07 The Drug Trader

Hi, I'm PJ Vote.

This is the Crypto Island miniseries.

In this episode, we talk to someone with a very illegal job that's after these advertisements for legal businesses.

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Can't tell if I should be describing the space I'm in.

Maybe not.

It has stairs.

It has a lot of stairs.

So a few days ago, I went to interview this person.

Not going to use their real name.

I'm going to change some identifying details for reasons that'll become clear.

But I can say I visited him at his home in New York.

Hey, it's going to be.

Cool space.

Thanks.

Just making music.

I just turned it all off.

What were you working on?

Like, what type of song?

But this is just like a static, is it just like a static, is it like a photo of a movie?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cool.

I don't think I've ever seen this many synthesizers in one place.

I think I've seen a lot of synthesizers.

Yeah, yeah.

The more the better.

This person,

he's in this scene in Brooklyn of people who I really like.

They're real artists, people who have not made peace with capitalism.

They spend their lives making absurd, beautiful follies,

but they sometimes make their money through activities that are at best great a black market this person he was in that scene

and some of the people in that scene who i knew sometime in the past couple years they all got really into crypto which i just found funny these brooklyn hippie hustlers were now also crypto day traders

also i just to observe rolling i'm rolling you have you have a giant crypto chart up so that's monitoring the market?

Of course, yeah.

How are you doing today?

Today I'm doing great.

I'm up like

100% in the last like

four days.

Even with the bear market?

Oh, yeah.

Bear market is just like, that doesn't mean anything to me because

bear market doesn't mean all these coins are just going down.

They're going like this.

They're going, you're doing like an up and down like cardiogram.

Right, it's like a spiral.

So as long as there's up and down movement, as long as there's that dynamic movement, then there's opportunity to make money.

So you've been riding those waves?

Yeah, 100%.

This person's strategy is basically what crypto traders call technical analysis, which sounds fancier than it is.

You look at the graph of the coin's price and you just try to make educated guesses on the spike and the drop.

The bottom, the support, or the top, the resistance.

But people on crypto Twitter, they spend all day just just scribbling hypothetical lines on these charts, making Gnostic predictions about where the price could go next,

when they should buy, when they should sell.

Jay was doing the same thing, but just in his apartment.

I think you want to just introduce yourself, how we'll be referring to you for the purposes of this.

Okay, uh, hi, my name is Jay.

Okay,

and Jay, what was when was the first time you heard about crypto at all?

I guess the very first time I heard about crypto was like 2012.

I was in San Francisco.

A friend was DJing a party and I was hanging out with him.

And he was like, oh, I want you to meet this guy.

He's from Berkeley.

He's really smart.

I think you guys will really get along.

You have a lot to talk about.

So I

spent most of the show sitting at a table with him while our friend was DJing and he was telling me about this

strange thing.

And he was a very, very early miner.

He was mining Bitcoin?

He was mining Bitcoin, and I think other things as well.

Maybe some that are defunct now.

I'm not sure.

But he was obviously, he's one of those like bright-eyed manic geniuses that as soon as they start talking, they get very animated.

I might be one of them too.

And he was like so excited about it.

And I, I mean, he was losing me because it just sounded like, it sounded like he was describing like fantasy and I had no basis in reality for it.

Like I couldn't ground it to anything that I knew before.

Like money was money and gold was gold and silver coins were silver coins.

And I'd like amassed silver coins before, but I, I, I just couldn't really figure out what he was talking about.

Wait, why did you amass silver coins before?

Well, I used to just travel around a lot with like nothing.

I'd never, like, I never had like steady income or anything.

And one of the things I used to do was I would uh go to banks when I was like hitchhiking across the country in like the Midwest or something.

You'd go to a small town bank with like a hundred bucks and you'd buy all their fifty cent coins.

Why?

Because

all fifty cent pieces in the US before 1964 are 90% silver.

And there's no one

there was no one separating them out.

So you'd buy $100 worth of 50 cent coins.

You'd get 200 coins.

And you'd always find three or four pure silver coins in there.

And so then you can melt down the silver?

No, you just keep them.

They're worth, I mean, they're worth as much as the price of silver.

I looked this up and it's totally true.

Although it's 90% silver coins before 1965, not 1964.

Still, pretty crazy.

I feel like whatever the

thing about you that collects facts like that about the world is probably related to the thing about you that is exciting about cryptocurrency.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean, it's exciting because

it's silver there for the taking.

It's like a ripe fruit tree or something.

And I mean, at the time, that was exciting to me.

That was like, in my mind, that's like a retirement account.

I have a box full of silver coins, you know, some storage in Vermont.

So that was the first time the ghost of crypto visited Jay.

But at the time, he didn't see the appeal.

It wasn't solid the way silver was.

About a year later, they used to run weed like from weed farms on the west coast to New York, where the which was the best market for it.

It's worth twice as much out here.

And at the time, it was a really lucrative thing.

I had a guy who was,

he owned a trucking service.

And he used to do the actual transport for us.

And

one time he owed me like 10 grand or something.

And he was like, hey, do you want 10 Bitcoin?

Because it was about a thousand bucks.

And

I was like,

what is it?

And then he explained it to me.

And he didn't know shit either.

He just was using it as like a currency.

But he was just like, it's, I don't know, it's like this thing.

Like, it's going to be worth a lot more in the future.

Like, he wasn't very convincing.

But I remembered that, oh, that's what that kid had in in Berkeley.

So I was like, sure, I'll take 10 Bitcoin.

So he transfers 10 Bitcoin into my wallet.

I open a wallet.

I read about the minimum you have to do.

And I open this wallet.

And like the next day, Bitcoin goes from like 1,000 to like 950 or something.

And I'm like, yo, man, I just, I just lost a thousand bucks.

And he was like, well, I'll have the cash like next week.

I can just buy them back from you if you want.

And I was like, yeah, but you're going to buy them back for for what they cost, they're gonna buy them for a thousand bucks each.

And he's like, Okay, okay, no problem.

So, I had 10 Bitcoin for like a week in 2012.

Which, at the height, last year would have been like it's like $750,000.

Okay, so it's like the second time crypto like visits your life.

It's the second time, turn it away, and I turn it away,

and the third time

I married it,

Jay finally settled down with crypto, not because an underworld contact visited him with a virtual briefcase full of Bitcoin, although that does happen later in the story.

Right now, it's still 2017.

And the thing that gets Jay into crypto, it's the same thing that was happening to a lot of people back then.

The price of Bitcoin just started spiking.

And Jay bought a little bit around Thanksgiving of that year.

During this time, it was unreal.

You would wake up every morning and your account had 30% more money in it than it did the night before.

And it just kept doing that for like two months.

And that's when I got hooked.

Of course, Jay, like a lot of people, held on too long.

He didn't sell the top.

But the spikiness and risk of the crypto gamble, it had him now.

Most people who I've encountered who day trade crypto don't sell Bitcoin or Ethereum, those are like in this world where you save your winnings, they're almost like index funds.

Instead, day traders make money trading the tinier coins.

Although, Jay doesn't really say trade, he says play.

So, what do you play?

I play smaller coins that are solid enough that I don't have to worry about total collapse,

like Luna excluded, but are small enough that there is room to go 23x in a couple months um

there's very good news sources out there and that's what just saved my ass with luna i read an article that specifically detailed why the algorithm was dangerous and

gave an example of the biggest coin to date before luna that had tried to do that stable coin same algorithm and it completely failed and it made perfect sense it was a reasonable article then i started started cross-checking it, and I found a couple other ones that said the same thing.

And I was like, that's enough information for me to get out of it.

What's the best investment you've had so far in crypto?

Like, what's been the most successful play?

God, I'm not even sure.

But, like, last year I went

like 5X

twice.

You mean, like, I went, I took a certain amount of money and I went 5x with it and then like went back down to like 5 or 10 grand.

That's what like crypto people call a round trip.

Yeah, I did that I did that actually did that three times last week.

How do you handle how do you not

how does it not I just the stomach for it

Well, at this point, it's like I really am confident that I can do it again.

So it's not a problem.

I

two of those were completely out of my hands.

Like I was in Mexico.

I had just gone on margin a half a million dollars.

Going on margin.

I might need to explain this.

So this is something that financial institutions and professional investors have always done, but that now Robinhood customers and crypto traders are doing as well.

So it goes like this.

You've decided you want to buy an enormous amount of a stock or of crypto.

You don't have the money to do it.

So you put up some of your own money as collateral, and then you ask the bank or the exchange to lend you a lot more.

Sounds great.

Unless the price of the thing you bought drops, then you can get margin called.

The bank can say, We want to be paid back right now.

And if you can't do it, which of course you can't, they take your collateral and they sell the asset you bought with their money.

They liquidate you in order to get their money back.

Again, in the old world, this was a risky move that professionals did.

Now, it's something Jay does on his phone.

Like, I was in Mexico.

I had just gone on margin a half a million dollars.

So, like, the exchange had just given me like 400,000.

I had 50,000 of my own money in there, and they gave me like 400,000 on top of it.

And I had it all in.

And I was doing, obviously, then I'm really watching the cycles, but a little tiny movement that it does 10 times a day is going to make me 20 grand.

You know, so I was just doing it like that, boom, boom, every day, just making a sale and then getting out.

But

I was in Mexico and I lost my phone.

And I happened to lose my phone like the very moment that there was a major crash in Bitcoin.

So everything just dropped such a significant percentage that when you're on margin like that, if it goes below a certain percentage, they force liquidate sales of all your things.

I have notifications set up on my phone, you know,

that gives you warning, but

I didn't know where my phone was.

It was in a cab in Mexico.

So,

um, yeah, so I really couldn't do anything about that.

Jay lost $50,000 that day, but he was okay because of his other income stream, which is far more profitable.

More about that income stream after the break.

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Welcome back to the show.

It's funny because like one of the One of the things I run into a lot in crypto is like, it's like a stereotype about cryptocurrency that it's like, oh, it's not useful for anything.

And then people will be like, well, it's useful for like illicit activities.

But like, you don't hear from people who are using it for illicit activities for like obvious reasons.

I mean, I do.

I hear from them frequently.

Jay sells drugs.

He doesn't do it himself.

He owns a delivery service.

But when his customers order stuff, he tries to use it as an opportunity to free them from their addiction to the dollar.

He tries to get them hooked on crypto instead.

I've actually turned a lot of people onto it because I'll give them a discount.

So I'll be like, if you pay with crypto, you know, you get like $50 off your order.

People are like, wow, how do I sign up?

And actually on the menu of the service, there's like very detailed instructions on how to sign up for crypto.

And so did you tell them to get in an account with an exchange?

Like, how do you, what is the...

No, well, there's a couple things like, you know, Venmo now, you can buy crypto.

I actually didn't know that.

You can buy it, but it's a scam because you can't remove it from Venmo.

So Jay's not into Venmo because the crypto you buy there doesn't leave the app.

But he does like another big corporate payment app that allows crypto purchases.

One you may be familiar with if you listen to the Genesis episode in Miami.

Cash App is what the instructions are on the menu.

Oh, interesting.

Cash App is awesome because it's giving people who they hear crypto and they're like, oh, I don't know what that is.

I'm not that kind of person.

I'm not going to be able to figure that out.

And it is extremely intimidating to get into crypto just coinbase is trying to be like the walmart of crypto but just opening a coinbase account and getting it all verified is very complicated i don't even know sometimes what to tell someone when they're like i can't send from my coinbase account i'm like i don't know man it was so funny to me understanding this like back in miami abram the street preacher had hated cash app because he saw bitcoin as the people's money and cash app as a corporate tentacle wrapped around it but here I saw how Cash App, created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, also now a Bitcoin Maxi, how his invention, Cash App, was being used for its most obvious purpose, to help people buy drugs.

So

what is the benefit to you of them paying directly in crypto?

It's like, like, what does that do for you?

Well, there's no, like, the primary thing is the IRS.

It's electronic music.

electronic money that's not visible to the IRS.

It could be.

I I mean, if they really drill down into anyone's situation, they can find anything.

But

unless they're doing that, it's pretty safe and hidden from view for tax purposes.

It's one of my questions as an outsider who can't get that inside is how much of crypto's appeal for people is just tax avoidance?

Like, what percentage of it is that?

I mean, I'm not sure.

That's just a small part of it for me.

The growth factor is a huge part of it.

And also, philosophically, it feels like good.

It feels okay.

Talk to me more about that.

What is the philosophical appeal of crypto for you?

It's really like an economy of the people.

And

very similar to the way weed was,

and probably still is, but less so.

It's a way for

just

any free person to

get real wealth.

Why did I'm intrigued by this idea with a weed?

Because it's like something you can grow and sell, and if you're willing to take on risk, like it's an access point.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, they're, I mean,

in say the nineties,

I didn't know anyone with real money unless like they inherited it or something.

And flash forward 20 years, and like

people

who

were

living out of a backpack or people who were you know carving

little wooden pipes and selling them at

festivals now own land and a house and have started multiple businesses and it's absolutely distributed wealth to a huge part of the population that wasn't willing to suck it up and go, you know, work on Wall Street or do any of the number of things that people do working their day in and day out working their ass off at a job that maybe they're tired of and some of those jobs are really important for society but there's a lot of people that just have other things on their mind like all i want to do is make music all day and if i had to go work nine to five in some job that like just taxed my soul, I would be a miserable person.

and I think there's a lot of people out there like that and usually they just end up dropping out kind of

but things like crypto and weed gave them an opportunity to actually have real wealth and

I've seen people who had nothing 20 years ago and now they're doing really cool shit And do they stay, did they stay in weed or did they cash it into other stuff?

Most people have been moving out of weed for a while because as it gets legal and

it takes a lot of the income away and also the competition is so high and like now there's like farms run by like Chinese mafia in California and like it's a madhouse and everybody's kind of out.

Everyone I know is

if they haven't moved out already they're moving out.

And how much overlap?

So like if one of the

people started other businesses with the capital they raised, you know legal safe businesses.

Right.

You just like, you do the thing that you would have wanted to do if you inherited a bunch of money and

like just come up with a cool product.

And I mean, now with Instagram, like you can sell anything.

And if it's a great, useful product and it's sustainably made, all the better, you know?

So if like, like what I hear you saying is like one of the sort of threads between crypto and weed or drugs is like,

it's like rejecting a very limited horizon that you get from society.

And then if you're willing to take on risk, you can kind of like cheat the system and you can have...

No, it's not even cheating almost.

I mean, it's like, it's like, it's a legitimate system unto itself.

It's like an alternative system.

Like to the, to the IRS, yeah, they're like, this sucks.

But,

I mean,

who,

who, like, what God.

declared that the US dollar is the currency for humanity.

I mean, fuck you.

I didn't ask for that, you know, like,

like IRS, like, I, okay, I appreciate roads, things like that.

But if you're spending half of every dollar on the military, like, I, you just lost the obligation in my mind to get my dollar.

It's not like I

have am emotionally invested in like rebelling or something.

It's just I think for myself and I

want everyone to be as free as possible and just to do what they feel without harming anyone.

And if like we lived in a society where

the centralized power was completely benign,

I might not even have a problem with the centralized power.

But it's not that way and it's completely out of control.

And like

we'll have an update to our phones and

like a year later you can see the behavior change in human beings all over the world from the fucking just one little swipe thing or it's changing it.

And like,

no one's planning, no one's driving this train.

You know, it's, no one's driving the train.

Yeah.

Jay's just answered a question I actually ask everyone I meet in crypto.

What is your problem with centralized authority?

And Jay's answer, I thought, it fit my own worldview better than most I've heard.

The problem with the world isn't a bad guy in a room somewhere.

It's that the systems we build become more powerful than our ability to change or even comprehend them.

Jay has found his way around these systems for now, but he knows that at some point he needs to move into a legit lifestyle.

That's what other people I've met who do what Jay does have done.

But it's an actually difficult logistical problem.

If you, over a lifetime, have made a whole mountain of cash selling drugs and doing whatever else, how do you convert that pile into a new life for yourself?

That's the real puzzle.

The exit.

After the break, the very surprising way, Jay might pull off his exit.

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Welcome back to the show.

Do you see crypto potentially as one of the things that like helps you exit?

Absolutely.

Yeah, definitely, because

it's

an opportunity to move large amounts of money as well.

Like really large amounts that normally

you can't do that.

Normally you have like a suitcase of cash or something and it's very hard to move it around.

What do you do with like the suitcase of cash problem?

There's like different systems.

It depends what you're trying to do.

You

know try to invest it in

things that

will take cash

buy land with cash um you buy

cars with cash and then you sell the car you get a check buy crypto like now with bitcoin at atms you can onboard cash onto crypto oh right that's a way to buy bitcoin without having to like turn it into electronic money first or get it into the like a bank account or something also even better than that there's peer-to-peer networks where people are buying and selling Bitcoin to people.

Like right now, you could go meet somebody in New York City with 10 grand and buy a third of a Bitcoin.

Wait, you mean actual peer-to-peer?

I mean meet them and give them cash.

I need to jump in here with an explanation because this is a little bit confusing, but once you understand it, completely amazing.

So normally buying Bitcoin means you visit an exchange online that will give you Bitcoin in exchange for money, but asks for your government ID, your name.

For people who want real real anonymity, Jay is saying you can find a stranger on the internet who owns Bitcoin.

You can arrange to meet them in the real world in person.

You hand them your suitcase full of money, and then they transfer Bitcoin to your wallet in front of you.

A truly anonymous, physically peer-to-peer transaction.

Have you done that?

I haven't, but I'm very much looking forward to doing it.

I'm so curious who is a guy on the other side of that transaction.

It's really interesting because I have a friend who does it all the time, and he's like super involved.

It's like his social network.

It's all these strangers that he's one of them he's going to meet and buy or sell Bitcoin with, but he's been really absorbed by it.

And what is why is he why?

Why is he so absorbed by it?

I don't know.

It's like it's like

that underground network thing, like secret society thing.

I wonder where they meet to do the trades.

Wherever you want.

And how do you trust the person?

You You see the transaction go through on the phone and you see the cash in there.

I think on the website that they're using, which is on the dark web,

there's actually like a every time you do a transaction with someone and there's no problems, you get like a rating.

So everyone has an actual rating for the number of transactions they've done that went off without a hitch.

But it's in person.

It's not like mailing money through the mail.

No, that's sketchy.

I wouldn't mail money through the mail.

I mean, I just did throw a bunch of mushroom chocolates.

You sent money just like hidden?

I usually buy money orders.

Have someone buy money orders for me and then send them.

We used to all send money orders and stuff.

Or we used to like take a speaker and fill it with 50s and 100s and then mail that in the mail, like through like a freight service or something.

Why a speaker?

Because that's a giant magnet and it'll deform any imagery if there's try to x-ray it.

but this is better than that way better because we used to lose like one in every five shipments

what would happen to the shipment just like

who knows someone would take it or if it went to the authorities

they just possess it and then you get a letter saying like we have your speaker yeah we have or saying you know we have your hundred we have your three hundred thousand dollars uh if you'd like to if you'd like to come pick it up just just show up at this address with a very clear paperwork document explanation of where this money came from.

They must really enjoy sending those letters.

Yeah, I've gotten them before.

What happens to that money?

Do they get to spend it?

You know, I have no fucking idea.

But you know who owns the most Bitcoins in the world?

It's the FBI and the DEA.

Oh, from seizures.

It's the U.S.

government.

So I checked this.

It's not quite right.

Satoshi Nakamoto is still the largest holder of Bitcoin.

But it is true that the U.S.

government routinely seizes oceans of crypto.

From there, they auction it off, although they have no policy of timing the market, so they often end up selling when the price is low.

Sitting here, though, in Jay's beautiful synth and plant-filled apartment, I just think for a moment about what it would be like to see the world the way the IRS does.

To watch the full path of money, I think.

It'd be like watching barium move through a body.

You could see a whole society that way.

You might watch watch a dollar travel from a drug dealer to a guy accepting a suitcase full of cash.

You could see the dollar change hands for two silver coins or a bag of chocolate mushrooms or a speaker shipment.

You might even watch that dollar disappear into shadow, transform into something strange and digital, but eventually end up as so many things ultimately do, flat under the fist of the most powerful system human beings have built.

It's the U.S.

government.

I don't have a problem with rules.

Like, anytime where there's human beings together, there's rules.

But the problem is when one authority is setting those rules,

it's very susceptible to bullshit.

And

when those rules are bullshit, I mean, then it's like, forget it.

I don't subscribe.

I reserve the right to decide what rules I'm going to honor and what rules I don't.

Jay, if it all goes to hell, he's got his silver half dollars in the storage unit in Vermont.

What is your view of the future?

What do you think will happen?

I have no idea.

I have no idea.

I just wake up and try to figure out which way the wind's blowing and see what I'm gonna do about it.

Crypto Island is edited by Shruthi Pinamanini.

Sound design and mixing by Steven Jackson and Phil Demohofsky at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Jay's voice was digitally altered.

Crypto Island theme music by Christine Andrews.

Additional music from Falcons 3.

Fact-checking by Garrett Graham.

Thanks for listening.

See you next episode.

This episode is brought to you in part by Odo.

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