1.5 million dollar investment in charlie's company bit instant we started looking seriously at it at the end of last summer and started purchasing around that time i think a light bulb just went off and said wow like the implications of this could be enormous if everyone in the world can have a bitcoin address and everyone in the world can be banked fairly quickly and when you consider that it's a very powerful idea and bitcoin can make that happen we're going all over the world we're going to the uk we're going to australia we're going to we're already in russia we're going to south america we're already in brazil now you can buy a bitcoin at any of our locations it's fun to think that satoshi might be here too i always wonder if somebody is someone here somewhere is uh yes i was planning i was planning to hack security cameras of the of the hotel and try to trace the partner of walk of some person who might be satoshi what would he do what talks would he be attending you know we're seeing the bitcoin players in the market meeting with the venture capitalists and they're all beginning to posture and that's very exciting because it means that there's going to be a lot more infrastructure built out a lot more money flowing into the space and it's really going to be a big bull market for bitcoin one of the companies best known for making bitcoin accessible for commerce is atlanta-based bitpay they're pioneers in bitcoin and provide a service that enables merchants to accept bitcoin payments without dealing with its complexities we've grown about about a factor of 10 since the beginning of the year we were doing about half a million dollars a month around the turn of the year and now we're doing about 5 million a month this is people using bitcoins to buy real goods and services they're not day trading they're not exchanging they're actually buying things i'm confident that bitcoin is the most important invention in the entire history of the world since the internet roger vera is an investor in several early bitcoin companies including bitpay his passion and enthusiasm has earned him the nickname bitcoin jesus it is going to change everything and all of you here in this room you're at the very very forefront of [Applause] that lives in tokyo but travels the earth spreading the good word of bitcoin the last couple of days we've been setting up a business per day to accept bitcoin here in the bay area today's business is going to be the super kilpo korean supermarket so for you like you accept credit cards right now right your credit card companies are charging you two or three percent for bitcoin you can do the same thing but they'll only charge you one percent you'll still get dollars in your bank account if you want you can choose to split some of the payments that you receive into bitcoins and then summon the dollars and whatever ratio you want so you can keep 99 in dollars and one percent of bitcoin or 99 in bitcoin and one percent dollars however you want you can decide that roger's describing the service provided by bitpay they take the volatility of bitcoin's price out of the equation for merchants by immediately converting bitcoins to dollars at the time of sale so right now we have it set to 100 dollars so anybody that pays here with bitcoin they'll deposit the money into your bank account the very next day with only a one percent fee and i guarantee you over the next couple weeks you'll have lots of computer nerds that love bitcoins will be coming in here specifically to shop at your supermarket so that they can pay with bitcoin the credit card companies just for processing the payment they take anywhere from 1.5 percent to over 3 percent and then on certain cards there's even a per transaction fee like 20 cents per transaction plus the percentage of the transaction one two percent is big we're talking about eleven twelve thousand dollars a month on the average that they just take right out of our account i honestly think that there's a really good chance that bitcoin will be more than a thousand dollars by the end of the year because everybody hears about wait i can send money to and from anyone i want it's impossible for anyone to freeze your account it's impossible for anyone to block you from sending or receiving these bitcoins more polish euros so you can see all these different currency exchanges around the world that exchange to and from bitcoins and you can see there's i don't know maybe between 50 and 100 exchanges now when i first heard about bitcoin and started telling everybody about it if you looked at that same page there were less than 10. and there's no central office that they could raid or anything like that there's no central it's amazing there's no central office there's no central place they could go to and say take steve's bitcoins or give c's bitcoins to kevin or do this or do that's the owner of bitcoins everybody that owns bitcoin yeah just like who's the owner of gold whoever whoever owns some gold short of shutting down the entire internet in the entire world there's no way to stop bitcoin and hit request payment and that's a qr code for your bitcoin address so i'm gonna scan that so now i have your bitcoin address on my phone i think this is two dollars so i'm gonna send you two dollars worth of bitcoins there it is you just received that many bitcoins from me directly with no fee and if you hit the little green square it'll show you the equivalent amount in us dollars so you just receive two dollars worth of bitcoins directly from my phone to your phone and you can send money just like that anywhere in the world you could have told me your bitcoin address by email or post it on facebook or twitter or anywhere so i could print this and have it at the register yep and you can you can check right on your phone anytime that you receive the payment okay thank you steve all right thank you one of the newest standouts in the bitcoin space is a san francisco company named coinbase they operate a digital wallet service that makes it simple to buy use and accept bitcoin i would not be surprised at all if google square paypal everybody is looking at adding bitcoin in one or two years by then we need to have 50 million wallets if we can make this easy to use it's going to be huge my involvement in bitcoin is not politically motivated yeah dude people are realizing large capital gains when professional investors enter the realm the stakes definitely change we raised five million dollars from union square ventures fred wilson led the round there i think bitcoin is still actually a little bit under the radar i think it's moved past the stage where people dismiss it but i don't think that it's totally gone mainstream either i think we're in that middle stage right now at the end of the conference jared from trade hill through a party to celebrate how far things had come you guys are hot right now congratulations on the raise thank you it's good money man it's well due yeah i mean well hopefully it's an advancement for the community i am completely pro compliance like i think like if you don't want to attach your identity to this i can't work with you yeah and i just need that i mean like the libertarian side of me is like yeah whatever but like from a business perspective if people don't play by the rules you're not gonna last yeah you're gonna shut down you're gonna go to jail noticeably absent from the conference were representatives of bitcoin's biggest exchange mount gox just days earlier the department of homeland security seized more than 5 million dollars from their u.s accounts the seizure warrant stated that mount cox had failed to register as a money transmitter putting them in violation of the new fence and guidelines i'm traveling to tokyo to meet mark karpeles mount cox's reclusive ceo [Music] no bitcoins on here not yet that will make this completely unnecessary but for now it seems kind of primitive that we're exchanging paper for paper and losing and losing that and someone's taking a cut somebody's taking me mark and his business partner gonzaga are french but they operate mount gox from offices in japan originally mount gox was in exchange for trading cards used in a game called magic the gathering mtgox stood for magic the gathering online exchange in 2011 mark's company taban bought mount cox and his focus has been bitcoin ever since one of the conditions of my visit is to refrain from any discussion about the dhs seizure due to the ongoing investigation we've arrived at mount gox this is mount gox right here there's no no big sign or anything no no doesn't look like a crazy commercial establishment despite their legal problems mount cox still handles more volume than any other exchange and is processing around six million dollars worth of bitcoin trades every day we are last year on average of ten thousand new customers a month january it was twenty thousand then thirty thousand sixty thousand one hundred fifty thousand with what's going on it goes down but we are reaching one hundred thousand new customers uh for may that's a month in a month so it was like this but still i was after what happened i thought that a lot of people will go away or or don't uh don't uh create a new icon but still 100 000 new customers it's uh wow and here we've got the office for with everyone uh working hopefully [Music] mount gox employs 18 people not only is mark the ceo he's also the cfo the lead developer and performs all technical operations to keep the exchange running what's it written in c plus is that your main is that your main programming language no i've got a lot of main program languages yeah what's your favorite programming language really depends what i need to do like if i need to cut something really quick and i don't care about performance i use php if i care it's a bit about performance i will use c plus plus with qt for example but if i care a lot about performance i will use asm when we go in camera's down first until we get to your servers getting ready to go into the mad cox data center location your camera's down [Music] we were allowed to snap a few photographs one of the main issues we had during the second mobile is that volume of trading was too high compared to what our system was designed to support to prevent this is we optimized a lot of the system the old trading engine can reach a peak speed of 70 to 100 orders per second with a new trading engine it can handle about 100 million orders possible [Music] if mount gox's new trading engine can really support 100 million orders per second it should be able to scale with the demands of professional traders but with complex legal problems and increasing competition mark's attention is pulled in many [Music] directions do you work seven days a week typically yep it seems that you do the majority of all the heavy lifting literally and i need to remove your shoes in the entrance mark is a talented man in one of the world's biggest cities but maybe he should stick to computer keyboards [Music] okay [Music] [Music] we are here in northern new hampshire for the porcupine freedom festival and this is an event put on each year by the free state project basically it's just a bunch of crazy anarcho-capitalists libertarian types in the woods with freedom and families pretty much all the vendors except bitcoin [Music] tastes much better when bought with bitcoin thanks guys salads and smoothies i would say one third of our sales have been in bitcoin it's uh 20 bucks so you're paying bitcoin uh yeah all right last year was our first year accepting it we did maybe 18 transactions 20 transactions the most and now we're up to close to 120. this community is really one of the largest groups of people in the us i think that's truly adopting bitcoin and using it as a currency because of what it stands for because of what it enables the world is seriously changing now and it is changing in a very interesting very radical decentralized and in my opinion positive direction here it is bryce breaks the all-time high vitalik is only 19 years old but he has a profound understanding of the complexities of bitcoin and a gift for explaining them as lead writer for bitcoin magazine he's been traveling the world covering bitcoin for the past year i'm a big fan of the of the decentralization concept in principle you know have have lots of lots of uh different societies operating according to whatever whatever people's own beliefs are bitcoin has unique properties that no other system in the world has had before it really seems like the the only practical way forward as you move away from cash into your debit cards and your credit cards you essentially are giving up a certain degree of your privacy without even really knowing it it's important to understand that bitcoin is not automatically perfectly anonymous but what it does is it enables you to be anonymous if you wish to eric voorhees is the founder and part owner of a hugely popular bitcoin gambling site called satoshi dice satoshi dice is the first of a new breed of provably fair betting games that use bitcoin since all bets are public anyone can verify the odds and payouts at its peak satoshi dice was responsible for more bitcoin transactions than all other uses of bitcoin combined it played an important role in bitcoin's development as one of the first applications to really test what the bitcoin network could handle recently eric moved his entire operations out of the us and into panama he started a company called coin a pulp that lets you send bitcoin via sms and email i think most people at least in america believe that when they put a thousand dollars into their bank the bank is holding a thousand dollars in its vault for them and they don't realize that 99 of all the dollars are digital the fact that we have these tokens called uh paper cash is a is the exception to the rule people see the cash and they think that that's what the money is but it's all digital and it's been that way for decades you guys moved your business to panama what was the primary driver in that if you're a us company you have to follow the arcane us regulations for all of your customers around the world so if you do business with some rural farmer in africa you're going to need to get a social security number you're going to need to get all this information that washington tells you is important we did not want to have to apply the u.s financial regulatory scheme to customers in sub-saharan africa i don't think the developed world is going to be where bitcoin really takes off long-term because our banking systems work decently well many people around the world don't have any bank accounts whatsoever ultimately those are the types of people who will find the most value out of bitcoin one month later eric announced that he had sold satoshi dice to an anonymous investor the price 126 315 bitcoins worth around 11.5 million dollars most of the new offices in the city are in this condition all still what's called gray not ready no internet no electricity nothing but we actually got one that was finished so we moved in and we are super excited about it you can see all the skyscrapers of new banks and everything getting built up here this is a financial center for central america so it was fitting that we established ourselves here as well still setting up the office we've been here for two weeks we're getting walls put in got furniture and this is the brains of the operation this is mr ira he can program anything and you can see all these books he's reading what do we got here we got crypt analysis we got everyday cryptography introduction to mathematical cryptography i read all these of course when i was much younger but i was trying to catch up with me the bitcoin phenomenon is trying to take control of money away from the state and return it to individuals it's trying to separate money and state in the same way and for the same reasons that it was important to separate church and state there's a wonderful quote from one of the rothschilds give me control of a nation's money and i care not who makes its laws so i'm trying to play my part in that narrative outside of the united states billions of people don't have access to basic banking services bitcoin can level the playing field and help bring developing nations into the global economy eventually people are going to use a currency that is as free as the internet because people seek out freedom wherever they can and just as the government can't stop the internet and the freedom of speech can't stop bitcoin and the freedom of money so we're just gonna have to see how hard they try to do it it's scary but it's exciting because at the other end freedom typically wins just have to see how long it takes to get there [Music] [Music] as summer rolled on the bitcoin industry continued to flourish it's hard to remember the days where i was running this thing out of my basement and it was like one or two people and like bit instant was just a domain name charlie and bit instant moved into their new offices i always wonder if satoshi knew that he was going to build something that would like foster like companies like this where we're actually like company we have jobs based on something that someone we don't know wrote a paper on it's kind of creepy if you think about it like i wonder if he's like kind of watching us right now or something in san francisco jared and trade hill had moved into their new space as well it sounds funny it's not a hundred million market anymore you know it's grown beyond that more professional people learning the space and they're expecting to deal with other professionals but just as things were ramping up regulators started taking a closer look at bitcoin so bad news for bitcoin or is it days of glory could be ending at least two dozen companies have been subpoenaed by new york's department of financial services can't be a good thing bit instant bitpay coinbase and winklevoss capital were all issued subpoenas we want to make sure that as this enterprise grows and if it does become a place where a lot of people are engaging in financial transactions that we have sufficient protections in place with increased pressure in banking compliance issues bid instant was forced to suspend [Music] services jared faced similar battles due to a lack of regulation many banks decided to cut ties with bitcoin companies without a u.s bank account trade hill can't operate and jared was forced to pull the plug [Music] regulation typically evolves much more slowly than innovation and regulations cannot keep pace with the pace of innovation explaining bitcoin to a bank feels like explaining amazon.com to barnes and noble until lawmakers catch up startups like trade hill and bit instant are left out on a limb [Music] banks do not want to bank bitcoin companies when you have regulation you can comply with it when you don't have a regulation they're not exactly sure and if the banks aren't sure they just default to no new regulation takes at least one year to develop propose and adopt and in many cases it can take much longer than that [Music] i won't let this go i'll fight till the end for a bitcoin whether i have to work on the street or sell lemonade bitcoin is going to succeed one way or another and i'm going to be a part of it [Music] over the past several months the bitcoin mining landscape has changed significantly [Music] when i started bitcoin mining was a hobby for geeks now it's big business in order to continue mining and continue playing in the game and be competitive and be profitable i would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on gear the 18 miners i ordered from avalon never arrived and the units from butterfly labs took over a year to ship by the time i got them bitcoin mining was so competitive that i would never be able to mine back all the coins i used to buy them see that computer that computer makes bitcoins and this is all the other computers that are making bitcoins too and it goes straight up in the line up in the air and that's because there's a lot of people that are making bitcoins with computers like that as my new units are arriving i'm selling them for bitcoins to try to recoup what i can you don't mind grabbing those other cables i'm not coming back up okay [Music] i'm taking a pretty big hit but overall the mining experience has still been worth it [Music] my mining days may be over but i'm still very involved with bitcoin with bitcoin it's a money system where it's backed by math it's backed by the laws of mathematics and by the rules of the protocol i keep thinking that there's got to be an easier way to just set up a secondary protocol to trade private keys every time i log on i see another dot on china and i'm like this is why right now the price is gone the price is nearing 150 again many attributed to the explosion of bitcoin's popularity in china what's happened recently is chinese people have really come and adopted bitcoin as a culture as a nation chinese people are keen to learn about things that are on the internet things that involve math and science we think that china can really contribute in the space and help bring bitcoin to the mainstream germany is another part of the world where bitcoin has found a home it's starting to get normal if one person a day comes in and buys a coffee with bitcoins people are looking for a new way of paying and not through banks and not with yours not with dollars something new the german ministry of finance even became the first governing body to officially classify bitcoin as private money i believe if we want to get some justice back into our society we should reduce the importance of the banks bitcoin is banking without banks so here we go the fbi today shut down what it's calling the most sophisticated internet site in the business of selling hard drugs including heroin cocaine and lsd in the sci-fi section of a san francisco public library undercover agents surprised a young man quietly working on his laptop they arrested a 29 year old software engineer named ross albrecht and accused him of being the mastermind behind the silk road people have always tied the silk road to it media has always tied the silk road to it as if like silk road is bitcoin but it's not this may be a sign that bitcoin is growing up it's funny my friend just uh imed me and said you know it's still crow crowd rated and the government sees 3.6 million dollars in bitcoin is there a way to invalidate bitcoins i replied no the government is now invested in bitcoin people are starting to finally realize that bitcoin has nothing to do with how people use it it's just money it's like gold of course not everyone thinks bitcoin is the way of the future bitcoin will not be able to survive or thrive without becoming legitimate i don't see it having a serious place in our financial system they're really good reasons why we have central banks that have the power to put out financial fires by printing money i'm worried about the technology as darth vader once said don't put all your faith in technology i think 10 years from now we'll look back on this and just kind of chuckle at the bitcoin fad oh yeah remember bitcoin oh yeah i remember that it's financial freedom come on bro this is the new world bro others are more optimistic i think within 10 years you're going to have a lot of people using bitcoin but they're not going to realize that they're using it because it's going to be a protocol that's embedded underneath whatever financial service they're using today and by bitcoin being open source it's what can allow all these different mobile wallets and all these financial technologies to all talk to each other especially around the world whoever the hell satoshi was he should go down in history as one of the greatest people or groups of people that ever existed this is a technology that mankind has needed for thousands of years people have been dealing with monetary shenanigans since the roman empire clipping gold coins and finally people can escape it i'm cautious to try to predict the future we don't really know i tend to be a technological optimist i see the democratization of technology as being a really positive thing and i think that's a really powerful force that is really only just beginning [Music] not bad [Music] recently as the price has been floating around 200 again you know i have a lot of friends that have asked me you know are you gonna cash out some of your bitcoins now you know the price is really high you should you know get some dollars out of it and i kind of tell them no like don't you see it [Music] i've met so many interesting people and there seems to be one thing that kind of binds a lot of them together and that is that they're willing to face opposition and follow through on the ideas that they believe in the people who try the crazy ideas often fail and then everybody likes to point their fingers and laugh and say that was such a stupid idea but once in a while it works out i think bitcoin is proving to be one of those [Music] things the decision to bring virtual currency within the scope of our regulatory framework should be viewed as a positive development for this sector i'm here to testify because i believe that digital currency represents one of the most important technical and economic innovations of our time we are enthusiastic about the potential of virtual currencies and the digital economy for social good this latest generation of technology which we're talking about today takes things to a whole new level there's a we have a bit of a shared responsibility here in trying to figure out how to make this work it is a little strange that uh bitcoin we don't know who the creator is and so um that often conjures up the idea that there's some risk here that we have not you don't think it was al gore do you [Laughter] if you think a little broadly this could again have huge huge implications [Music] [Music] 2013 was the year bitcoin first entered the mainstream and 2014 got off to a dramatic start just as we were wrapping things up on our film charlie shrem was arrested after returning from a bitcoin conference in amsterdam he could be facing up to 30 years in prison on charges related to his activities at bit instant in jfk you walk right off the plane and you go straight to customs about three agents in front of me and then four agents behind me said mr charm please come with us they took me to an interrogating room told me that i'm being arrested on federal crimes money laundering running an unlicensed money transmission business and failing to file suspicious activity reports the indictment alleged that charlie had sold bitcoins to a reseller that operated on the silk road what sucks is the house arrest you know i have to pretty much be here all the time every day can't even go outside unless i'm going to my lawyer's office which is once or twice a week i pretty much lost my freedom lost everything that i've built over the past year charlie's arrest wasn't the only bad news that rocked the community in the new year for months there had been rumors that mount cox had become insolvent and in february the site went offline i'm not touching you i have a question the rumors turned out to be true mount gox had reportedly been hacked and nearly half a billion dollars worth of bitcoin were missing mark was forced to step down as ceo and mount gox went into bankruptcy a national magazine claims to have identified the mysterious founder of the worldwide digital currency called bitcoin tonight he is speaking out but he says he has nothing whatsoever to do with bitcoin why did you create bitcoin sir okay no no questions right now i want my freelancer sir can we ask you about bitcoin why are you involved in fun okay i'm not involved in bitcoin okay who's involved wait a minute first i'm gonna go with this guy i want big one oh okay yeah this would be good oh geez i have some honor hey uh who's yours newsweek claimed the creator of bitcoin had not used a suit in him they connected the dots to a 64 year old japanese man living in los angeles [Music] named dorian prentiss satoshi nakamoto nakamoto immediately denied the allegations and said he'd tell a story to the first reporter who agreed to buy him lunch the main reason i'm here is to clear my name that i have nothing to do with bitcoin nothing to do with developing was just an engineer doing something else as the media frenzy escalated newsweek's claims started to unravel holes in the story led many to believe it was nothing more than sensational journalism there was no conclusive evidence tying dorian to bitcoin amidst the uncertainty on that same day a comment suddenly appeared on satoshi's long dormant profile page which read i am not dorian nakamoto [Music] maybe we'll never know who created bitcoin but the truth is it doesn't really matter [Music] bitcoin belongs to everyone and the future is ours to build [Music] for the hundred thousand dollars on market orders right now let's do it let's go come on come on why what's going to happen buy 100k worth of bitcoins right now why do it i don't want to do it do it you owe me a hundred thousand dollars do it i'll send you a hundred thousand no you buy buy a hundred i can't right now i need the floating dogs for the volume closing bell for satoshi all right does this look right one npw yep yep okay and i owe you point two point one eight one eight this is four bitcoin t-shirt pleasure sir great doing business with you i'm going to wear your shirt proudly do it that's one thing that's interesting about bitcoin it's like how do you like declare losses you know you point to two transactions that happen on the internet and you tell the irs that you own that you know oh i used to own that and i lost the private key like you know and then if you really do lose it how do you write it off for taxes and stuff that's gonna be interesting [Music] [Applause] okay guys we're gonna play a special version of hopscotch called bitcoin blockchain hopscotch oh you lost all your bitcoins who's satoshi nakamoto i gross i'm not telling but yeah oh do you know oh maybe not maybe oh you know i have a bitcoin and a half myself now which i think probably in 10 years means i'll be really rich [Music] when you think about it hard enough on a global scale this is a net gain for humanity

Channel: Plot11

Views: 2,213,970

Rating: 4.8737459 out of 5

Keywords: the rise and rise of bitcoin, the rise of bitcoin, bitcoin documentary, crypto documentary, bitcoin movie, bitcoin documentary 2021, film bitcoin, digital cash, bitcoin price history, crypto currencies, blockchain, cryptocurrency news, documentary, bitcoin news, bitcoin explained, bitcoin cash, bitcoin trading, Bitcoin mining, crypto news, Digital money, satoshi nakamoto, what is bitcoin, Btc video, cryptocurrency explained, digital currency, cryptocurrency documentary

Id: qk4gZrBR9CU

Length: 95min 48sec (5748 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/estebansaa]

The days before Blockstream.

[u/saddit42]

One of the oldest and at the same time best documentaries about bitcoin.

[u/Mr-Zwets]

yes it's a great documentary! It only goes up to satoshi's comment that he's not Dorian Nakamoto (2013?).

Anyways tons of cool early bitcoin history & very much the spirit we're keeping alive with BCH!

The "I dont want to go to prison" quote from Charlie Shrem is pretty ironic now

[u/btcprint]

It's really interesting to see the evolution play out. Another 2015 documentary, "Bitcoin: The End Of Money As We Know It" was followed up in 2020 with "Cryptopia: Bitcoin, Blockchains, and the Future of the Internet" (which is on Amazon Prime right now). It's amazing how much happened in those 5 years.

"So, uh, Roger, last time we talked to you there was excitement about Bitcoin's future potential as a currency, nearly free global transfers of value.... what happened?" It does a fairly good job explaining the fork, current ideologies and views for the future without proselytizing.

[u/unstoppable-cash]

Notice the focus on price?

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Its STILL very early...

[u/twilborn]

Once the market cap of BCH passes BTC, then BCH will just be called Bitcoin, and BTC will just be called Bitcoin Core.

[u/MoviesMogul]

ahahah true, old but gold!