Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption

Zuckerberg had gotten lucky—in another world, the twins never would have had to approach him for coding help. In any event, Tyler and Cameron didn’t believe they were on the earth to exist; they were here to create, to build.

As an entrepreneur, you had one, maybe two, but usually not more than three chances to catch lightning in a bottle; as a venture capitalist, however, you could chase lightning as long as you had cash to invest.

In rowing,” Tyler said, “sometimes there’s one guy in your boat who slows the whole thing down. He might mean well. He might be trying as hard, or even harder, than anyone else, but it doesn’t matter, he’s weighing everyone down. We call that guy an anchor.” And with that, the twins left the building.

Gold is valuable because of its naturally occurring properties: it’s scarce, durable, portable, divisible, fungible, hard to counterfeit, and easy to authenticate,

The U.S. government stepped in during economic crises all the time. Less than five years earlier, the United States had used billions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street banks during the 2008 financial crisis. During the Great Depression the government had prohibited U.S. citizens from owning gold: in 1933, President Roosevelt had signed executive order 6102, requiring citizens to turn in their gold for cash. It wasn’t until 1975, when President Ford repealed this order, that it was again legal for Americans to own gold that wasn’t jewelry or coins. And all bank deposits were only insured to the tune of $250,000. “More than twenty thousand account holders at Laika, the second largest bank in Cyprus, are going to have half of their savings taken away,

The less you know, the more soundly you sleep.

Which left only rhodium, palladium, platinum, silver, and gold—five of the eight noble metals. Rhodium and palladium wouldn’t be discovered until the 1880s, well after money had been in use for thousands of years; and platinum’s melting point would have been too high for preindustrial furnaces. By process of elimination you were left with silver and gold. Silver tarnished easily and had a much greater industrial application—too useful to make good money—leaving gold just useful enough. “Gold is valuable because of its naturally occurring properties: it’s scarce, durable, portable, divisible, fungible, hard to counterfeit, and easy to authenticate,” Tyler said. “Exactly,” Voorhees responded, “and bitcoin has all of those properties too—

Silicon Valley was a town made up of engineers who thought in frameworks, decision trees, and game theory.

You still had to use the Balkanized, legacy banking system, which was built before the internet even existed, littered with middlemen and rent-seekers all along the way. And only if the central authorities of this network allowed it to happen, would your money move at a snail’s pace from point A to point B.

Tyler was to his left, and to his right were the three other witnesses who had joined them for the headlining session of the first day of testimony. Directly next to Cameron sat Fred Wilson, a seasoned venture capitalist veteran who had moved into the cyber currency space in a big way, with the countenance of someone who had seen a number of technology waves, including the first dot-com boom and bust. Next to Wilson, the up-and-comer venture capitalist Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture. And at the end of the bench, Barry Silbert, the founder and CEO of the startup SecondMarket.

you can be unethical and still be legal.

We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.

Libertarians or individualists believed people should be free to do whatever they wanted with their money. But in reality, people had never been free to do whatever they wanted with their money. There were laws, regulations, criminal statutes.