Genesis

Hi, I'm PJ Vote.

This is the second of our crypto island favorites that we're sharing with you.

In this episode, which takes place in April 2022, we were fascinated by the idea of Bitcoin's white paper-the notion that a currency would have a founding document laying out how it should work written by a pseudonymous author.

We wanted to start in that document and trace it to where it had led to see how something that is so open to interpretation could be interpreted in some very strange ways.

We wanted to meet the pilgrims who had followed in Satoshi Nakamoto's wake.

I hope you enjoy it.

This one is special to me.

We'll play it after some brief ads.

This episode is brought to you in part by Quince.

As the air turns crisp and the leaves start to change, I am thinking about layering pieces that feel cozy but still look put together.

And Quince is where I'm looking.

They have 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, which are unbelievably soft and warm, perfect for layering under jackets or over a shirt, and they start at just $60.

I've been also eyeing their denim.

It fits right, holds its shape, and works for everything from errands to casual nights out.

And I'm very curious about their real leather jackets, which are classic, stylish, and surprisingly affordable.

What sets Quince apart is their quality and the way they do business.

By partnering directly with ethical factories and skipping the middlemen, They deliver fabrics and craftsmanship you'd expect from luxury brands, but at roughly half the price.

It's easy to build a fall wardrobe that looks high-end but feels smart for your budget.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash search engine for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's quince.com/slash search engine to get free shipping and 365-day returns.

Quince.com/slash search engine.

A lot of people already know the origin story of Bitcoin, but I'm just going to recite it one more time.

It is fall of 2008.

Good evening.

This is George W.

Bush is president.

We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis.

Lehman Brothers has just collapsed.

Number one movie in the country, Beverly Hills, Chihuahua.

Number one song in the country, T.I.'s Whatever You Like.

like.

This is where I would play a clip for you, but the podcast budget does not really allow a fair use lawyer.

You'll just have to imagine it.

On Halloween of that year, 2008, a person claiming to be a Japanese man named Satoshi Nakamoto appears on a cryptography mailing list to announce his new invention, Bitcoin.

He describes this invention in a white paper.

It's called Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

This white paper, it's an elegant document.

Text runs just eight pages long, minus footnotes.

In precise academic language, he describes the problem he set out to solve.

Quote, Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic

quote, Bitcoin appear-to-peer electronic system.

Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, abstract.

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

Obviously, we don't know who Satoshi really is, but this is as close as I could get to the voice I hear in my head when I read this.

And when I read it, I don't really try to follow the technical description.

I just listen for this voice.

Calm, academic to the point of being pretty dry.

Nothing about this white paper to me screams impending revolution.

Quote,

digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending.

We propose a solution to the double spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.

What Satoshi is saying is that there will now be electronic cash, money native to the internet.

And when that money is spent, the ledger of who has it and who sold it will be kept by the users, not by a centralized bank, not by a third-party company.

Satoshi's white paper does not explicitly describe an ideology, but a worldview thrums through it.

You can find it if you know where to look.

For instance, the Genesis block.

The very first recorded transaction on Satoshi's ledger, which he himself mines just a few months after publishing the white paper.

Satoshi embeds in that Genesis block an actual headline from a newspaper.

The London Times, 3rd of January 2009.

Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

This text, embedded into the blockchain, embedded into the blockchain forever.

Countries, normally, put presidents on their money.

Satoshi instead has stuck a newspaper headline on his that, presumably, he felt away about.

Government prints money to save bankers' asses.

Maybe that's what Satoshi wanted everyone to think about whenever they used his blockchain.

I can't help but see this white paper as a Bible of some new religion.

Over the next 13 years, Bitcoin will become popular, arguably to some people, even useful.

And it will certainly find its adherents.

This vision Satoshi Nakamoto is trying to call into existence, strangers will see that vision.

It'll give them their own visions of the future, futures they want, where they're free from the lives they're bound to.

And they will follow this vision with a religious fervor.

Some very weird people will get rich.

Alongside Bitcoin, many new coins will spawn, each presenting not just a new version of how this technology can work, but within a slightly tweaked vision of a different new future.

And each time, led by a different nerdy, charismatic figurehead.

You'll have your Vitalic Buterins, your Charles Hoskinsons, Elon Musk will end up in there somehow.

Crypto, which outsiders like me will see as a monolithic, coherent world of crypto bros, will actually be a deeply balkanized world of competing tribes, loyal to different futurists.

But it's the original group, the Bitcoiners, the cult of Satoshi Nakamoto, who will seem, at least to me, the strangest.

And to try to understand them, to understand the world which this white paper has called into being, I will find myself on a very hot April weekend in Miami, alone in a bathroom with a small tape recorder at a very large conference.

So here we go.

So it's the first day of Bitcoin Miami.

supposedly the world's largest Bitcoin conference.

And I've just left a somewhat quiet bathroom to re-enter the hulking complex that is the convention center.

Miami Convention Center, a deeply nondescript large building with some palm trees outside of it.

Inside, so many people and they paid a lot of money to be here.

The week of the conference, regular passes were going for around $1,000.

The expensive tickets, the whale passes, were going for $21,000.

The best estimates I see say that 25,000 people are here.

The floor feels like a mix of normal

people and some genuine weirdos.

Think of a lot of interesting outfits.

There's two guys in flight suits.

People who look like they got lost on the way to Burning Man or like extras in a novelty rap video.

A lot of gold Bitcoin chains, indoor sunglasses, women with QR codes on their butts.

Another flight suit.

I run into a German guy with a t-shirt that's just Satoshi's headline.

The one he printed in the Genesis block.

Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

You could spend a whole day here just reading the t-shirts.

I see a bunch bashing fiat money, money issued by government.

Like it's a rival sports team.

Anti-fiat social club t-shirt.

I'm in a place where people are rooting for a currency like it's their country.

In fact, they've printed out a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a room-sized version, but they've changed it so that now it's about Bitcoin.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the monetary bonds which have enslaved them to a fiat system of government decree.

And to assume...

If I sound like I'm at a funeral here, it's not because I'm a Declaration of Independence purist.

I'm just feeling a little self-conscious, standing in a room full of people talking to a recorder.

But my approach today is to be a rookie grad student.

I'm going to go to every panel.

I'm going to take lots of notes.

I want to document the different groups of people drawn to Bitcoin.

The followers assembled at this very strange mecca.

Chapter 1.

The Fundamentalists.

So my first stop is this big room called the Genesis Stage.

Alright.

That's a bigger room.

Five men sitting on stage on leather couches in front of a backdrop of the Bitcoin logo against some palm trees.

I'd chosen this talk out of all the others because it had a great title, Wartime Bitcoin.

My assumption was that the panelists here would be talking about something I was really curious about, the war in Ukraine.

An unprecedented amount of crypto has been donated to the Ukrainian side this year.

That's what I thought they'd be talking about.

I was wrong.

Wartime Bitcoin actually meant the secret war that some Bitcoiners believe is being waged against Bitcoin by the global elites.

Yeah, this is definitely a powerful panel.

I hope there's not a drone strike that's going to take all of us out because this would be a big loss to the freedom community.

But I would start off by saying I think it's fair to say that there's a war on for people's minds, but I would even go further and say that there's a financial war happening right now by a lot of big banks, central controllers.

They're launching bombs of inflation.

Some people would call it a controlled demolition of the economy in order to financial war.

Bombs of inflation.

A controlled demolition of the economy.

It's as if that fairly subtle note of frustration at the banks and Satoshi's white paper, it has blossomed into this potent cocktail of conspiracy and rage.

Here's one panelist talking about actually confronting one of the bailouts architects in person, former Fed Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke.

And I remember seeing Ben Bernanke there after the 2008 financial crisis, and I went up to him and specifically asked him,

how does it feel?

creating one of the biggest banker bailouts in human history, conducting the largest transfer of wealth, giving trillion dollars to your private banking friends while everyone else is struggling out there to live.

Ben Bernanke was a little surprised by that question and then literally tried to take the recorder out of my hand and rip it out of me.

Here you go.

Thank you, Jay.

Luke Rodkowski, the man telling this story, is a YouTuber/slash survivalist.

His all-caps t-shirt reads, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.

Just to give you a sense of this panel's vibe, Luke is the moderator.

This rage against the banks, the governments, against central authority, this is what unites the five panelists who've come from all over.

Australia, Italy, the US, two Canadians, one a spokesman from the Canadian trucker protests, the other a French Canadian who's wearing a camo vest with a patch that says in Latin, if you want peace, prepare for war.

I'm Francis.

I'm the founder of Bull Bitcoin.

I got into Bitcoin to destroy the Bank of International Settlement and to bring an end to the era of central banking.

And then I got interested in removing the power from governments into the hands of the citizens and decentralize the governance system.

But now I'm staying into Bitcoin to take revenge on the governments and for what they did to us.

And we will make them pay.

These guys on stage, I'm realizing, are what are called Bitcoin maximalists.

Maxis.

I've seen them online.

I've never seen them in the flash.

The most hardcore Maxis believe that Bitcoin will become the only digital currency, perhaps the world's main currency, full stop.

They're Bitcoin fundamentalists, essentially.

To spend time with Maxis is to spend time in a world where the bank bailouts of 2008 were not just bad policy or an example of corrupt American elites protecting their own in a crisis.

For Maxis, those bank bailouts had the emotional valence of watching Santa Claus get dragged out of the mall by his beard and shot in front of children.

No one here is over it.

No one wants to be over it.

Bitcoin will be their revenge.

The plan goes like this.

The government has power because it controls the money.

So take that power away from them.

Convert your dollars to Bitcoin.

Create a world where there's no bank bailouts, no printing money out of thin air, no Fed chair announcing that inflation is going to rise.

Fix the money, the Maxis say, and you can fix the world.

That's the idea.

But interestingly, these Maxis are equally fired up about the threat to Bitcoin just posed by other cryptocurrencies.

All those other coins that toddled after Bitcoin with their own little white papers, those are shitcoins.

Those are apostates.

Here's another panelist.

And to the point of wartime Bitcoin that we're discussing here is that during wartime, we're going to have...

governments to battle.

We're going to have central banks to battle.

But guess what?

We're also going to have a whole lot of fucking shit coiners to battle.

battle and as much as I love the organizers here like the larger these communities get the more we get infiltrated with fucking retards who come here and try and shield

try and shield their own shitcoin

crypto is the attack on fucking bitcoin make no mistake about it it's the most effective attack

There's a bunker vibe to the Maxi community, a feeling of perpetual besiegement.

As I dutifully walk from talk to talk, notebook in hand.

Excuse me.

Do you know where Meeting Room 229 is?

I'm realizing these bunker vibes permeate the stages of Bitcoin Miami.

I believe in the future and I believe in Bitcoin.

There's no critique of Bitcoin to be found here in any of the talks.

I just think that we focus so much on the energy narrative and we shouldn't.

We should focus on like what Bitcoin does for the world.

There's one panel devoted to discussing Bitcoin's environmental impacts.

It's called You Are the Carbon They Want to Reduce.

Like the people who say that we should reduce Bitcoin carbon emissions are talking about getting rid of you, a carbon-based life form.

These nervous, prickly capitalists.

They're a movement.

They're fired up.

But they have no leader.

Satoshi is anonymous.

He does not issue marching orders, which means that other populists step into that vacuum.

I see one of them that afternoon in the Nakamoto arena.

Okay, I'm walking into the Nakamoto arena to see Peter Thial address a very excited crowd.

Peter Thiel is the keynote speaker here.

Billionaire PayPal founder, the largest single donor to Republican politicians this year.

Well, actually, he's tied with a man named Ken Griffin, who happens to own a copy of the U.S.

Constitution.

Small world.

Anyway, Thiel is gracing the Nakamoto Arena today.

An enormous room that could house Thai fighters.

Orange laser lights and strobes, thousands of seats.

It looks pretty full.

Up at the front, the seats reserved for the whales.

Those people who spent as much as $21,000 for their wristbands.

Hello.

The whale seating for Teal's talk, particularly packed.

Thank you so much for having me here.

It's,

you know, there's so much I was wrong about in 1999, but I thought I'd reflect on some of the things I was thinking at the time.

Teal's on stage in a white polo shirt.

Brown hair, ruddy cheeks.

He's holding up what looks to me like a couple hundred dollar bills.

Hard to see from my seat, but he's using that paper money as a prop for his talk.

You know, when I was running PayPal, when I was getting it started, the standard way I'd start an investor pitch would I'd hold up several hundred dollar bills and it would always get people's attention.

It's kind of hypnotic, you know, even though you know, it's really weird.

What is what is this?

I mean, it's it's probably not very good as toilet paper.

It's not good as wallpaper.

It's um it's sort of this crappy fiat money.

At this point, Peter Thiel wants to do something that I think he and this room would consider kind of punk rock, like their version of smashing a guitar.

Throw the money into the crowd.

You know, would the gentleman in the front row like to have the money?

But the distance is a little far.

Money, not that aerodynamic.

Just somebody come up and get it.

But

they don't know how to throw it out at people.

In the end, he settles for folding it up and tossing it underhand like a rookie high school softball pitcher.

I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists, you know?

And so uh from there, he continues to serve up more red meat.

He shows a slide of Bitcoin versus its biggest competitor, Ethereum.

You know, so if we, if this is, by the way, this is a, I, I took, I took this slide from uh from a Vitalik, uh, from Vitalik himself.

So, uh Bitcoin represented by a picture of a burly dude in a MAGA hat, machine gun pointed at the camera.

Ethereum, just a picture of Ethereum's inventor, Vitalik Buterin.

Very skinny fellow who often dresses like he's wearing his favorite pair of pajamas to a sober rave.

The crowd eats this up.

So this is

sort of a question, how do we compare and contrast them?

And so if we look at the current market caps, $830 billion versus $386 billion of Ethereum.

Thiel moves briskly through his argument that basically, while Ethereum is fairly valued, Bitcoin in the future could have parity with the equities market, meaning the price could rise 100x.

This here is the truest rallying cry for the Bitcoiners.

Obviously, Teal is a Republican, but with this, he is uniting a room filled with all sorts of political beliefs.

All these people rooting for this one future, rooting that the number will go up.

And now, Teal moves to the encore, to his big finish.

And so I want to maybe end with, you know, an enemies list.

A list of people who are holding back Bitcoin.

He starts starts naming those enemies, posting their pictures on the Jumbotron.

Enemy number one.

I think the sort of the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha

is

perhaps the most honest and the most direct in it.

The sociopathic grandpa from Omaha is how Teal's referring to Warren Buffett, a 91-year-old billionaire who's committed the high crime of disparaging Bitcoin.

He called it rat poison squared.

Enemies list goes on.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon won't invest in Bitcoin.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has also so far abstained.

They are the finance gerontocracy, Teal closes by telling the room.

And it's up to them, the youth, to prevail.

And

we have to just go out from this conference and take over the world.

Thank you very much.

All right, we're going to have a five-minute

Sitting here as people stream out of Teal's talk,

I have this feeling I'll get over and over again in Miami.

I feel uneasy, like physically, in my stomach.

I feel like I'm watching the genesis of something bigger than I can really comprehend.

In how many large rooms have groups of Americans met to share strange ideas, mocked by outsiders, bound together by outrage and paranoia, ignored until they become unignorable.

I keep getting that feeling in different moments at Bitcoin Miami.

Or maybe it's just my nicotine patch.

I'm struggling with the nicotine patch.

I go outside to get some air.

I breathe, and I notice right away there's sort of a refreshing disconnect between the amped-up war machine on stage and its intended audience, the actual people at this conference.

Outside, there's no army massing for war.

I just see a festival.

There's loud music from the sound money stage.

It's a currency pun.

There's a line of food trucks where you could spend $18 on a poke bowl if you're not careful.

And then there's this.

Every festival, of course, has the thing you're supposed to take a selfie in front of.

Here, it's a gigantic plastic statue they're calling the Miami Bowl.

It's like the Wall Street Bowl, but instead of old bronze, this this one looks like a robot.

Glossy black, body covered in circuits, eyes laser blue.

Like an actual real-life transformer.

Everyone makes a stop at this ball.

What do you think of this ball?

Oh, it's beautiful, amazing.

I want to make one with similar one,

put it in my house.

I think it's cool.

I wish it didn't look so plasticky, you know?

Feels really transformative, like crypto.

People here are celebrating.

It's a party.

I keep walking past people, getting just snatches of conversation where someone's telling someone a tip for how they could make more money.

Lock it in, I'm gonna shoot you a text.

We'll link up.

The phrase I hear over and over again is financial freedom.

Either the freedom to not work or the freedom at least to just leave a soul-crushing job.

Floating among people, catching sentence fragments about nodes and ASIC mining rigs.

Honestly, I feel kind of thrilled just to be here understanding the lingo.

I feel like I've been learning French at home for many months, and now I'm gamboling around Paris with a baguette under each arm.

By early afternoon, the heat is staggering.

It's that kind of Florida heat that makes your brain slow down and sputter, like a computer from the 90s.

I pilot myself inside to the air-conditioned exhibitor's hall.

Alright, this is the exhibition room.

Smells like new rugs.

This big room where the conference's hundreds of sponsors are all trying to outdo each other with elaborate spectacles.

Cash app, who is sponsoring it, has like a huge display.

There's a giant like

actual volcano with smoke coming out of it and a quote from Nakamoto.

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.

Oh, and it's an enormous stone.

God, I wonder if Satoshi Nakamoto knew how much marketing copy he was writing.

It's here wandering around the exhibitor's hall, far away from the maxis on stage with their microphones, that I'll meet the people whose faith is the real engine for this movement.

After the break, chapter 2: Pilgrims.

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombas.

Fall's here, kids are back in school, vacations are over.

It is officially the start of cozy season, which means it's time to slide into some bombas.

You know, bombas, the most comfortable socks, slippers, tees, and underwear out there, made from premium materials that actually make sense for this time of year.

The season's softest materials, think merino wool that keeps you warm when it's chilly but cool when it's hot, Sapima cotton that's softer, stronger, and more breathable than regular cotton.

And even rag wool, the thick, durable, classic cozy sock you'll want all fall.

The best part, for every item you buy, Bombus donates one to someone experiencing homelessness.

Over 150 million items have been donated thanks to customers.

I mostly just wear bombus socks.

I've been only wearing red socks because it's harder for people to steal them from me.

But I've decided this year, I'm switching to purple.

You can head over to bombus.com/slash slash engine and use code engine for 20% off your first purchase.

That's bombbas.com slash engine.

Codaengin at checkout.

This episode is brought to you in part by Ollie.

I have a dog who I love very much named Ralphie.

Ralphie is a very picky eater and I worry a lot about his health and so I'm always looking for great dog food for him.

And if my dog could talk, he would probably beg for Ollie.

Ollie delivers clean, fresh nutrition in five drool-worthy flavors, even for the pickiest eaters.

Made in U.S.

kitchens with the highest quality human-grade ingredients, Ollie's food contains no fillers, no preservatives, just real food.

The way it works, you fill out Ollie's 30-second quiz, and they create a customized meal plan based on your pup's weight, activity level, and other health information.

For first-timers, Ollie will send out your pup's first box with two weeks worth of meals, a free storage container for mess-free serving, and a guide for how to gradually switch them over to their new diet.

One to two months on Ollie can help your dog reach a healthy weight.

Head to ollie.com/slash search, tell them all about your dog, and use code search to get 60% off your welcome kit when you subscribe today.

Plus, they offer a happiness guarantee on the first box, so if you're not completely satisfied, you'll get your money back.

That's olie.com/slash search and enter code search to get 60% off your first box.

Welcome back to the show.

Chapter 2 Pilgrims

So I'm walking through the sponsor area, genuinely just appreciating all these lunatic brand activations.

This is a weird sort of light chamber that I don't understand.

It's very cool looking, kind of looks like the set for Mo Mani Mo problems.

I noticed two women in the tube who just seem to be having a wonderful time.

Can I ask you guys, are you guys having fun?

Oh, we're having the best time.

I saw you taking pictures in that tube of light thing.

Yes, the Nexo Tunnel.

What is that?

What is the Nexo Tunnel?

I have no idea.

It is a space of enjoyment, imagination, and power.

But it is.

It looks like a good place to take your picture to go on Instagram.

Hello.

Or TikTok.

Woo-woo.

Lanu and Marnita.

Lanu flew from Hawaii to be here, 16 hours.

She's Polynesian, curly hair, floral blouse, high heels.

Marnita came in from Colorado.

She's black.

She's dressed more casually.

Bright pink sneakers, dreads dyed half white, half discolored.

It's almost like neon kelp.

I'm Marnita, the Queen Connectress.

What is a Queen Connectress?

Yes, sir.

I am connecting people to financial literacy, investments, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology.

Marnita, not a maxi.

She's not preparing for war against the global elites.

But Bitcoin's cultural power, it probably owes more to the fact that so many normal people like her have fallen down this rabbit hole.

Hello.

How long have you been in crypto?

Okay, so you guys, I've only been in crypto for three years, and I still feel like a little babe, right?

What got you in?

Okay, so check this out.

I was looking for something different, right?

You know, like every one of us, we struggle with day-to-day life.

We're looking for something that can give us financial freedom, something we can base a foundation on, right?

So I started praying.

Nothing happened.

All of a sudden, I'm on Facebook.

Yes, Facebook, right?

And I'm scrolling and I hear this voice, man.

And this voice is yelling about how cryptocurrency is going to bring about the greatest financial revolution that we have ever seen.

That voice belonged to her cousin Brandon, someone Marnita feels extremely grateful towards.

My cousin Brandon Ivy.

All right, he is actually a cryptocurrency and blockchain educator.

Crypto educators.

Some call themselves tutors.

They're a big part of the scene.

I've been really hoping to meet one here.

I wanted to talk to Marnita's cousin Brandon and she wanted to make the connection.

But right now he was AWOL.

Oh, he was sitting here.

See, can you call Brandon for me?

Okay, for...

Oh, i don't have a card but he's here okay so check it out while we wait she continues the story of how she got into crypto she'd seen brandon's post hadn't initially been that interested but then she'd noticed something about the comments beneath it

just the mix of people there and it wasn't just like let's say people who are less fortunate it was like people who had a lot of money it was blacks it was whites it was hispanics and all of these people were there for a common reason freedom right and where were you at in your life?

Like, what were you doing for work?

Okay, so check me out.

I was working at the bank, $17 an hour.

Talk about irony, right?

In the credit card department of all places.

That's where I was.

I started learning about cryptocurrency and I walked away.

I was like, this is not the way, dude.

I walked away and I started learning about cryptocurrency and I thought because he's my cousin that it was going to be easy.

No.

Right?

He made me go to work, but that was the best thing he could have ever done for me.

And what do you mean he made you go to work?

Like he was like...

He said, you got to learn this stuff, girlfriend.

I'm not going to tell you.

I could have had it to where

I say, hey, I have $500, Brandon.

Where should I put it?

He said, no, no, no.

Do my course.

Learn about what cryptocurrency is.

He said, do you know who Shitoshi Nakamoto is?

I said, no.

He said, don't ask me where to invest your money if you don't even know who that is, right?

There are a lot of these crypto groups.

On Facebook, on Telegram, Discord, some charge, some are free.

Many are definitely scams.

Crypto tutors who charge money for obvious advice or even accept bribes to push certain coins on their followers without disclosing.

There are also legitimate ones where groups of people invest together and try to just trade good information.

At Bitcoin Miami, I will meet person after person who will refer to the groups or to the crypto tutors who have led them here.

Sometimes I'll think, obvious scammer, but a lot of times I'll just wonder, not being able to tell how legit some specific tutor is.

Partly just because the Bitcoin price shot up so much after the stimulus during the pandemic that all boats had kind of risen.

So the only information I really have is how the people I'm talking to feel about their experiences, what they tell me.

Marnita was really happy with her cousin Brandon.

He'd made a big promise about financial freedom.

Three years later, that promise was paying off.

But of course, it didn't always work out that way.

Lanu, Marnita's friend, was also talking to me about financial freedom.

And I said to her, you know, the hard thing about those words is I hear them and I just sort of want to pat my pockets to make sure my wallet's still there.

In my experience, some of the people that'll say to you, like, I'm trying to free you are trying to scam you.

And I feel like you guys ran into that as well, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

That was the first thing I encountered.

I thought I was being freed, but instead I was scammed.

How'd you get burned?

Well, okay, so I'm Polynesian, and so there was a self-made billionaire in crypto who was Tongan, and I was Tongin, so that was very appealing and attractive to me.

And like a dummy, we're just like, here's our money, take our money, like, you know, because we're just like trusting him to, you know, take the helm and guide us.

But he was actually a con artist, and he scammed us, took all our money, and ghosted us.

So we lost 57K collectively as a family.

And that's that's awful.

Yes, it is.

And it took a big toll on me.

And I told myself that I wasn't going to let that happen to anyone.

It didn't have to just be my family.

If someone was interested in learning more about crypto and I had something to share with them, then I was going to pay it forward.

So then I had to take a seat and start learning and start getting educated.

Lanu's education happened in Facebook groups and online meetups.

She actually met Marnita at one of those online events.

This conference in Miami is their first time hanging out IRL.

Lanu believes that understanding crypto means understanding society, understanding that rich people hoard wealth and hoard information they only share with each other.

Crypto, for her, it's a way for the 99% to start to help each other the way rich people do.

I don't know.

Call it outsider trading.

What were you doing before this?

I own pawn shops on Maui.

So I'm in the pawn industry.

That's why Bitcoin made sense to me when I was first introduced to it because Bitcoin is like digital gold.

Lanu's a miner.

She mines crypto, but not Bitcoin.

The computing power required to mine actual Bitcoin is too expensive for her.

That space has mostly been taken over by large corporations.

So Lanu mines smaller, more obscure coins.

Can I ask how much you're getting a day in mining?

$15K passively.

Hello.

$15,000 a day?

About a day.

So a day, well, it's $15K a month.

So maybe divide that.

How many computers do you have set up?

I have currently 14 in my office, and then my husband is working on 22 more.

Did you ever think this would be your life?

No, I didn't.

I love it.

It's pretty amazing.

I'm going to go get a Bitcoin tattoo right now in the front.

You're for real?

You're getting a Bitcoin tattoo?

Yeah, Cash App paid tattoo artists to give Bitcoin tattoos for free during convention.

So, what are you getting and where, if I may ask?

So, you have to choose from what they have available, and they had a cute Bitcoin symbol that had an X for mining, and it shows the rock.

So, yeah, because I'm a miner, that's the one I'm going to go with.

Lano and Marnita left for the tattoo booth.

Brandon Ivy never appeared.

Something I never knew exactly how to feel about, but saw over and over again, were just people pulling other people into Bitcoin.

Every Lanu and Marnita had a Brandon Ivy and were themselves a Brandon Ivy to several others.

It boggled my mind sometimes, just the scale of it.

One idea from a white paper PDF.

reproduced over and over, transmitted person to person,

gave me that feeling in my stomach stomach again of witnessing something enormous without knowing yet what that enormity would mean.

The place I felt that enormity at its maximum strength was when I saw a panel essentially of three Brandon Ives, well, crypto educators, who also happened to be world-famous celebrity athletes.

It was at a panel called Pay Me in Bitcoin.

I am so excited to be chatting with three legends right here.

Let's get, how are you guys doing?

I didn't think there was gonna be this many people here.

We're good.

We're excited to hear and talk talk about this

Chapter three

the celebrities

Well, let's just get right into it on the Nakamoto stage wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.

quarterback Aaron Rodgers and tennis star Serena Williams all three athletes had signed deals with cash app the event sponsor Cash App is like Venmo, but with a lot more crypto training

So Cash App wanted to convince their customers to direct deposit their paychecks and auto invest the money in Bitcoin.

Like whatever you get paid from work, just instantly put a percentage towards Bitcoin investing.

These athletes on stage were not directly making that pitch.

Instead, they were saying that athletes should get paid in Bitcoin.

Here's Serena Williams talking about diversity among Bitcoin holders.

I think a lot of people don't realize that women and people of color actually will probably invest sooner and more.

And so that's important to know.

just, but it's just having that opportunity, right?

So I think we're all here to kind of talk about how we can get that opportunity through Cash App.

And it's such an easy way to

invest.

And it's like, you don't really think about it.

You just.

Serena Williams of the three was the most conscientious about using the sponsor's name.

Odell Beckham Jr., mostly quiet.

Aaron Rodgers.

Green Bay Packers quarterback, most famous recently for his alternative views on COVID vaccines.

He convincingly says that he's taking his NFL salary in Bitcoin now.

He describes his journey to that decision like any athlete, explaining to the hometown why he signed up to play for them this season.

So I personally talked to people who've been in the space for a long time who think it's going to 500,000 a coin.

And I talked to the crypto analysts at my financial institution who believe it's going to zero.

And just because I wanted to hear both sides of the story and enjoy the conversation.

And to me, it was a no-brainer.

Dressed all in black with a leather jacket and a slicked-back ponytail.

Rogers really comes across as a true believer, extolling the virtues of doing your own research, very big Bitcoin thing, generally reciting Bitcoin or bromides that the room eats directly from his hand.

If the Fed keeps sprinting trillions of dollars, you know, the best defense against inflation, I believe, is Bitcoin.

I leave the conference that day just sort of in awe that Aaron Rogers, Serena Williams, and Peter Thiel are rallying around the same

anything.

That night, my journalist friend Liz lets me tag along to this party thrown by a crypto exchange.

They've rented the local museum.

The party is set in this cavernous room.

A woman dressed like a ballerina is doing ballet stuff

with a bunch of

L-wire lights on her and a ballerina 2-2.

It's a pretty good spectacle.

Feels like what you'd see at a nice wedding party for two crypto barons, I imagine.

Pretty soon, I run out of nicotine patches and I head home.

The next day, I'm back at the conference center for another round of talks.

But that feeling of dutiful grad student is beginning to wear off.

I see my friend Liz.

Hey, how's it going?

Exhausting.

Just like really exhausting.

I'm just getting sales fatigue.

Like I've had to watch 24 hours of a QVC pitch for one product.

So around 4 p.m.

that day, I decide to skip the next talk, and I leave the building.

Outside, the Miami heat continues to swelter.

80 degrees verging on 200.

I pass back by the conference entrance where organizers are handing out swag.

Orange Bitcoin, sunglasses, and bottles of water.

I'll take one of those.

Everything Bitcoin is always orange.

I find myself out on the sidewalk on a cloudless day on the corner of Convention Center and 17th.

Two street preachers have set up shop.

One is the traditional kind, an older woman with a sign preaching that Jesus is the only way.

I try to listen respectfully, but I'm a little distracted because someone's playing a song on an electric violin nearby, and I can almost but not quite figure out what it is.

Only one song, only one.

You got one son, you're going to give it for me.

Look at me.

Look at this lady.

No,

I can stop coping here because, for the Lord, nothing is impossible for God.

You take me.

Isn't she lovely?

It's isn't she lovely?

You see?

Okay, so your sign says Jesus loves you.

He's coming.

Repent.

Father judgment.

Because

when you buy one insurance, I don't speak good English, okay?

You do me.

No!

If you buy one insurance, you don't pay.

After that, after you're in the bag.

About 10 feet away, there's another street preacher.

This one is different.

This one is actually a kind of person I thought I'd never see at Bitcoin Miami.

A dissenter.

That's after the break.

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Chili Pad.

Will my kids sleep tonight?

Will I wake up at 3 a.m.

again?

Am I going to wake up hot and sweaty because my partner leaves the heat on?

Those are the thoughts that bounce around my head when I can't sleep too.

And let's face it, sleep slips away when you're too hot, uncomfortable, or caught in a loop of racing thoughts.

But cool sleep helps reset the body and calm the mind.

That's where Chilipad by SleepMe comes in.

It's a bed cooling system that personalizes your sleep environment.

So you'll fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and actually wake up refreshed.

I struggle with sleep constantly, and I have found that having a bed that is cool and temperature controlled actually really does make a huge difference.

ChiliPad works with your current mattress and uses water to regulate the temperature.

Visit www.sleepme slash search to get your ChiliPad and save 20% with code search.

This limited offer is available for search engine listeners and only for a limited time.

Order it today with free shipping and try it out for 30 days.

You can turn it for free if you don't like it with their sleep sleep trial.

Visit www.sleep, s-le-e-e-p.me slash search and see why cold sleep is your ultimate ally in performance and recovery.

This episode is brought to you in part by Robert Half.

Need contract help for those workload peaks and backlogged projects?

You're not alone.

Robert Half found that 67% of companies surveyed say they will increase their use of contract talent.

That's why their recruiters leverage their experience and use award-winning AI to quickly find the skilled candidates they want.

Learn about their specialized talent in finance, accounting, technology, marketing, legal, and administrative support at Robert Half.

They know talent.

Visit roberthal.com/slash talent today.

This episode is brought to you in part by Groons.

If you love the taste of fresh green apples, you're going to want to try Groon's limited edition Grooney Smith Apple Gummies, available only through October.

They taste like sweet tart green apple candy, but with all the full body benefits you get from Groons.

It's basically fall wrapped up in a gummy.

Groons aren't your typical vitamins.

They're not just a multivitamin, a greens gummy, or a prebiotic.

They're all three and more, all packed into a convenient daily snack pack.

Each pack has six grams of prebiotic fiber.

That's three times the fiber of leading greens powders and the equivalent of more than two cups of broccoli.

Plus, Groon's ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications.

They're vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free, and come low-sugar or in sugar-free options.

And they taste amazing.

Grab your limited-edition Grooney Smith Apple Groons available only through October.

Stock up because they will sell out.

Get up to 52% off.

Use the code Search.

That's at groons.co.co.

Welcome back to the show.

Chapter 4, The Apostate.

For two days, I've been in a place where pretty much everyone seems to share the exact same beliefs.

Bitcoin is financial freedom.

You should buy Bitcoin.

You should convince your family to buy Bitcoin.

Here, outside on the sidewalk, I'm going to witness this movement encounter a person who disagrees with them.

An apostate.

I have a soft spot for all apostates, but this one in particular.

This street preacher wearing a Gilligans Island bucket hat standing outside the Bitcoin convention peddling an anti-Bitcoin message.

How's it going?

Pretty good, you guys.

How's business?

Oh, it's great.

It's been great.

Okay, so say your name and what you're doing out here.

My name is Abram Horner.

I'm from California and

I'm out here preaching the gospel to people

and trying to tell them that Bitcoin really cannot cannot save them.

It cannot save the world.

Only Jesus Christ can.

Tell me what your sign says.

One side says the love of money is the root of all evil with a little Bitcoin symbol because Bitcoin, a lot of people are thinking of it as the new money.

So a lot of people are here because

they believe in the promise that Bitcoin can decentralize finance, but then a lot of people are just here because they want to show off their Lambos and like I got rich off Bitcoin and you can too, but really they're just creating a new Ponzi scheme.

When Abram read the white paper, he saw a promise, not of a world where people got rich, but of a new tool that everyone could use.

So what he sees at this conference, it disappoints him.

Plus, he points out, wasn't the whole point of the white paper to create a currency unencumbered by profiteering middlemen?

So like this event is sponsored by Cash App,

another middleman.

So why would Cash Op be sponsoring a Bitcoin event?

Because in theory, they're the competition, right?

Bitcoin, if it worked.

Right,

they would lose their profit, their margin.

So why would they be doing this if it's a peer-to-peer?

Because they figured out a way to stay in control using Bitcoin.

So I gotta say,

I don't usually talk to street preachers with...

such a coaching take on the financial system.

Well, Craig Wright, the inventor of Bitcoin, who won the lawsuit here in Miami, proving that he is the inventor of Bitcoin, himself was a pastor.

Craig Wright.

I should tell you, there's another side to Abram's sign, the back, where he exhorts people to follow Craig Wright.

Craig Wright, very much persona non grata here at Bitcoin Miami.

His crimes, he claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, which they don't like.

And he's encouraged people to turn away from Bitcoin to use a different coin.

So that's the conclusion to Abram's whole argument, that everyone is here worshiping a fake Bitcoin and they should follow the real one, Craig Wright's alternative Bitcoin.

If none of what I've said upsets you, you probably weren't at Bitcoin Miami.

The most dramatic moment I will witness in my time here, and for me, of course, my favorite.

It starts because this man who's simply walking by, middle-aged guy in a polo shirt with a software company logo on it, he comes up, reads the front of Abram's sign, the less provocative part, and asks a little angrily,

Are you saying Bitcoin's evil?

Are you saying that Bitcoin is evil?

Well, I'm not saying Bitcoin is necessarily evil the way it was designed, but the question is, is why would Cash App sponsor this event?

I don't know.

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, right?

Yeah.

So why do you need Cash App?

You don't.

Okay, so why would Cash App sponsor it then?

Because they're helping to implement Bitcoin.

I mean, it's an open protocol.

Anybody can use it.

It's not like controlled by the US dollar where only the Federal Reserve 12 banks are allowed to participate.

I could write a software application tomorrow that runs on Lightning.

You know, Cash App can write one too.

It's an open protocol, just like the internet.

It's open protocol for anyone.

This guy's getting pretty heated up.

And he hadn't even seen the back of the sign yet.

Abram Spiel about Cash App is working much less well on him than it had on me.

And then Abram decides to escalate things a little bit more.

He invokes the holy document.

Lightning is not in the white paper.

There's nothing about second layer solutions in the white paper.

That there's no centralized control.

There's no evil person controlling life.

So,

how is there centralized control?

This third voice you hear, that is a new fighter who has entered the arena.

A white guy holding a drink, younger in a bucket hat with piercing blue eyes and a whale wristband.

I later find out he's a Bitcoin rapper named Captain Youth.

Right now, Captain Youth and the Polisher guy, they're teaming up.

I think Bitcoin is the furthest thing from evil.

I think Bitcoin is probably the most godly thing there is.

Bitcoin, the real Bitcoin, Craig Wright, the inventor, was actually a pastor before.

What does that mean, though?

That means that he made Bitcoin to benefit rich and poor people.

But right now,

poor people cannot use BTC.

Why not?

I've been in this conversation before.

I mean, not this one, but I've seen pro-life people ask pro-choice people, when do you think life begins?

These passionate, angry, completely talking past each other conversations.

They're basically what America is made out of.

But I've never heard it happen over two different kinds of Bitcoin.

That's why he added

the back of your sign, the back of your sign at the very top, it says Craig Wright, right?

That's an individual.

That's centralization.

Satoshi.

Who's the leader of Bitcoin?

Satoshi's anonymous.

Craig Wright claims to be the Lesoshi.

This is a name, right?

This is a real name attire to an identity of a person.

This is anonymous.

This isn't tied to anybody.

He's proven in court that he is Satoshi.

He hasn't, though.

Proven in court.

Craig Wright even moved one Satoshi.

He did, right in front front of Gavin Eskimo.

He didn't!

He didn't.

He signed a message.

What, blah, blah, blah, that he lost the case?

This is what I've done.

That he won the case.

Why doesn't he move the coins?

The thing is, he just won a lawsuit here, proving that he is the sole inventor.

And who's the determiner of one a lawsuit?

A jury.

A jury.

A jury.

Related to a government.

This is where Captain Youth rests his case.

Not by pointing to other possible holes in Abram's argument, but on the idea that Abram would ever place his trust in a jury, a symbol of centralized authority.

I don't know how you prove anything, really, if all centralized authority is suspect, but no one solves that problem or any other problem here on the sidewalk.

Oh, so you don't believe, you don't believe in a jury?

The apostate keeps fighting as the afternoon sun begins to dip.

He was accused of fraud.

They tried to sue him for 500,000 Bitcoins.

Yeah, man, I mean, it is, you've got, you've got brochures here that are saying that beast, which has one, I just wanted to tell you.

Chapter 5: The Crypto Tutor.

This whole time, I've been wanting to meet a crypto tutor, an educator, and it finally happens because of Abram.

A few minutes after Captain Youth leaves in disgust, another man comes up to argue with Abram.

This man has a long beard, platinum grill, three or four gold chains.

This man and Abram, their debate doesn't last very long.

It ends with Abram inviting the man to a party he's hosting.

Abram, the street preacher, also apparently hosting a party.

Who knew?

Where is the party, man?

It's at the treehouse.

You know where the the tree house is?

Here in Miami.

Okay.

Come on down.

It starts at six o'clock.

Get a free drink or don't drink.

It's up to you.

You'll have a wonderful drink.

You too, man.

The man with the beard is part of a crypto crew called the KP Primates.

They bought a mutant ape from the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

They built a whole community around it.

I started asking him about the KP Primates crew, and he motions me over to the BMW that they're packed into.

I can meet the guys.

Community right there waiting on me.

They in the car, you know.

These guys in the beamer.

Yeah, we can come over here and talk.

Excuse me.

Yeah, we can come over here and talk.

We can, hey, man, you want to know about what we got going on?

Yeah, I'm curious what you guys are up to.

There you go.

The man in the front passenger seat is a crypto tutor.

He says he's on a mission to educate people about crypto.

I'll just say our nationality group, there's not too many people that are actually pushing crypto or actually pushing knowledge of crypto.

We're actually doing it with no charge.

We're actually not charging nobody.

We're just trying to get more and more people to get into crypto so that we can all teach each other together.

You're saying, like, because a lot of the people here are white.

Yeah, well, yeah.

Or just not black.

Yeah.

It's, yeah, like,

we're like at like 25 to one out here as far as not being.

our people here.

So as far as that, we're trying to show people that these assets are what we need to be getting into because as kids, we were never taught to actually invest in assets or banking or taxes or nothing like that.

They really just set us out here to crash for ourselves.

And so we're actually trying to come back and double back and teach people how to actually use assets to just reach financial freedom so how did you get into all this

um

I started with XRP and I ain't gonna lie I started following a guy's tick tock because he was talking about spiritual planes and celestial guidance and stuff like that are you into that stuff yeah for sure and then from there so he went from celestial guidance to XRP the coin XRP has a less than sterling reputation in crypto.

The company behind it is being sued by the SUC.

But that didn't seem to be an issue for the KP Primates.

So I got into XRP and then from XRP I got into all crypto.

And what year is that?

That was last year.

Oh, so you're pretty new to all crypto?

I am.

I'm new.

I sold my Rolls-Royce for crypto.

Really?

Yeah, so my, I have a picture.

I had a Rolls-Royce on 26s.

I was the only person with a Rolls-Royce ghost on 26-inch wheels.

And

I sold that two more cars, and I got straight into crypto.

That's a beautiful car.

Is that your handle cryptopimp.eth?

Yep, that's my handle, cryptopimp.eth.

How do you feel about the Bitcoin white paper?

Have you read it?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So

I've read a couple white papers and it's like

centralized, decentralized.

At the end of all of this, I feel like we're going to have to have it centralized.

I don't believe that America or even the EU is going to to allow us to be free.

That's it.

And sorry, like I know that we're centralized, decentralized, but at the same minute, I say for full adoption, we're going to have to be fully regulated and fully doxxed.

Not that anyone asked me, but the Crypto Pimp's predictions about both the likelihood of crypto regulation and the inevitability of systems towards greater centralization totally mirrors my analysis.

He tells me where to find his Instagram and his Discord, and then he and the crew take off.

And those gentlemen just drove away in their very nice BMW.

I'll look them up later and see that the KP primates are trying to build a strip club in the metaverse.

What a world.

That night, I popped by a party run by a Dow, where I learned how small talk works at a Web3 party.

Are you in the NFT space?

No, are you?

Yeah, I like them.

What have you got?

I got some good stuff.

I got some nice stuff.

I I got the apes.

You got apes?

We got more names.

We got new names.

Nice.

Plonex is my favorite, though.

What's Plonax?

Hurigami and Artie?

I feel like I've seen enough.

I go back to the hotel to sleep.

The next day is the final day of the conference.

Walking in for the last day of the Bitcoin conference.

They've turned it into a music festival against everyone's better judgment.

Outside on the big lawn, warmongering and crypto shilling have given way to a music festival.

Steve Aoki is playing later, but first, several hours of warm-ups.

I am seeing

the most motionless music festival I've ever seen in my life.

Somebody's DJing, a white guy in a white t-shirt's DJing on stage, and no one is moving.

There's just like some people sitting.

Oh, one woman.

They found one woman dancing and they've immediately put her on the Jumbotron because she's a kind of miracle

that's outside inside standing next to the giant cash app volcano ryan i find ryan broderick

ryan's an internet culture reporter he has this newsletter called garbage day

ryan was at the conference with his dad paul broderick conveniently the last type of person i was hoping to meet at this conference

chapter 6 The Horse Trader

Ryan's dad started investing in crypto during the pandemic, but he had never met crypto people before.

Miami was his introduction.

Ryan's dad is a pure investor, a middle-class guy, a retired former assistant clerk magistrate.

Not here because he believes in the new world order, not here because he believes in financial freedom.

Just a guy playing around in a weird new kind of stock market.

I was very, very curious to see how all this insanity had landed on him.

The problem was, Ryan's dad was nowhere to be found.

He'd wandered off to a virtual reality yacht experience.

You're on a yacht and then you put on VR glasses to see it?

Yeah, but you pay a lot of money to do it, though.

Oh, obviously.

Obviously.

It's less money than just a normal yacht.

Eventually, we tracked him down.

Forewarning here.

You're going to hear me giggling a lot off Mike in this interview.

I'm sorry.

Just really, something about the way Paul Broderick spins a yarn.

He told me his crypto adventure started one night when he and his son Ryan were drinking and talking about the price of Bitcoin.

Seven months ago, my son and I were sitting at a bar and he had said, hey, historically, it goes, it dips in October and it bounces in November.

I said, you really believe that?

He said, yeah.

And he's a liberal.

But he saw that on a conservative news channel.

I said, okay, let's put a thousand each on Ethereum and Bitcoin.

I don't want to do $1,000, he said, but we'll do 500.

So we put 500 each on each one.

While we're sitting there having dinner at the bar, it went up $800

on our investment.

And I was the son he was talking about, yes.

And he's talking about a Fox business host.

I think her name is Susan.

And she's pretty good.

And I opened Twitter and she's like, you should buy the dip now.

And I I was like, I wonder what that would do.

Let's see.

And it worked, yeah.

For a little bit.

And then we kind of lost those gains, but yeah.

Susan on the Fox business, she's very credible.

And matter of fact, she'll contradict the host a lot.

Prior to coming to this, how much were you participating in Bitcoin culture?

No, I wasn't into culture at all.

See, back when, in the 80s and 90s, I used to raise and sell Arabian horses.

I had a farm in New Hampshire, 50 acres, indoor riding hall, showbond, and we would have a, we would have conventions very similar to the one we're sitting in now, where all the side booths, insurance, transportation.

I would.

They were conventions like this, except they weren't selling Bitcoin, they were selling horse semen.

Horse semen or horses?

Horses.

Well, so.

And semen to make more horses.

So I read up on the Arabian horse market and kind of a crazy moment in 1980s America.

The Arabian horse craze happened because at the time a quirk of Reagan era tax laws meant that the ultra-wealthy could buy expensive horses but then use them to slash their tax bills.

That drove up demand, which created middlemen like Ryan's dad.

If you wanted to buy a horse from him, you'd fly to Kansas City, where a four-seater jet would pick you up to take you to the breeding farm in nearby Glidden, Iowa.

For Reinstadt, it was expensive.

Paying for the farm, training the horses.

Housing was $400 a month.

Then we had our trainer who trained them, would take them to shows and show them off.

How do people make money off of...

Sell them.

Well, what's the horse market?

And what you would call now is a pyramid.

Yeah.

We would sell it to him.

He would sell it to her.

She would sell it to you.

And somebody ended up with a hot potato at the end.

With a rapian horse.

Now, the 80s were crazy.

Now, this was the 80s.

For a glorious moment, Ryan's dad was making money hand over fist, and he was learning a lesson he could apply later.

Just because something was kind of ridiculous, it didn't mean he couldn't make money off of it.

Just so long as he wasn't the one stuck holding the hot potato in the end.

All this insanity in Miami, he'd seen it before.

He'd survived the horse crazy 80s.

I am seeing basically the same

thing going on,

just it's probably their kids doing it now.

When you say the same thing going on, what do you mean?

All the side hacks.

You know, we've got the mining, we've got the insurance, we've got the...

What did you call it?

The pick and shovel?

These are the pick and shovel guys in this exhibit hall.

So in the gold round.

You can't have gold.

But if you're selling them the shovels and the picks,

very lucrative.

How do you explain this to your friends?

I don't.

You know,

my days of selling people, you know, but, and it's just, it's kind of like wetting your pants in a gray suit.

It really feels good, but no one notices.

So, Ryan, you're a very well-versed internet culture reporter.

This is your dad.

He's investing in Bitcoin.

What do you think when you see that?

I'm like, it's just like Arabian horses.

I went to a few of those conventions.

They're a weird vibe.

But they're not.

He's right.

They are very similar to this.

So obviously, when he first told me he was investing in cryptocurrency, I was extremely worried.

But it turns out he was pretty good about it and he was making pretty decent money.

It was also good timing for me because

I started

covering it

through him.

And I was very upfront about that in my newsletter.

I was like, my dad's investing in Bitcoin.

I'm going to just study him like a little lab brat.

But I honestly think it's an interesting experience to be with someone who's actively trading it and like has been at it for a while, watching the markets with him.

I think it's useful.

Bitcoin Miami, besides being an unlikely bonding experience, it also helped Ryan just get a better understanding of die-hard Bitcoiners.

These people that actually both he and I are used to seeing online where they're shrouded behind their laser eyes avatars, but who neither of us had really met in the real world.

Now we shared our sort of updated Game of Thrones opening scene map topography of what the crypto landscape looks like now, having been here.

So I went in thinking Ethereum people are the freaks and the scammers and they're bad for the world and Bitcoin people are actually the reasonable ones.

I have come away with a more nuanced idea of that dichotomy.

Ethereum people

I mean here they're accused of being too woke, which is blowing my mind.

But they're younger, they're a more vibrant cultural space.

One kid we were just talking to outside at the techno party that's happening right now was saying that Ethereum is not currency, it's technology.

And I think that is like a good way to think about it.

Ethereum people, they want to run the whole internet on the blockchain.

It's what they call Web3.

That's like, they're trying to reinvent information technology and combine it with finance.

Interesting idea, horrifying.

Depends on your point of view, I suppose.

Bitcoiners, I have learned, are

much more militant about Bitcoin.

The Bitcoiners are much more obsessed with redefining how society works in a way that I don't see in the Ethereum community.

And what's the society they want?

I think they want to live like medieval barons, but in Arizona.

I mean, that's, we were talking about this, but like one of the things that I found, like a dawning realization I had was that if everyone at this conference is right and they are scooping up all the money that is going to be the money of the world,

they do kind of on some level believe that like they are the new haves and they're ahead of the have-nots.

That was the dark realization I had.

In fact, just before this interview, the group of kids we were talking to, one of which was a libertarian YouTuber, kind of dropped his mask in a way that a lot of Bitcoiners do if you talk to them for long enough or have enough drinks with them, where they start talking very openly about acquiring generational wealth.

And like, I'm not sure if your listeners are familiar with the book Neuromancer, but it's basically about a rich family that lives in space and uses cloning to store wealth over centuries and then they get robbed thankfully

uh spoiler um but that's kind of what the people here are dreaming about they're dreaming about a way to store their wealth for centuries or millennia and have it be able to leave earth and like they're very serious about it and you know it's kind of goofy it's like oh wow you're wearing like a rick and morty t-shirt and walking around miami but then you're like oh you are like literally preparing for a world in which you're like an oligarch in space

it's a grim prognosis.

It hangs in the air for a minute as conference goers mail past.

Are these people going to be my grandchildren's feudal space lords?

I think about the white paper, about all the people it sent on pilgrimage here for all their strange and personal reasons.

Even me.

Thank you both.

You're welcome.

You're welcome, PJ.

Ryan and Paul Broderick head outside.

They want to go see the music festival.

They recommend I check out the egg roll guy.

Apparently, that's the best food truck.

Highly recommend the egg roll truck.

Really good.

I walk upstairs, past some booths to talk to some more people.

I'm supposed to meet up with that Bitcoin rapper, Captain Youth.

He promised to wrap some bars for me.

But now I start to feel really weird.

A little bit scared.

A little bit of this unreal feeling.

My chest starts to tighten.

That panicked, uneasy feeling in my stomach.

It starts to go off like a fire alarm.

I don't know why it's happening.

I go to the bathroom to try to find some quiet, but now the bathroom feels really small, and and I'm trying to find the main door.

My tape recorder is still on.

I feel like I'm in a dream.

Like I feel like I'm having a dream.

I don't know why.

I'm just like...

I just walked out of the bathroom past like a very wealthy Bitcoin rapper.

Wealthy from Bitcoin, not from rapping.

Past a friend of mine interviewing Ross Albricht's mother, Ross Albrecht, who's in prison for the rest of his life for inventing the Silk Road.

And then just like the conference room is like swarmed with people who have invested like some portion of their future in a thing that like literally, like I don't know if I'm gonna look back at this and think, oh, this is like all these people who are about to get like wiped out or all these people who are gonna be like future oligarchs of like a moon planet.

Like I genuinely feel like

I feel like I'm

I feel like the feeling of like seeing too many futures at the same time and it makes me want to pass out

It's really confusing like I'm not joking or being literary that's giving me a stomachache

and now I'm passing by a giant robotic bull that's like oh what if we took the Wall Street bull and made it not so classy and like a woman in a midriff shirt is posing in front of it with her hair blowing in the wind.

This is like what it would have been like to be around when they invented acid, but it's money instead.

Oh, and now this is a music festival for Bitcoin, a money.

The music festival for a kind of money.

How did this happen?

That's 41.

Order number 526.

Look at this.

Look at this.

Look.

Y'all got one shot.

That's gonna be 47.

This shit right here ain't gonna look like this soon.

Yup.

I find myself collapsed on the sidewalk while the guy who runs the egg roll truck calls himself Chinaman blares out mixtape style endorsements of his own food.

Yo, them egg rolls serious, man.

Y'all on the curb.

I know what I'm talking about.

I'll later realize I'd slapped on two full-strength nicotine patches.

The shortest route I've ever found to a panic attack.

That's later.

For now, heart jitterbugging.

I pull myself up to do the one last thing I need to before I can go home.

That's it for Crypto Island this week at the Bitcoin Miami conference.

This podcast, I hope I don't need to say this, is not financial advice.

If you listen to a person's fever dream in Miami, do not buy Bitcoin off of it.

Fact-checking from Elizabeth Moss.

Sound design and scoring by the very talented Phil Demahofsky and Stephen Jackson at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Theme music from Christine Andrews.

You can find more episodes of CryptoIsland at pjvote.com where you can also subscribe to my newsletter.

Thank you for listening.

See you next episode.

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by ChiliPad.

Will my kids sleep tonight?

Will I wake up at 3 a.m.

again?

Am I going to wake up hot and sweaty because my partner leaves the heat on?

Those are the thoughts that bounce around my head when I can't sleep too.

And let's face it, sleep slips away when you're too hot, uncomfortable, or caught in a loop of racing thoughts.

But cool sleep helps reset the body and calm the mind.

That's where Chili Pad by SleepMe comes in.

It's a bed cooling system that personalizes your sleep environment.

So you'll fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and actually wake up refreshed.

I struggle with sleep constantly, and I have found that having a bed that is cool and temperature controlled actually really does make a huge difference.

ChiliPad works with your current mattress and uses water to regulate the temperature.

Visit www.sleepme slash search to get your ChiliPad and save 20% with code search.

This limited offer is available for search engine listeners and only for a limited time.

Order it today with free shipping and try it out for 30 days.

You return it for free if you don't like it with their sleep trial.

Visit www.sleep S-L-E-E-P dot slash search and see why cold sleep is your ultimate ally in performance and recovery.