What Happened When Bitcoin Made People Rich Quickly? | Cryptoland

welcome to crypto land i'm krishna undevolu bitcoin gave rise to a new class of millionaires and billionaires what does that mean for the future of crypto [Music] in 2013 motherboard went to one of the first bitcoin conferences ever it was only like a few hundred people super low-key and very nerdy back then bitcoin was a niche obsession for people who embraced its promise of a democratized currency or depending on who you talked to maybe just a way of buying drugs on the dark web dexter thomas caught up with the organizer of that event who's come a long way since and so has his bank account i'm here at decentral miami which says it is the biggest defy in nft conference this year and yo i've been out here for about an hour and the scene is super weird man i mean the line is wrapped up around the parking lot i saw somebody running around with bitcoin balenciagas there's a lambo part in the handicapped spot there's models i mean you might be forgiven for thinking that this is actually a club line instead of a line for a crypto convention and you got to be goddamn kidney there's somebody running around with the actual shiba inu i don't know what i expected when i came here it was not this decentral overlapped with miami's art basil festival and was largely focused on nfts which have exploded in the crypto space over the last year i have absolutely no idea what's going on so there's places all over in here with that explosion have come hundreds of nft startups hi can i scan or whatever the heck and a lot of them are here with booths and paid spokes models and qr codes trying to get people's attention and everyone's pretty friendly if you don't understand what's going on they're happy to explain it to you the tokens are still somewhat abstract but this is how i decided i say it's the new stock market for the new internet one of your nfts just errored out bro you got a 404 on one of your nfts i gotta get my guy you still need a guy in this world this is all cool but it's not the only reason i'm here i've flown to miami to meet up with a guy who in another world would have still been my co-worker alec liu former writer for vice's technology section motherboard a lot of this is still abstract it reminds me of like bitcoin 2013. [Music] hey it's alec with motherboard we're here at the first ever bitcoin conference in san jose where over 1200 bitcoin supporters have gathered to celebrate how far the movement's gone this bitcoin conference in 2013 was a turning point for alec he was there covering the event it's been a crazy interesting sort of weird scene we feel like bitcoin is entering a new phase after the event he quit his job to join the crypto industry and like a lot of people here he's doing pretty well for himself now so is this guy and this guy and this guy on the day of this conference one bitcoin was worth around 120 in 2021 when the miami conference happened it was worth an average of 47 000 meaning that every single 20 this guy fed into that atm is worth a little over 8 000 bucks now and the comedian they hired for four bitcoins my mom is so japanese that when i was born i actually came out cordless in retrospect had a pretty solid gig bitcoin is a tremendous force that can make the world a better place it's up to us to make sure that that happens the keynote that you're we're the winklevoss and it was like whoa that's a big deal but there were so many question marks everywhere right like people were talking about this future but there was so much work to be done you know you left kind of feeling like wow this was like bitcoin's coming out party how did you decide to go from you know doing essentially what i'm doing right now you know what right let me get into this crypto thing i'm definitely a bit of a sellout uh i mean look money big motivation but it's also like the opportunity to be part of like let's say the beginning of the new internet um that was just an opportunity i couldn't miss i respect that man 2013 was this like motley crew of like all different like early adopters hackers true believers but obviously you're fighting a lot of pushback because you know the mainstream narrative is just sort of okay this is this dumb digital currency for buying drugs online now it's a dumb digital currency and you can buy really expensive art to put on your tv you have to realize like back in 2013 it was just bitcoin i would say the next big milestone was when ethereum came out and now you could add programming and code um that sort of set the foundation for for what we're seeing today and the nft thing has been huge because now it's brought creators and artists it's a very different crowd the crowd is different partially because a lot of new people have come in but also some of the people from the early days have changed themselves what is up everyone good morning good afternoon good evening i am your host charlie schrempf charlie shreem is considered to be one of crypto's founding fathers in 2011 he started bid instant the first truly user-friendly way to buy bitcoin he was also a founding member of the bitcoin foundation and he's the one who put on that conference back in 2013. thanks everyone for coming these days he works out of a fancy office and lives in a beautiful home in sarasota florida with his wife courtney and their dog but back in 2013 his lifestyle was pretty different just been out of bed a few minutes ago it's all good thank you is anybody hungry or thirsty or anything nice to meet you and charlie's mom i guess this is downtown here is where all the magic happens back then charlie shrimp was living and working in his parents basement she kept my hands here over here and he had big plans for the future i want to make the world a better place i feel like i was put here to do bitcoin this is my life's work and there's a lot more and i'm still young so there's a lot more that's going to happen this is just like part one a lot more did happen just a few months after this interview charlie shrem was arrested on charges of money laundering after more than a million dollars worth of bitcoin from his exchange wound up on the silk road he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of aiding and abetting unlicensed money transmission and served over a year in federal prison it doesn't matter if you're a casual bitcoin observer one of the die-hard faithful you need to know what's happening these days charlie shrimp doesn't run his own company anymore i mean he doesn't have to he's rich instead he's leaned more into being a crypto evangelist traveling around the world to spread the good word today he's flown to baltimore like he does every couple of weeks to film a video series aimed at investors but while he was in the area he wanted to take me by the monuments what do you think abe lincoln would have thought of bitcoin he would have loved it [Music] at that conference in 2013 where were you mentally thinking about bitcoin i was walking around like my didn't stink they would call me the prince of bitcoin did you like that title yeah of course i did it was a cool title i mean here i was this high school kid who had no friends i was a geek i was a nerd and all of a sudden i'm like the most popular kid in school and i found an industry that loved me just as much as i loved it what was your motivation back then we all realized early days that in this community what we're doing was special there was no doubt about it but personally for me i was looking for a family at the time i was leaving the very very religious orthodox jewish community that i had grown up in shrimp says that his family made him choose between them and their religion and his then girlfriend courtney who isn't jewish he chose her and a life outside the community he hasn't spoken to his parents in years do you find yourself seeking some of the things that you did have within your community when you were growing up in bitcoin oh yeah one of the things that frustrates me all the time is that growing up in a religious community is you have instant camaraderie or friendship with tens of thousands of people but in the external world it's really damn hard to make friends you came into bitcoin to find friends i came with the bitcoin and found some friends as long as i'm still involved in the industry i'll always be pushing for that camaraderie in community because it was what got me into the beginning bitcoin wasn't worth anything in the beginning it wasn't it wasn't tradable it wasn't worth the only reason we started a bitcoin exchange was just to get more people to get it back then most people thought of bitcoin as a dodgy electronic alternative to cash like hipster nerd monopoly money but the conversation is much broader now not only do you have cnbc giving bitcoin financial advice but people in the community are promising that the blockchain could do everything from stopping racism and worker exploitation to bringing about world peace it's pretty remarkable given that we still don't even know who invented bitcoin all we have is their pseudonym satoshi who do you think satoshi is ah i stopped it's funny i stopped asking myself that a few years ago really i think what makes bitcoin great is that there is no satoshi satoshi's probably aliens aliens well or time travelers if time travelers invented bitcoin to save the world and they would release it in the way satoshi released the white paper invent it in depth go back but not take any credit because you want the people believing it came from them or maybe the people invented it i don't know [Music] a lot of the people who have truly believed in a lot of these things from the beginning yeah a lot of them were idealists that's that's something i hear a lot about i hear a lot of really shall we say optimistic you know i mean utopian thinking right about yo this is going to stop wars this is what it's going to could fund wars maybe 100 fund wars and this is what i'm talking about you know objectively speaking right money is a huge part of state and government power that that's a fact and so if you look at it from the perspective of if the state's money gets undermined you are undermining the state's power and it's hard not to talk about state power here the u.s government has been pretty apprehensive about cryptocurrency in general other major global superpowers have toyed with restricting or even banning crypto outright on the other hand you've got el salvador starting to fully embrace bitcoin and it's starting to look like governments are realizing that crypto might not be something that they can just legislate away if you're in my position right now seeing what you're seeing at this conference would you make that same step or do you think that moment's passed oh it's certainly not passed we are everything is very very early people have gotten a taste of what's possible and that's why there's this energy that's why there's this investment we've seen enough validation to have the confidence that we're going to get there you're supposed to support each other through spaces enough money for [Applause] [Music] a lot of people who are in crypto don't actually care about the technology they're just playing it like a buzzword stock market they're in for the money but 10 plus years in crypto is different from the stock market in that the ogs think they have a shot it actually changed the world the other side of it that i see is that this is gonna be a new aristocracy there's gonna be some people who got in early who got a bunch of bitcoin they're to be rich but they're still going to be another one percent and the rest of us 99 are going to get left in the cert i think that's always been the story of technology and like big technological developments it's a double-edged sword i think what's nice about the framework is that it has that utopian uh flavor in mind but uh this is a very capitalist system and so you know there will be winners and losers uh the hope is that the competition is more fair and i think we all need to stay vigilant if you want equity and and you want fairness you have to fight for that every day regardless of the underpinning technology so you're saying i should quit bison following your footsteps there's room for you there's a huge opportunity now and i think we need good people fighting that good fight to make sure that this next chapter uh works for us rather than the other way around we're more than a decade into bitcoin's life and we're here to talk about whether it has lived up to its original promise and how it will shape the future here with me are motherboards maxwell strawn an early bitcoin adopter and current chief strategy officer of coin shares malcolm demiros malcolm maxwell thank you for joining me um a lot to talk about but in order to talk about what bitcoin is like today and its future we got to go back in time and talk about how it was born its history its culture meltdown i imagine it might be a good idea to talk about your life and how you got into bitcoin because maybe it tracks to kind of the larger trajectory of where we are today absolutely i think like many people um when i first heard about bitcoin it was 2012 and bitcoin was deeply ideological in nature and very closely aligned with this idea of crypto anarchism in the early days when i got involved in bitcoin it was not about an investment it was not about making money it was not about you know becoming a millionaire or billionaire it was really about how do we use technology to subvert the current political economic and social climate and to introduce a new thing to the world and the great experiment we're attempting is the separation of money and state and as i was leaving grad school i was like what am i going to do with my life and then i spent the next three years of my life just completely immersed in the bitcoin ecosystem working with core developers working with entrepreneurs working with financial institutions i mean i made the rounds in 2015 on the street pitching bitcoin to banks and everyone thought we were crazy everyone thought we were money launderers everyone thought you know we're like oh here's the bitcoin lady don't talk to her she's weird um but it was interesting i have such a vivid memory of the day that bitcoin hit ten thousand dollars for the first time and we were all gathered in new york because the media company that we ran at the time was hosting the first ever investor focused crypto event and i vividly remember i had never owned a nice pair of shoes before and so the moment that bitcoin hit ten thousand dollars i went on my little netaporte app and i bought like a a nice pair of shoes for the first time and i had them portered over to the conference and i put them on and i was like whoa and a bunch of us all put in 1.1 bitcoin each which is a thousand dollars and i think it was a hundred of us so we ended up having a hundred thousand dollars and we threw a crazy party wow on the rooftop of the public and we're all like what is happening why is this happening because it happens so fast and so intensely and now we have the capital now we have the resources not only on an individual level but as companies my company manages seven billion in assets we're billion dollar publicly listed company and i think it's incredible that we have a community of people who are leading with technology the tenants are open source decentralized permissionless and these people are empowered with with capital and they're motivated to build there's no doubt that uh bitcoin and all of crypto has a very political origin story uh there was a lot of uh you have to remember that when uh all of these ideas were first coming to the fore we were in the middle of financial crisis i think there was a lot of justifiable anger and frustration with the u.s government bailing out wall street banks and there was a lot of concern about the federal reserve and its role uh in the money supply uh and so yeah there was certainly a hugely political undertone to the beginning of crypto from what we can see from surveys and things of that uh nature the majority of people buy crypto because they think it's an exciting space they think that you know they could it could increase their net worth by a certain percentage and those are you know that's a justifiable reason to buy something i think the question is how do you combine that with the sort of political elements to get to a sort of more revolutionary decentralized process like she was speaking about people love to talk about cryptocurrencies as though there's some niche esoteric corner of finance they are not this is a three trillion dollar asset class that we have memed into existence it's wild yeah i'm laughing because it is crazy yeah but we've we've done it and i think again when we think about the investment in crypto the other thing we have to remember is for many people it is an antidote to chaos that you can buy in your portfolio it is a hedge against infinite money printing against trillions of dollars of bailouts the government incompetence that we're seeing around the world for many people they've never had the ability to exit right they've only had the ability to voice their dissent but for the first time with bitcoin people who are unhappy with the monetary regime they're in had the ability to exit help me understand how all of that makes total sense i think people who don't come from a lot of money they feel a need to take on risky propositions in order to uh you know improve their their life what i don't quite understand is how those set of incentives are any different from someone who got into house flipping in 2003 or someone who brought bought shares of apple in 1995 what is it about crypto that is distinct from those type of risks earlier there is no ceo of bitcoin there is no singular leader there is no singular investment thesis on bitcoin people see whatever they want to see in bitcoin so there's a whole group of people out there who are focused on technical analysis and trading and they're really into the speculative element and they're all of these different niche sub communities but the beauty is bitcoin is flexible enough to accommodate all of these different sub-communities and some of them evolve and spin out and become their own thing but i don't think there is like one singular view or singular perspective or one singular ethos there is no single person who dictates what what happens it's up to us i know a lot of people own a little bit of crypto but my understanding is that crypto for the most part is highly concentrated uh the the vast majority is owned by a very small number of people and is that right is that wrong and if it is true that it's concentrated amongst a small number of people how is that a democratizing force how is that different from you know uh how assets are uh uh divided uh through wall street or anything like that this is a great question and one i love talking about so in our existing monetary system wealth is extremely concentrated and today um whales control about 12 of the bitcoin supply but what's really whales being people whales being people who own more than a thousand bitcoin okay so that's 12 with the whales with the whales but then the really cool thing is there's an extremely long tail of smaller bitcoin holders and that long tail keeps growing that provides them with more resources to you know do do what they want to do so that long tail is growing but we need to find more ways to help big growth but that sounds like you're identifying a solution to what is a problem which is to say it isn't democratized at the moment so there has to be a way of making how do you propose we create a new world currency and distribute it fairly rightly i'm not here to answer that question like i don't i don't even know if we need a new world currency and distributing it fairly you are if we want to change the world and the power structure in our world we have to start with the money because at the end of the day everything comes back to the money and i think that's what i'm really advocating for is like let's consider this as a potential tool in our toolkit along with a variety of other initiatives and technologies that can help us start to find better answers to some of these systemic challenges that have plagued humanity since since the dawn of time like so what is happening with the wealth that's created because i think that that might be the way to talk about this question because like so what what are we doing what are you guys doing to make sure that that wealth actually does benefit a large swath of people yeah i think there are a few different approaches i mean i think so are you paying taxes i pay taxes of course how does it how does it work with taxes and bitcoin and how do you think it should work how should it be and yeah exactly the reason i think this is an important question is because like we live in a society right in our government we live in a society yeah our government our governments might be broken but there's a lot of attention these days paid to whether billionaires or people who made a lot of money are paying their fair share into broader-based programs that are decided through democratic means as to how we have better roads or how we move to a a greener economy these sorts of things so if you want to keep everything within the crypto world and you never cash out then when are you ever going to pay taxes and when you pay taxes you pay taxes on like kind exchanges so if i trade my bitcoin for another cryptocurrency that's a taxable event just like it would be if i bought google shares to buy apple shares right i think the issue is if we look at how taxpayer resources in america have been spent on waging endless war broken agreed totally destroying countries but but also to defend the dollar social security public school of course but if we look at what we get for the amount of tax we pay in america what we do is we take public resources and we put them in the hands of private companies tesla billions of dollars of tax subsidies so i think the issue we have here is there is so much grift with public sector resources flowing into the hands of private corporations that's what i take issue with that's where the inequality stems from is that we don't live in a democracy we live in a corporation state so if we if our tax structure looks more like europe with nationalized health care and lower defense spending and things like that how would that affect your view on how taxes should be employed in the u.s i mean look the only thing i can say is um we can sit here and we can pontificate and that's great and we can complain but if there's one thing i've learned from seven years of being in this industry is at some point you just have to shut the up and build it and so i am going to help put people in office we need to create a new political party i don't think the two-party system in america works and i think we're now at a point in the crypto ecosystem where we have enough resources we have enough wealth and we have enough people who view the world through the same lens that we can actually start to enact real change and it's not us sitting here around this table talking it's us putting people in office who are going to change things how much actual wealth has been created through bitcoin so just basic facts today bitcoin is a 1.2 trillion dollar asset class bitcoin is anywhere between 40 to 50 of the overall crypto asset market put assets on a relative scale right crypto 3 trillion dollar market precious metals literal rocks 12 trillion dollar market okay okay global equities 100 trillion dollar market real estate 300 trillion dollar market apple is a two trillion dollar company microsoft is a two trillion dollar company right yes they have budgets that are bigger than the budgets of nation states right so the the general solution so like just if you take a step back right like crypto is not the craziest thing that's happening we're living in this interesting world where corporations right have more power than nation states they have more resources than nation states which is a dynamic we haven't seen before and is the result of there is so much money in the system so crypto is the least surprising thing to me and it's so blatantly obvious if you put it in context i i agree with all of the problems you've stated today i just have trouble wrapping my head around is why crypto is the answer to any of those things like what makes it so different or what about the decentralized technology i've never been able to understand how that helps solve things outside of it being another market or something how does it solve some of those issues there's a great satoshi quote and i'm gonna use it because like the gospel of satoshi is real and it's um if you don't understand i don't have time to explain so i do think there's an interesting thing i spent the last seven years of my life trying to explain and convince various people from all walks of life about the significance of bitcoin and again like money is just a shared delusion sure right like money is just a collective fiction i'm trying to convince you of my view my delusion right but it's very difficult for me to convince you of my delusion because you're trapped in your own delusion which is obviously true i'm not trapped and it could be that the benefit of crypto is that it moves resources from this traditional hierarchy of white men who work at goldman sachs to a totally different group of people and that might be fine i i think that that would be a good thing to have a more diversified i think the most powerful thing that bitcoin has done and the most dangerous thing that bitcoin has done it is has helped people understand that they have a choice so maxwell i want to talk to you for a second because we've there's a lot of big ideas and in your reporting on inequality in tech what are the red flags that you see coming out of this conversation you know what what what makes you want to push tell me about the my red flags i'm dying i you know i you were just talking about you know uh spending you know money on ludicrous things that seem to me doesn't seem like an issue to be honest like rich people have been spending money on stupid stuff for thousands of years i i think but the or maybe millions who knows they were trading want them for like sick cave art yeah so you know like yeah nfts whatever you think about them some people think they're innovation some people think that they're you know gonna be gone i don't know i don't really care i don't know if there is a red flag but i do find myself still confused about outside of bitcoin rising in price uh bitcoin uh allowing people back in the day to buy nefarious drugs i i'm just having a trouble seeing how it's solving any of these problems and it obviously people think that it does because like you said there's religious element to it there's a real devotion to it and early adopters i think understandably really feel attached to crypto because uh especially in the case of bitcoin it's changed a lot of people's lives and if you were there early but if we're starting today though if you're starting to get into you want to buy bitcoin today i wonder are do you think you'll be uh are you too late to the party or are you still very early you don't have to buy bitcoin though you can earn bitcoin you can get paid bitcoin cash back rewards like what we want to start to do is create new dynamics where you don't have to buy the choke point the control point is always going to be where crypto touches the traditional banking system and so one of the things we're really focused on is building the ability for people to never have to leave the crypto ecosystem we can now enable people and there's actually a really cool company called stack work that allows it's like an upwork or fiverr where people can get paid in bitcoin um so if you're a developer right so for example if you are a university-educated woman in afghanistan you can no longer work outside your home if you have an internet connection you can work online and get paid in bitcoin so you don't have to deposit in a bank account because as a woman you can't have a bank account right so you can now empower people around the world to work for bitcoin which is pretty cool that that is a tangible benefit how how big is that how big is that how often is that happening right now all the time and there are huge developer communities in argentina in chile in venezuela in turkey where i'm from in the philippines in malaysia so we can now allow people anyone with a phone and an internet connection can get bitcoin and i think that's super powerful you and i don't feel that pain because we live in america and we have bank accounts and we've never been marginalized or excluded but i think for people who haven't had those opportunities like this is tremendously exciting for them i think that that is a super exciting opportunity don't you you have to agree yes of course but then the question is will this tide actually lift all boats and i think that's the inequality question in a nutshell and here's my answer to that like i can't decide that for anyone right because value is deeply subjective and deeply personal and we're still super early like the technology to be able to do these things is like three years old what happens with that that future is up to people to to build and decide this is permissionless financial technology so people will build different things and some of it will make sense to us some of it won't some of it will be altruistic and well-intentioned in nature some of it won't but my only job is to empower people to build the things they want to build and to try to move the movement forward in a way that's positive and value-creative and that's all i can do i will say that the one thing that makes me concerned is that uh the one thing are there many things i feel like there are many things is that uh you know this is essentially unfettered capitalism there's it's capitalism without the state by definition that's the ideological underpinning of the whole thing and there's a lot of history that shows that that's not a democrat uh democratizing thing all the time does it end up benefiting society at large does it rise all boats uh or does it help a concentrated few uh i don't think we know yet but uh it's not written yeah but it's worth asking until it does but by telling these stories like we can help shape the direction of the story yeah but like we have to we have to go forth and do and i know malcolm we've been hard on you to some degree i think i think it's because so much rides on what the early wealth earners of this community do with it sure and how it becomes something or just becomes another thing like i think there's a lot of promise here and i think the technology itself is there but that story is for us to to write and by holding people accountable and asking the hard questions enforcing i don't even have the tools to hold people accountable to this i don't even know what the right questions are because it feels like yeah the sky's the limit okay well thank you both for this wide-ranging and conversation that's not over is how i feel about it it's just getting started so thank you and thank you for joining us that's it for us today we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 1,100,719

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2022

Id: 2hZ-Q9QTL2s

Length: 32min 30sec (1950 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 14 2022

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My moons are going to get me on that documentary next bull run🙏

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They've finally made a documentary on me

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