Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Charlie Shrem: The Untold Story of a Bitcoin Pioneer and Renegade

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Charlie Shrem became fascinated with Bitcoin in 2011 but grew frustrated with the hassle of buying it from the leading exchange at the time, Mt. Gox. To make the process faster and more convenient, Charlie created BitInstant in 2012. BitInstant quickly grew and by 2013 became responsible for processing a third of all Bitcoin transactions. This was with the help of Roger Ver and the Winklevoss twins, who were his seed investors, and Erik Voorhees, who led their marketing efforts. The success of BitInstant was short-lived. In a time where Bitcoin's primary applications were price speculation and buying things on the Silk Road, Charlie spent time in prison after a lack of customer due-diligence attracted the attention of the law enforcement. Our conversation with Charlie recounts the Bitcoin industry at its beginning, his time in prison, and what he is doing now that he's able to continue his work as a Bitcoin advocate.Topics covered in this episode:Learning of Bitcoin on IRC in 2011The Bitcoin community in the early daysCollaborating with competitors to grow the ecosystemFrustration with Bitcoin infrastructure in 2011Why Charlie decided to create BitInstantMeeting Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees, and the Winklevoss TwinsCharlie’s time in prison and its effect on his personal lifePodcasting and daily life after prisonEpisode links: Untold Stories WebsiteUntold Stories on Apple PodcastsBitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and RedemptionCharlie and Best Selling Author Ben Mezrich Discuss Bitcoin's History60 Minutes Podcast - Sunday, May 19, 2019 with Charlie ShremCrypto.IQCharlie Shrem on TwitterSponsors: Status: A multi-purpose communication tool that combines a peer-to-peer messenger, secure crypto wallet, and web3 browser - https://status.im/Cosmos: Compete to win 100,000 ATOM by building and running Cosmos Zones - https://cosmos.network/goz/Pepo: Meet the people shaping the crypto movement - https://pepo.com/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/321

This is Epicenter, episode 221 with guest, Charlie Shrem. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian, With you, and welcome to 2020. From all of us here at Epicenter, I'd like to wish all of our listeners a very happy and prosperous new year. I hope you've enjoyed the holidays and are fully recharged. I'm feeling a bit under the weather. You might hear it in my voice.

But I'm excited nonetheless, and I'm very, very happy and very excited to bring you our first interviewer of the year, our conversation with Charlie Shrem. Of course, Charlie needs a little introduction. For those of you who've been in space for a long time, Charlie's a well-known figure in the space. But if you're new, you know, maybe you came into the ecosystem recently and you don't know all the old timers. That's okay. You know, if you weren't around in the land before time era of Bitcoin, you know, Charlie was the CEO of a company called BitInstant. And in 2011, he found it been instant and allowed people to buy Bitcoin with cash.

Now, you have to understand, this is an era where you could probably fit all the people who ever heard about Bitcoin in a single conference room. You know, there was no crackin. There was no coin base. There were no hardware wallets. People were going out and buying laptops and like air-gapping them so that they could securely store their crypto. You know, the only exchange at the time was Mount Gox.

and if you wanted to buy Bitcoin, you had to wire money to Japan. Well, Charlie wanted to make it easy, and they wanted to allow people to buy Bitcoin cash at any supermarket or pharmacy, just like you would any gift card. That was an important and very revolutionary idea at the time. BitInstent is also an important focal point in the story of Bitcoin because it's where some of the most well-known and prominent figures in the ecosystem had their first encounters. So among the investors of BitInstant were Roger Ver and the Winkelvoss twins. And who was running marketing at BitInstent?

Eric Voorhees, who then went on to found ShapeShift. So in 2014, while he was returning to the U.S. from Amsterdam, Charlie was picked up by the FBI at JFK International Airport in New York. It was later sentenced to two years in prison for aiding and abetting an operation of an unlicensed money transmitter business. Now, I'm not going to get into the specifics of the charges, but in short, BitInstant sold BitInst to a guy in Florida named Robert Fyella who was laundering money to help people buy drugs on the Silk Road. And as the compliance officer of Bit Incident, this is something Charlie should have alerted authorities about. Now, I'm not going to get into more detail. I'm not going to comment on that, but that's what happened.

Now, Charlie's been out of jail for a little while. He did just over a year in prison, which is still a lot. Don't get me wrong. But, you know, he's now out of that system. He's now a free man. And he's done a few things since then. And now has a podcast called Untold Stories. And it's really good. I would really encourage you to check it out. I think he's celebrating his one year anniversary like this week. Well, I felt like Charlie came on Epicenter to tell his untold story. This is the most candid interview we've ever done. Charlie shares some things here that he's never shared before. He tells the story of Bit Instant, how he got involved in Bitcoin, his time in jail, how he met his wife. And he tells this, he also talks about his very complicated relationship with his family, which you'll hear him talk about in the interview. Anyway, after you're done listening to this, I would really encourage you to pick up the book, Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mesrich. He also wrote, the accidental billionaires, which is the story of Mark Zuckerberg and founding Facebook. It got turned into the movie, The Social Network.

So Bitcoin billionaires picks up where that story left off. It tells the story of how the Winklewoss twins learned about Bitcoin and started buying massive amounts of Bitcoin. And then how they invested in Bid Instant as their first investment in the Bitcoin space. It tells the story of the complicated relationship between Roger Vair and the Winkovost twins. Anyway, it's a fascinating read. and it really got me interested in having Charlie on the podcast. So I hope you'll enjoy this interview because I certainly did.

Now, before we go to the interview, I'd like to tell you about our sponsors for today's episode, and I'm very pleased and super excited to tell you about our brand new sponsor, Status. We had the founders, Jared Hope, and Carl Bennett's on the podcast a couple years ago, but we're going to do another episode about status soon because the status-secure messaging app is coming out this month. It's currently in beta, but it's going to be in the app stores in production very soon. I use secure messaging pretty much exclusively with all my friends and family and colleagues, and there are two apps that I use. Signal for people that I'm close to and telegram to quickly connect with people in the blockchain ecosystem. But there are things that I don't like about both

of them that status fixes for me. For one, status doesn't relate to you. For one, status doesn't relate to on a phone number. I don't want to share a phone number to use a messaging app that doesn't even use the functionality of the phone. And also, sharing your phone number, it exposes you to vulnerabilities like sim swapping and also just people spamming you. Like, I mean, I get text messages so things that I don't even know where they come from, probably because I've been sharing my phone number with so many people. And so status doesn't rely on a phone number. When you create your status account, you create a seed, and then you share a public key with your contacts the way it should be, right? And also, it's fully decentralized.

I got to tell you, I am absolutely astonished that the entire ecosystem has adopted Telegram as a messaging app when it is a fully centralized ecosystem. When you reset your phone and you put your phone number in Telegram and all your messages pop up, that's because they're coming from the telegram server. They're fully backed up on the telegram server at all times, encrypted, but they're still there and you're still relying on that centralized service. It's a point of failure, and it's something that we should all move away from. And I'm going to start using status.

When people are asking me, like, what's your telegram? I'm going to say, no, no, no, find me on status. We need to start eating your own dog food as a community, as an ecosystem, and using apps that really leverage blockchain, and status is the way to do it. And so I would encourage everybody to go to status.com, download the beta. The new production version will be out on iOS and Android this month. And when you're there, create your account and join us on the Epicenter channel. It's hashtag Epicenter on the public channel.

And I'm there and other folks from Status are there as well. And we'll give you some free S&T tokens so that you can create your own E&S name on status and share it with your friends and just start building communities and migrate the ecosystem from Telegram to a real decentralized app. And so over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be telling you all about the status ecosystem because it's so much more than just a messaging app. Status is a collection of products and protocols which create a new blockchain infrastructure, a tech stack that allows secure communications.

And so there's key card, the secure contactless open source hardware wallet. There's Embark, which is their all-in-one platform for building and deploying DAPs. There's subspace, which is the front-end development library. Their Nimbus research on implementing lightweight ETH2 clients. In fact, the modular peer-to-peer messaging stack, which status relies on all of these things are part of the status ecosystem. And I'm very excited to be able to tell you about those over the next couple of weeks. But until then, find us on status. Hashtack Epicenter, public chat.

We'd like to thank status for their support of the podcast. We are also brought to you by Cosmos, the Internet of Blockchains. Now, in preparation for the upcoming IBC module, they've announced the second ever adversarial test net challenge, Game of Zones. You know, we've never had a fully interoperable blockchain before. This is a new thing. And so we need, as a community, to learn about how this thing is going to work. And so much like with Game of Stakes, before Cosmos was launched, Game of Zones will allow

teams to compete in this invaluable educational opportunity to learn about the nuances of the IBC protocol and how the system will work once there are tens and hundreds of blockchains interoperating together on the Cosmos hub. So Game of Zones is due to start in 2020. A more exact date will be coming very soon. But the Interchain Foundation is providing 100,000 atoms in a prize pool for winning teams. So there will be multiple challenges and those atoms will be up for grabs for teams that are competing in Game of Zones. So if you want to learn more about this adversarial test net challenge, go to cosmos.net network slash GOZ. And there you can join the riot chat and talk to all the people who are already thinking of participating and discussing about Game of Zones.

And you can also sign up for the newsletter there where you'll get up. updates on Cosmos every single month. We'd like to thank Cosmos for those supportive epicenter. We're also brought to you by Pepo, a community of content creators sharing short video content on crypto and entrepreneurship. On Pepo, when you want to show your love for content, when you want to like something, well, you tip the content creator with pepbo coins. And when you want to participate in a conversation, you show your interest by putting up pepicoins as well. The app is really cool. It's well designed. It's easy to use. use and the team that's building it is constantly listening and gathering feedback and trying to

understand how people are using this so that they can better the app in a direction that makes sense for the community. So if you'd like to try it out, you can go to pepo.com slash epicenter. That just lets them know that we sent you. And there you can find links to iOS or Android. And you can find me there. I'm at Seb 2.0. That's Seb 2, P-O-I-N-T-0. posting content there quite frequently. And I'd love to also talk to you there. So come meet me on Pepo and take part in the conversation. And with that, here is our conversation with Charlie Shrem. So we're here with Charlie Shrem. Charlie has been involved in Bitcoin since, well, since over a decade and is a well-known figure in the space for many reasons, which we'll get to during this

interview, but yeah, I'm super excited to have you on. It's been, I mean, I think internally at Epicenter, you know, we wanted to have you on years ago, many years ago. And for reasons, which I think a lot of the listeners will be aware of, well, we couldn't, but you're back. And we're, yeah, really excited to have you on the podcast today. Yeah, it's so funny because just the other day, someone was like, so like, let's go through, you know, year by year of this Bitcoin space. And I said, all right, let's do it. And they said, all right, so what was 20, 15 like in the Bitcoin space. And I said, well, I don't really know. I wasn't there. Yeah, there was a bit of a blank spot there for four years. We call it the sabbatical.

Yeah, you had a Bitcoin sabbatical. So tell us, where were you doing before you got into Bitcoin? Absolutely. It's a crazy kind of like when I look back and I try to spend a lot of time reflecting because our life has gone through. When I say our, my wife and I, our life has gone through such a whirlwind. Her and I met in 2012 around that time right when I had first, like a year into Bitcoin or two years into Bitcoin. So she was part of that whole kind of ride so far, of course, and the ride forever. But I got involved in, it was sometime in 2011. A year before that, it was in 2010, I'd read that slash dot article about Bitcoin. And there was, you know, the famous slash dotting as Jeff Garzik likes to call it because it was that 2010 article that a lot of the

early crypto people had read, but we like kind of ignored it. And I almost say that a lot of people that I talk to on Untold Stories say the same thing. It's like, yeah, I ignored the first time I had ever heard about Bitcoin. And that happened to me. And it wasn't until a year later that I had been in a chat room somewhere, IRC actually now that I'm thinking about. I was in an IRC chat room in early to mid-2011 when just some, you know, some random people started talking about, I belonged in a lot of these, like, gray hat. I was like not a very good hacker, but more of like a script kitty. I, I joke that I'm a trained very bad developer because I'm not very good at it, but I can still read code and I can have conversations with CTOs and things like that.

But I was in there trying to learn how to better my Python game when someone started talking. about Bitcoin and that was sometime in 2011. And what was your first, like, what were your first thoughts about it? Like, how did you then, how did it go from there to like creating and starting Bit instant? Yeah. So the story goes that in, I was in the chat room and, you know, even until today, I'm still to remember who it was because I wanted to think that person.

But I had, at that time, I was, you know, I was in, I was my first year of college and I was running a different electronic startup. I was, you know, 20 years old. I don't even think I could legally drink yet. And I was, um, hanging out with some friends and I was, we were in some chat rooms and someone started talking about Bitcoin and saying how, yeah, this is so cool, check this out. But he didn't really know, like, why it was cool or what I should check out. It was just like, you know, how many times were we seeing digital versions of money? You, we saw over those early years we saw so many iterations of different versions of the of and a lot of them were scams. So you saw a lot of these like digital currency scam type things and I mean around the same time

as Liberty Reserve and some of the other ones e-gold and they didn't really work. So when I had when when when this guy was talking about this Bitcoin thing, I was like, well, okay, so it's a download it's a downloadable because back then all it was it was a it was a few dozen people hinking out on forum.b Bitcoin.org. and then you'd go to Bitcoin.org and download the Satoshi code, the Satoshi client. It wasn't called Bitcoin Core. It wasn't even called Bitcoin QT yet. It was simply just Bitcoin.

I mean, that's what it was the, it was the Satoshi client, right? You download it, and as soon as you downloaded it, as soon as you turned it on, it would start mining. Because the Satoshi client back then, the downloadable wallet, it was the only wallet back then. It was only one wallet. It was a downloadable. I don't even think it worked on Mac yet. It was like Windows and Linux, downloaded it.

And I may not be a thousand percent accurate. It may have worked on Mac at that time. But you downloaded it on. It would start mining for you and downloading the blockchain for you. And then you can start, you know, transacting. And I was like, well, what's, okay, it's like a downloadable wallet that you send this, you send nothing. What do you send dollars?

Like, what was it? And then he attempted over IRC to explain. Yeah, it's, you know, the thing is called Bitcoin, but also you could send these Bitcoin things and they're not just units, they're placeholders, they're not really worth anything. And they weren't worth anything. They weren't really trading anywhere except for in forums. You know, you could buy 10,000 Bitcoin for a few hundred bucks. And that's kind of how it started. And then I didn't really understand why it was so important. But then as we started investigating it, some of our friends, we realized that, oh, wow, this is really cool because, and we didn't

really understand, like, Sebastian, we don't understand like mining yet. I don't understand, like, any of that. What was cool to me was simply this. The database that I had on my computer, because back then it was a database file. So you downloaded the database file up until that point, and then it would download the rest. So I was like, wow, this is really cool because if you check out this database, not only is my transaction that I just did going through, the one that he just sent me some coins, but if someone else is doing a transaction, then it's still shows up on my database as well. So kind of the light bulb went off on my head and I said, oh, this is actually really cool

because if I like unplug my Ethernet cable, I still have a copy of someone else's transaction who's sending money from New Jersey to California. And I'm in Brooklyn. So that to me was like, well, this is really cool because I have that ledger like me, Charlie on my computer, not sitting in a data center somewhere. And I didn't really understand the implications yet, but it was just that. That was it. I could see how downloading the first Bitcoin client opening this software on your

computer running it, it might seem like very underwhelming. It looked like shit too. Yeah, because like you get this thing. It looks like shit. It's got like three tabs, like send, receive and maybe addresses and the UI. probably like really bad. Well, it also didn't work. And a lot of the things that you had,

so Satoshi, I guess didn't realize that when you have something called a graphic user interface, it's got to be a graphic user interface, right? And so, but a lot of the early processes that you were trying to do within Bitcoin, you download the software. This is such a funny tidbit. I've never actually said this and no one talks about this.

So imagine this. Imagine you download a piece of software and you're not a developer or programmer and you want to interface with the software. send, receive, you know, all these small little functions, send receive, create new address, send invoice, you know, like very basic e-wallet stuff. And so those four things were, would work on, you know, like there would be a send receive button. But if you wanted to do a simple thing, like export your private key, import a private key, re-download the, the blockchain. And then Sebastian, like, and Sonny, the software would break half the time. So like,

you'd have to find yourself having to like delete all the files except for your wallet file and then re-download the whole thing. And this would happen very frequently. Basically every time an update would come out, which was all the time. But it didn't really matter because the blockchain wasn't that big, so who cares? But what I was trying to say earlier was, so you couldn't actually interface with the software a lot. You'd have to within the software, you'd go to advanced and there was like an RPC interface where you'd have to start typing out command line commands

in the graphic user interface. It didn't make any sense to me. The kids these days, they don't realize how easy they've got it with their ledger wallets and their, you know, no, they don't realize. Staking web platforms. Oh, they have no idea because, you know,

all software is either like command line or graphic user interface, like a GUI. But Satoshi did it where it was like literally command line in the GUI. It's just so funny how, like, nascent and how much testing and how early, you know, the early Satoshi code was, but Bitcoin is still going strong. It's still there. It's still a lot of the early same code. It never broke. Like, isn't that astounding to think about? I mean, that's what's, that's what excites me every day. Yeah. I mean, I think I had a friend who, I can't remember exactly who it was, but they were telling me about the same process where, like,

you know, every, every couple of days, you just had to, like, delete your entire blockchain history file and, like, something would just go wrong. And they told me, like, yeah, on one of those purges, I accidentally purged my wallet. dot dat file as well, and that had, you know, quite a few Bitcoin on it. So, yeah, I've heard a lot of the stories around this stuff. It's crazy. So, yeah, that was sort of like the state of the technology. What was the state of the community like, though? So you went to college in New York, right?

Yes. I actually just moved to New York like last month. So I'm getting the hang of the New York scene these days. But what was it like 10 years ago? Like what was, were there meetups and were you hanging out with other Bitcoiners? Or was it sort of completely online? And what was this world like? Great, great, great question.

And one that's really not asked enough. Let's go back as early as I can. remember and full disclosure there are probably some people or places or things that I'm going to forget this is not an accurate picture because I'm going to leave you know I I don't remember I don't have the memory to remember everything from 10 years ago but some of the best memories are this go back to 2011 the community was largely on the internet oh it was largely it was all on the internet up until that point when I at first got involved there were never not that I know of There was no Bitcoin conferences that had ever taken place.

Now, about a month after I got involved, this guy, Bruce Wagner, he had a show called The My Bitcoin Show or something, or no, it was a Bitcoin show. I don't remember what it was called, but he actually, a lot of people were claiming that he was involved in an exit scam later on called My Bitcoin, but that's needed here and or there. He was one of those people in the early days who's not involved in anymore, who was the media. He is the only crypto media. He had like an internet TV show and he wrote a blog and that was it. Like there was no telegram yet.

And so up until this point, there was just everyone hung out in one place and one place alone. That was forum.b Bitcoin.org. And then eventually around that time in 2011, our Bitcoin, Reddit, our Bitcoin launched. But it was all, there was no Bitcoin talk. It was all forum.com. And so he did the first Bitcoin conference in 2011 and Charlie Lee was there. Roger Veer was there. Oh my God. I think Garzik was there.

There were so many of us that were there. So many of the early people that were there. I'm forgetting everyone. But if you actually look at a picture, Charlie Lee has one of the only pictures that I know of. If you look at a picture of it, you'll be able to pick out. So I think the BitPay people were there. Where was this conference? This was in New York.

The Mount Gox people were there. This was, I mean, anyone who was at any Bitcoin related anything was. at this. This was like mid-2011. That was like the first one that I, and that was a community. It was a great community because we were also new and like puppy-eyed, you know, we were so fresh. We didn't, we weren't jaded. There were no scams. There were no, imagine living in a Bitcoin world with no exchanges ever got hacked, no ICOs, no exit scams. Imagine just Bitcoin, the love, the crypto-anarchy, the ideological, you know, every single person back then was there for ideology. Now, I'm not like going, I'm not trying to like romanticize this guys.

Like I'm not, I'm trying to just to talk about the history. There were good and bad of those days and there are good and bad of nowadays. So that's just kind of how it was. But the community back then, I would say there was an unspoken rule. If I had to like really dial this in, there was an unspoken rule of the early Bitcoin community. And when I mean unspoken, it was very religiously followed, but it was not said. And the unspoken rule was, let's work together to grow this pie before we start competing. So you'd have companies that competed with each other that behind the scenes were working together.

So all the Bitcoin exchanges back then worked together very closely. I worked very closely with them. Competitors, even my competitors back then, which there were almost none, I would support them. I actually tried to even buy one of my competitors in 2011. But buying a Bitcoin company in 2011 was literally the company. was run by a guy in his dorm room, so there wasn't really much to buy. What were some of the bads that you alluded to? The bads of the infrastructure was just terrible.

And also that, you know, the infrastructure, so as the years went on, so let's continue to go forward. So, you know, we get into the end of 2011, we get into 2012. We went through kind of like that first bubble and that first, I mean, there were, there were some earlier ones, but the first real bubble that got mainstream attention. was that Gawker or Gizmodo wrote an article about it. And that was probably the first article, except for the slash dot article. And this Gawker article was an article that was written around, I'll never forget.

It was May or June of 2011. And it talked about how you can buy drugs on Silk Road. And till today, if you ask a lot of people who got involved in the space, a lot of people will tell you that they found out about Bitcoin. A lot of them probably won't admit it. but they found out about Bitcoin from that article. And it's not a bad thing. You know, however you find out about it is how you found out about it.

But when that article was written, the price of Bitcoin was hovering maybe around $12 or $13. And then almost immediately when that article was written, the price started pumping. So I phomode in at $32. And then the price pumped to $36. So I'm like in the money, right? I'm making $4 a coin. But think about it for a second. Think about how many coins you would get for $1,000, right?

So when you're up $4 a coin, you're in the money. I mean, you're making a ton of money. And then the price dumped, dumped down to like $2 from 36. And I lost a ton of money. That was like, I've never been more wrecked in any subsequent bubble than that first $36 bubble. So when did he decide to start Bit Instant? And what was the goal of that company? So this is what happened with Bin Instant.

Super simple. I was at a bar mitzvah. It was 2011. I was trying to buy some Bitcoin. And it was actually during that bubble, the one I just said, the $32 bubble, I was trying to buy Bitcoin. It's because I was like fomoing. Like that was super fomo. And so I was at a bar mitzvah and I had wired money to, there were only two exchanges.

There was Mount Gox. And no one really wanted to use them because the only way to buy from Mount Gox was to wire an international wire transfer to Mark Carpellis' personal bank account that's denominated in yen. Right? In Japan. Okay. Who's going to fucking do that? Who's going to do that? No one. Well, a lot of people did that. A lot of people did it because that's the only way you can do it. But realistically now, if like that was the only way to buy Bitcoin now, no one would do that. Like some people would, but it's a how it, you don't understand. He would have to manually approve wires. It would take like a week. There was no automated infrastructure. The wire transfer instructions were sent via email. Like there was no, what I mean, there was no infrastructure.

There was no system for this stuff. There was no customer support phone number. It was literally just like every, okay, you ready for this? BitInstent, Mount Gox, Coinbase, BitPay, and Bitcoin.org were all launched on Bootstrap. Did you know that? Bootstrap? It's like a WordPress style template that you can, like it wasn't even, they, all those, those are, Those are our top infrastructure of today.

And like that's what it was like back then. They were all like no one could even afford to have websites designed. Coinbase, Bin Instant, Mount Gawks, Trade Hill, BitPay. Crazy, right? So anyway, so that was our infrastructure. And it was so wonderful though, because it was fun. So I wired money. So this, so all of a sudden this guy launched this like exchange.

He was living in Chile. His name is Jared Kenna. And he launched an exchange called Trade Hill. And it was very similar to Mount Gox. It looked better. And it was based out of San Francisco. But still, you had to wire money to Jared's personal I-N-G account. And everything had to be manually verified.

So I really wasn't thinking about how I was going to have to, you know, buy Bitcoin. So I wired money. And as soon as I wired the money to his account, his account got shut down. And so I'm thinking I got scammed. So I called him when I was at this bar mitzvah. And he answered. And we had like a three-hour call. about Bitcoin, about amazing Bitcoin was.

And I said, Jared, let me ask you a question. If I start a company where it's like a retail way to buy Bitcoin, would you support us? Because you're in exchange. We're not really competitor of you. And he said, yeah, I would support that. But I can't take credit for a bit instant because really the idea came a few days before this when I was on the Bitcoin forums and my partner, my business partner for those years, Gareth Nelson, he came up with a concept in a forum post.

go back and find it now. And he said, I have this idea to start like a little side business called fast Mount Gox. That's literally what the name of that's what he wants to call it. Fast Mountain Gox. So it's like you have Mount Gox and we just want to make it fast. Let's call our company Fast Mountain Gox. So I said, Gareth, I want to do this with you. You know, like you can code it and I'll send you the $1,000 to like get started. But we need to call it something else. So that's where we came up with the idea of Ben Instant. And the first idea of Ben Instant. And the first idea of Ben Instant, was very simple. We would wire 10 grand to Mount Gox and then leave the money, the dollars, sitting in our account. We'd have relationship with banks here in the U.S. and at our peak,

we had been working with Money Graham, Western Union, CVS, Walgreens, Dwayne Reed, all the pharmacies, all the grocery stores you can walk in and buy Bitcoin up to like a few hundred bucks. And so you'd walk in and buy Bitcoin and then deposit money at like a Walmart. our software was hooked into it. But all our software really did was, let's just say you wanted $300. We transfer $300 minus three or four percent from our account to your account. So all we were really doing is we weren't really selling Bitcoin, but we created an easier way or faster and easier way to fund your exchange account.

So we were like the payment processor for the exchanges. Wait, so you had partnerships with all of these like giant groceries? Yes. If you look at a bunch of tech crunch articles and all these other things, you wonder, and those early articles will say that Bit Instant did 30% of all the Bitcoin, global Bitcoin volume up until like 2014. That's a huge number. And there were a lot of exchanges back then.

There was BitStamp Mount Gox, Trade Hill, Camp BX, Crypto Exchange, Exchange, B. A lot of these exchanges don't exist anymore. I'm missing a few. But there were a bunch of them. Bit Stamp. I probably already said that. And they had very significant volume. So how did Bin Instant have such a significant amount of market share?

Simple. We didn't actually sell you your Bitcoin. We were the processor for all the exchanges, not for all, but for like the top four of them. So when you wanted to fund your Mountain Gox account, your BitStamp account, your Trade Hill account, all those companies would tell you use Bit Instant. We were the processor for them. That's what we were able to have so much of the volume. How did you build these partnerships with the grocery store? So how did you convince Walmart and CVS to get on board and, like, allow people to deposit at their stores into bid instant?

Yeah, it was really easy. There are only, there are two companies in the U.S. that manage the payment processing for almost all the companies that I mentioned. I think back then it was soft pay and money grants. And so when we made partnerships with those two companies, it allowed us to work with all the other ones. So there's MoneyGram in every Walmart and every Dwayne Reed, CVS, Walgreens, et cetera, et cetera. So because we had to deal with them, you'd be able to create a Moneygram barcoded slip on your computer, print it out, go to a Walmart, and then go to the, go to the checkout, hand the, you know, the cashier that piece of paper that

had the Moneygram logo and the Bit Instant logo. They'd scan that piece of paper. The piece of paper would then, you know, tell the computer that this, you know, is 300 bucks. You'd hand the cashier 300 bucks like you're buying groceries. And then within seconds, the Moneygram software would ping my software and then my software already knew about your transaction because remember you came to our website and you had created a slip. As soon as we get that ping that the transaction is done, we then transfer the money into your account. And then like a week later, Moneygram would settle with me that $300. So I'm almost like I was floating the $300 for a week. Yeah. So money gram is so this payment intermediary that allows people to send money with cash

at retailers. And so you just have to make a partnership with them. And then that gave you exposure, or at least a lot of people to buy Bitcoin with cash through the service at just about any retailer in the US. Exactly. And so back then from 2011 to the end of 2013, almost everyone in Bitcoin had used at least once been instant.

And I can very fairly and accurately say that. In fact, if you ask any guests you have going forward that was around in those years and say, did you ever use bin instant? The answer will probably be yes. Yeah, that would be interesting. And so the trick was you were kind of using moneygrams like faster clearing. It may not be settling faster. You know, it still takes a couple of days to settle, but it was clearing faster.

I did it for the software. So you're arbitraging that delay between money grams clearing versus like wire transfers. And that's why I needed to raise money. So I needed the float. So when we first started the company, you know, I used the little bit of money that I had, some bar mitzv money and stuff to be the float. And we weren't doing so much volume. So $1,000.

Let's just say it took us a week to get the money back. Let's just say you deposited the money on Monday. It would take me until the following Monday for that money back, that's spendable to re-buy to get money back into the exchange account so I can cycle it one more time. Let's just say it took a week. I think it was about that, maybe a little bit faster. So you would need to have enough float to handle your weekly volume.

So at this point, you needed to raise money because you didn't have enough float to honor these transactions. And so I think this is a good segue into how you ended up meeting Roger Ver and the Wink of Lost Twins. And this is a story that I didn't know very much about. I knew that you were involved with those people early on. but I read the Bitcoin Billaner's book, which came out a couple months ago. And basically that tells the whole story of like Roger and the Wink of Lost Twins. And it was interesting to see how like those two, there were two opposing forces. Like one one side you had this kind of like libertarian, very anarchistic type of personality that was pushing you to, you know, do more volume, just like let people do the transactions.

There were two competing forces, and it wasn't just Ben Mesrick, who wrote Bitcoin billionaires, very accurately, was able to kind of make you understand how these forces were not just in my head, but the forces were starting to enter and to split the overall Bitcoin community. Let's talk then about how you met them and how that sort of schism started to enter into the Bitcoin community. Absolutely. So it's early 2012. and the company was growing very quickly. And it was just me and Gareth and I think that's it running Bin Instant. And so we needed money. I went on this internet TV show, Bruce Wagner's TV show. And I, you know, said to everyone, I said, whoever's watching, if you're an investor,

Bit Instant is growing. Everyone is, you know, using us. We're doing $1,000 a volume a day. $1,000 a volume a day. Like, think about that for a second. Coinbase probably does $1,000 in a nanosecond. But that was our daily volume. and that was so great that we simply couldn't keep up with demand.

I didn't have $7,000, $8,000 afloat to keep the company growing. So Roger had heard that, and he sent me a Skype that night, and he said, hey, I heard about, I watched your show, and, you know, I own this company called Memory Dealers. I live in Japan, and I love Bitcoin, and I, you know, I have a little bit of money, and so I'm just trying to, you know, support this economy. And if you're interested in just like an investment, I'd love to. to be involved. And I said, and that was the Skype message, like one message. And I was like, you're a lifesaver. I don't know who you are, but like, I'm willing to, you know, this is what our

numbers are. This is what our company does. And I'm willing to give you 10% for $100,000. And he goes, how about this? How about, I forget what it ended up coming out to, but I gave him a little bit more, not a little bit. I gave him some more. And the idea was that he was going to be my confidant, be like just 10 hours a week involved and helped me run the company. And it was very worth it. And so Roger really was very involved. And so one of the first things that Roger did was, a month later, said, hey, there's this guy that I know that lives in New Hampshire and his name is Eric Voorhees. And he's kind of like a libertarian like me, voluntary is kind of like a nut, but he's super cool and he's very smart. I want you to hire him. And I was like,

Roger, like, I know you invested 100 grand, but I don't have the money to, like, pay his salary. And Roger's like, I'll pay Eric's salary until you can afford it because Eric will be very good for your company. And Eric, I remember I met Eric at the train station because he was living in New Hampshire. He took a train down to New York. And we met at the train station. And we became best friends instantly. And we're till today, we're super close. Eric and I actually spoke to him yesterday.

and even when I was under house arrest and I couldn't leave my parents' basement and I missed his wedding, Eric set it up where I was able to give a toast at his wedding, you know, over video chat. And that was really wonderful. So I didn't miss out on that. And where do the Winklelaw strings come into the picture? So we kept moving forward and the company kept growing. And at this point, I'm skipping a lot, but the industry was exploding. And this was 2000 and I think the end of 2012 early.

2013. No, it was actually 2012 for sure. And I knew this guy, he was like my neighbor growing up, you know, he babysat me. His dad was my dentist just to give you an idea. His dad was like, you know, my dentist from a kid. You know, he knew I was involved in his Bitcoin thing and he went on vacation to Ibiza one day. And while he was there, I don't remember what the book said, but what really happened was there were no chairs at the beach club. And when David had had seen Cameron and Tyler, the movie had just come out. See, I guess he was a little starstruck. So he gave up his and his wife's chairs at an Abiza Beach Club to Cameron and Tyler. So you can imagine like David's wife getting really pissed at him for giving up these chairs.

But that's kind of what happened. So as he was giving up the chairs, he kind of put in their ear. He says, you know, you guys should check out this Bitcoin thing. And then when they went back home, they investigated it and they got in and they called them. That's kind of how it all played out. I think that's pretty much how the book explains that episode. And what were your first impressions of them? I was starstruck. You know, the movie had just come out and everyone was like super, you know, who did it? Was it Cameron and Tyler?

Was it Mark Zuckerberg, you know? So, you know, it was like hanging out with like, I don't know, like, let's just say like Brad Pitt kind of walks on the door. Fuck, yeah, Brad Pitt, let's go hang out. You know, like George Clooney, like, you know, like a real. celebrity. These guys just had a movie made out, you know, Arnie Hammer, Jesse Eisenberg. It's kind of crazy. So that's kind of how it went. It's so starstruck. And, you know, the book very, very accurately, and I implore everyone to read it. The book goes into how we met our relationship and how event over time, Roger and Eric and the crypto anarchist, you know, movement tried to continue

forcing me into the voluntarist movement to, like, live and let live. And people should be allowed to put, whatever drugs into their bodies that they want to. That was that kind of mentality. And the other Cameron and Tyler mentality was, listen, this industry is so new, we need to engage the regulators. We need to engage governments. We need to be the shining city on the hill. I think that was like their quote that they would say over and over again.

And back then, the start being starstruck kind of wore off. And I realized that maybe our personalities didn't vibe as much. was a 21-year-old kid or 22, and I didn't like that these guys who had went to Harvard, a school that I can never even, not only just not afford, but was never smart enough to get into, were telling me what to do. And one of the very important things that I were telling what to do was, Charlie, you need to, you know, like this company's growing. You had 30 people, but I was 21 or 22. I didn't know how to run a company. And Cameron and Tyler were basically trying to convince me to bring on a seasoned CEO. Now, this was a one.

was my first startup. So I'm thinking, fuck these guys. I want to run my own company. But little did I know that that concept of bringing on a season CEO is a very normal thing. It's actually very nowadays, if I was running a company and my investors came and said that I would, you know, breathe a sigh of relief. You know, I would want that. So one of my biggest and only regrets in life is kind of not listening to the very smart people in the room when I was younger. And, you know, that's okay. It's a life lesson. I would encourage everybody to read this book because I read this book over like three days.

I didn't put it down. There's a movie being made. Has it started filming or? No, it hasn't started filming. But Ben, like, I mean, I don't, I don't know what I can say on the show, but it's, it's going to happen. It's sold there. What do you want to play you?

So, so you want to hear something funny. So actually, that's how I. know this is happening. So talks are already happening with like Jonah Hill to play me. But I want Jerry Ferreira, who played Turtle in Andoraj and who also plays in power. I forgot his name, but I love power. And he plays the lawyer in power. He's a great actor. And so I, I messaged him. You know, I sent him a message. I was like, hey, do you want to play me in this movie? And he's like, fuck yeah. And so we're going to be supposed to meet up in New York in a few months when I, when I go back. That's amazing. I also heard you interview you did on your podcast with Ben. And at some point, I think he describes the book as pulling in the opposite directions of the mainstream movement and the crypto-libertarian movement. And I thought that was such a good way to describe the story. And most people don't realize, I mean, this book is not like documentary. It's a fiction, right? So it's a fictionized version of what's happening. It's a novel, right? It's a novel, yeah. So I'll tell people this, that like a lot of the events are accurate, but more of like the

a dialogue. Sometimes is exaggerated. I'll give you an example. He wrote how, like, I had 26 bongs in my office, you know. I don't have 26 bongs. I probably had one, and it probably wasn't even mine. But, I mean, so that wasn't not, you know, it's not, it's not inaccurate, but it's a little exaggerated. So I would still tell people to read that book. I love the book. It's a great book. And look, Ben could have used his license of writing fiction to write a very outlanded. an inaccurate book, and he didn't. He wrote a very good book that's going to be seen as historical. And if you look at his other books, I've written all his other books.

A lot of his other books, he has to use a lot more of that license to make it interesting. He didn't have to do that here. That was so cool. All the stories that you read are like all based in truth, which is so cool. Well, not all, but most. The character that you have in this book, it seems kind of like a totally neurotic character. Do you think that Ben portrayed you accurately? Very accurate. Maybe not at this time, but like back then, were you, was that accurately you?

Thousand percent. Wow. I was this neurotic kid who didn't have his ADHD in check. I was coming into a little bit of money. I grew up in a very religious Jewish Orthodox community in a bubble and I had not known of the outside world. I mean, I never even had a cheeseburger at that point. Never had tried lobster, you know, because he could only eat kosher. So I was like, being, discovering the world's. through Bitcoin, right? So I was like just excited and so ecstatic of the world that we were in back then. This will segue the conversation too much, but I just want to say one thing. I'm romanticizing it here a little bit, but understand that where these two camps ended up going. So there were two camps and now it's not so much that there's like one or the other. It's a spectrum and people fall as, you know, fall where they want. But the larger liberty, like the Roger Veer and that mentality was a lot about power and control. That was disguised in crypto anarchism.

And you see that with the Bitcoin Cash movement, you know, the power and control. And then the pro-business movement, the Winklevoss movement, went to like one extreme of being very close with the government. And that is very good for our infrastructure. Well, not very good for like the crypto anarchist movement. So then the rest of us kind of like sprinkle and fall. all the various points on that spectrum. Wouldn't you agree? Yeah, I mean, we had Eric Verhees on actually maybe like a month or two ago.

And yeah, so, you know, he seems to have sort of been an example of one of the people who kind of try to learn from that and kind of stray a little bit of the middle path where, like, you know, he still has, tries to keep those of crypto anarchist ideals, but like, you know, understands where tradeoffs need to be made and whatnot. I agree with him. Eric was a lot more mature than I back then and has matured a lot faster than I in those years too. So I like speaking with him frequently because I still kind of look to him as a moral guidepost as I do with a lot of people. And my understanding, my thought process is if I have a bunch of, you know how like GPS works? GPS needs, I think, three different satellites in order to triangulate someone's location. So I try to follow my moral compass by keeping three or four people that I believe that have very solid, like, grounding. Who are those three or four people? Well, Eric is definitely one of them.

I have one or two non-crypto people that I don't know if I want to name just because they're private people. And then I have one of my, not one, but I have one or two of my best friends here that live in Florida with me. And then one of my friend, he's German. And I look at him as one of my moral guideposts. And between, you know, it's like half crypto and then half non-crypto. Between the four or five of those people, as long as I could maintain good relationships. And then, of course, my wife is the ultimate decision maker on everything. But what's really good is that she's really close with all these people, too.

So she's close with Eric. She's close with Eric's wife. And so we're able to like really, it's a really nice crypto families. It's nice. That's cool. I absolutely love talking to Eric. Every conversation I've had with him, either. in real life or over the podcast, it's just been filled with so much insight.

And you just get the feeling that this guy has very strong grounded morals. But what's nice about Eric is that you can still talk to the person. You can still have a debate with him. You can still have sort of a disagreement and talk through it. And it'll always stay respectful. And that, I think, is like a very strong quality in people that is hard to find. But so one of the things about the story that's that really touched me and like when I read the book, I met you for the first time at SF blockchain week just like a few weeks later.

And actually what I met you is like, I met you and your wife at the same time. Yeah, we were in the, we were in the ready room, you know, to get ready for the for the panels. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. No, I remember that. Okay, cool. I thought you meant like 10 years ago. No, no, no, just like a couple months ago.

So I met you and your wife basically at the same time. And it was like, oh, God. like, you know, this story continues. And so that was really kind of heartwarming. So can you maybe talk a little bit about that story? I know there's a crazy moment in the book where like you have to go back to your parents and sort of like break up with her and you're forced to, you know, make this huge concession. I don't know if you're comfortable sort of describing that episode. Absolutely. I'm very comfortable. In fact, it's somewhat therapeutic for me. And I know it is for her too. We got together in 2000 and end of 2012 around April and we got together because she was actually

one of the first people to do the first ever Bitcoin transaction that took place at a physical location. And then it was reported in the New York Post. And so we kind of met through that. It was like in the bar scene. She was working at a at a nightclub that I was, became like a part investor in with Eric Voorhees. So we kind of all got together. And I liked her and I was kind of afraid to ask her out. And then our friend set us up on a blind date and kind of the rest is history. And then when we had first met, this was before Bitcoin really exploded. So I was still like living with my parents. I don't have any money. But I was just excited. I was excited and passionate about the space. When we first started dating, that's when like six months into it, everything started

exploding and going crazy. And then we were traveling around the world. And then January 26, 2014, we must be dating about a year, year and a half at this point. And we were coming back from a trip in Amsterdam. And I got arrested at the airport for I was caught up in the Silk Road investigation that took down, you know, Ross and dozens of other people. But essentially, I was the CEO of Bit Instant and I was also the compliance officer. I also cleaned, you know, cleaned all the toilets and everything. It was just me and Gareth. But one of our customers, you know, talking about that like libertarian movement, everything, I had allowed one of our customers to essentially buy Bitcoin from us as like a reseller and then I knew that he was then reselling that Bitcoin on Silk Road.

And people ask me, it's like, why didn't you do anything? Well, because like, I knew about it, but I just didn't really care to stop it. I was of the belief that when you buy Bitcoin for me, what do I have to do with it? I don't care. But obviously, that's wrong. And that's illegal. So I went to jail for a year and a half. The whole process of being in the criminal justice system was six years, start to finish. And I literally, my three-year probation just ended like two months ago. And so that was really nice that that ended. The day my probation ended was the day that Courtney and I celebrated our two-year wedding anniversary.

I proposed, we got married, and I got released from prison on the same day. Not like physically the same day, but the same date. it was all done on purpose. When I had gotten arrested, the government had asked the judge to put a million dollar bond on me, and I didn't have a million dollars. So my parents had came in and said, we will put up our house. And at that point, it's a very complicated thing, but I grew up very, very, very religious. And I had chosen myself to leave the religion and leave the community.

It was my choice. My parents and the community weren't happy about that. And so my parents had basically said that I would have to apologize to them in front of the judge for leaving the religion. I would have to break up with Courtney in front of the judge. And I would have to promise with the threat of going to jail that I wouldn't be with her. Could you imagine that? Right. And my parents enforced it.

And then the fourth condition was I would have to live back and home with them in their basement and then go to like synagogue and be religious again. So I faked it. I faked it for a while. I faked it for like, I don't know, like six months or seven months or seven months. And we were still together. We FaceTime. We talked every day. We watched movies together over Skype. We drank together over Skype. We didn't see each other for those six months, but we talked in video chat. And our relationship got very strong during those six months. And eventually my parents figured it out. Once my parents figured it out, they tried to send me back to prison because they had figured it out. They tried to pull the bail. The judge found out, you know, the rest of the story is actually kind of sealed, so I can't really talk about it. But a month

later, I was able to move in with Courtney and were able to be back together and I wasn't under the control or the thumb of my parents anymore. And then I was able to live with Courtney for the next six months under house arrest leading into my year and a half stay in federal prison. Do you still, have you reconciled with your parents or are you still not in touch? There's no resentment anymore because Courtney and I both learned to move on from resentment. It's not good to harbor that. Over the years, we've tried to thaw. They came out to Florida for a day.

But it's hard. It's not their fault. It's just that they're part of this larger community. And if they accept me and they accept my wife because she's not Jewish, then my parents will be kicked out of that community. and my three younger sisters would be kicked out of the community with their husbands too. And it's not just being kicked out of the symbolic community. All their jobs are in the community. Their work, their lives, their business, their house, their social lives,

their wives, girlfriends, husbands, their best friends are all the restaurants, they eat that, the places that they prey at, the lives they live are all in this community. So the threat of leaving the community and being excommunicated, is as real as it is for them as it was for me. So they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. And they can't, you know, we try to pretend, but it's just, it's, there's still a lot of anger and resentment and fear and it's difficult. And I think time will heal it.

But as of now, no, I've not spoken to my parents in many years that have not seen them. And one can only hope that they're proud of, of their son. I would hope so too. It's really hard, I think, for people who've never experienced something like that to understand what that's like, but, you know, when your whole life is wrapped up in community, and literally your entire life, there's a lot of stake there. True. It was a very toxic community, and I'm really happy that I left.

It's a very toxic community. I wouldn't call it a cult, but it's, you know, a lot of people would. If it wasn't for the Bitcoin community, and if it wasn't for Courtney, I would have never had the guts to leave because I literally left by, like, packing all the shit that I owned in a car, in my car one day, and literally leaving when my parents were, weren't home. What I mean by leaving, I had to sneak out. That's how serious this was. I wouldn't have had the guts to do it. And there are a lot of people that have helped me. I don't know if you know of Tur Demester, Tur. He has a very similar story. He grew up in a very toxic family in Belgium, and he left

and moved to the U.S. And when we had met, I told him, because I'd read about what he, you know, he'd written about this. And I said, like, TUR, like, I'm trying to leave my family. And he helped me do it. He walked me through it. He was there. And I give him a lot of credit for helping me with that. I didn't know about that connection. Oh, yeah. My parents didn't give up. And not only my parents, but the whole community tried to come after us. We were dating like a year and a half at this point. When I left, they offered her like $100,000 to leave me. Crazy, right? And I told her, I said, you should have taken it. And then we would have had the money together. But if it wasn't for the family of the Bitcoin community that was, if it wasn't for the family that we were, I would

wouldn't have had the guts. And now I have no resentment. I have no regrets in that sense. And I want Courtney and I to be close with my family again. Like, I want that. I'm at fault as much, if not more than them. So if they're listening to this show and they're thinking that I blame them, I don't. Courtney doesn't either. We blame ourselves. And one of the reasons that I haven't been able to have the courage to really move forward and rebuild that relationship is, I harbor a lot of guilt. I have a lot of guilt right now and for the anger and sadness and pain that I caused my parents over those years. And I don't think I've fully let go of that guilt yet for me to rekindle that relationship with them. That's really touching. I mean,

I don't think we've ever had such a candid interview on this podcast. Thanks for sharing that. No, but thank you for having me. We wanted to ask you about your time in prison. And I think for me, the thing that's most interesting is as someone who wasn't ever involved in crime before, wasn't on a track to go to prison, I suppose, did you learn anything being in there? And did you get a sense that this institution was preparing people for like life after prison? From your vantage point, what were you able to take away from that experience? You get out of prison what you put in. And so everyone does their time differently. One of the mantras is do your time.

Don't let your time do you. And on that note, what you have to almost do is you have to stay productive and enhance and grow your life. But at the same time, do it in a place where you're literally, it's like morally and intelligently and like just completely void of any type of culture and love. and life and any of that. So imagine trying to like further yourself in a place that's backwards and continuing to regress in humanity. And I don't say that with fucking sarcasm. Those prisons are literally regressions of humanity.

They are disgusting and despicable. And honestly, you know, we should be ashamed of ourselves for not caring enough. Our government and people care so much about putting people. into prison that we don't care about them once they are in there. And we can easily say to ourselves, oh yeah, who cares they're going to be there forever? No, most inmates are only in for a year or two or three. And when they come out, you know what they're going to do? They're going to go back right to crime. You know, I know that? Because I asked them and they told me. You know why? Because they just do nothing in prison. There's no vocational training. There's no life skills. There's no, hey, let's try to

make you a better person. It doesn't exist. So you have to do it on your own. It's an uphill battle. And the only way to do it is when you say to yourselves, I want to do it. 95% of inmates don't say that. They don't say, I want to do it. You know what they do?

They substitute. So they substitute drug dealing with working out in the gym. They substitute gambling with playing cards in prison. Like they just substitute. It's the same bullshit. And they go out and they can. commit crimes. And I know guys who I was in with who got re-arrested. And I'll see the news articles. Oh, there's one guy I was in with. He was in for identity theft. And his wife is a freaking like

state senator. And I was in with him. And he was in for like five years. And within six months of him getting out, he's already check-kiding again. And he has all opportunities in the world. His wife is a state senator. Like, what are you doing? The point is that you're in a place that brings out such negativity. So you can literally go in. So you'd have people that are brothers. You'd have business partners. Sebastian and Sonny,

I was in with people who were literally father and son, who the prison made them so, like, morally devoid that they were at each other's throats. They were literally ratting on each other. Father and son, in prison. Like, what kind of place does that to people? So you talk about vocational training? No. I'm lucky that I came out better than I went in. What did you do that like, how did you make sure to...

I was very lucky that my lawyer was able to introduce me to people who had gotten out of the same place that I was about to go into. And I still remain friends with those people today. And those people sat me down and said, Charlie, you're about to go into a place that's literally hell in Pennsylvania. Like if they put hell in Pennsylvania, that's where you're going. The only way to beat the system and the only way to do your time and not let the time do you is to work very hard on making yourself a better person. It took a month or two, but started in, you know, you have a lot of time. In prison is a place where you learn how to be with yourself. And I almost kind of like joke with people and I tell them, hey, try this experiment.

go in a room by yourself with no phone or any computer or paper or pen or anything and just sit by yourself for two hours can you do it can your listeners do it probably not very difficult very difficult do to sit in a room for two hours you go crazy in prison you do that about almost every day you have hours and hours and hours you know what i would do i would have a paperback book in my back pocket 24 hours a day. Always. Because you never know what they'll call your name on a loudspeaker and you got to sit outside someone's office for three hours while they eat Wendy's. There's this documentary that just came out. I haven't watched it yet, but I heard an interview with Lynn Novak, who has worked with Ken Burns in the past on like the Vietnam War documentaries. And she did a documentary on

college inmates that go through college while in prison. And it has just for them like been a life changing experience. Some of these people have went on to work at like NGOs and like get jobs when they get out of prison. It's interesting how she describes the sort of politics that go into that because a lot of these people come from families where no one's gone to college. And so there's almost like a resentment on the part of their families for getting educated. And then the other thing is like even the guards in the prison, a lot of these people are not college educated. So they start feeling resentment against the inmates that get the college education, right? But like I've, yet to watch it, but it just shows how fucked up the system is. I mean, what's the point of putting

people in prison if when they come out, they just go back to crime? I mean, that doesn't advance society, right? Yeah, I think we kind of forgot why we were putting people into prison in the first place. But you know what? Like, if you ask me, like, what's my opinion on prison reform? I don't have really one. I don't know how to solve this problem. I don't. I would say that prison may not be the best punishment for all crimes. I think there are actually a lot worse. Like, honestly, like, it's so funny, because if you were to ask a lot of people, like, what would be a worst punishment? One year of prison in like a camp or a low or like five years of house arrest, if you've already been in prison, you would say they'd rather the prison. Because house arrest of

five years is a worse punishment. It's worse. Think about it. You have to be under the thumb of the government with an ankle bracement for five years. But during those five years, you're working, you're paying taxes, and you're being a, hopefully a pro-social member of society. The biggest problem with prison is that you're getting out of society, so you're considered and it's literally a label. It's like a legal label. I didn't make this up.

You are considered antisocial, the day you walk into prison. And their belief is that by the time you get out, you are now a rehabilitated pro-social member of society. So my whole concept is you have these people that did something bad and illegal, but at the same time, why not keep them as a social member of society with a very, because it costs $50,000 a year per inmate. And just some inmates are in there for 20 something years for a pound of weed, right? Like how is that beneficial for our government? But I don't know. I mean, I don't know prison reform.

All I know is that one of the beliefs that I have is that I shouldn't have to lose my. rights for life. Most people don't know, but when you're a felon, you lose a lot of rights. And I fought very hard to get even my right to vote back. And I just got it back last year. So for the first time in the history of America, if you're a felon or formerly convicted and you live in Florida, you will now for the first time in your life be allowed to vote as of 2020. And that's really wonderful. So thank you to all Floridians who voted to give us our rights back to do that. Yeah, Wayne, thank you, Wayne for that. It's very important. And I'll tell you why it's important. We're a huge voting block. You ready for this? We are 8% of the Floridian population.

There is a million of us felons living in Florida out of 15 million people. We're a huge voting block. That's why the lobbyists fought so hard to not let us get our rights back. Felons, we are very open-minded people. We're very open-minded people and we're not willing to take politicians' words at, like, whatever they say. We investigate. Now that we have our rights to vote back, I feel like in the future, we care about our civic duty. We will vote at the local level. We will vote. You know, you have these, like, city elections where you have, like, a mayor or a city councilman, and you live in the city. I live in the city the size of 100,000 people. But when it comes to, like, electing the mayor, only 2,000 people vote. So it's very easy. I once jokingly asked a Republican

fixer here that lives in Florida. I said, hey, how much is it to buy a city council election? And he was drunk and he laughed and he said, 50 grand. And I said, that's it. It's all it costs. So my hope is that now that felons have, we have our rights to vote back, it'll be much more difficult to game the system or to buy elections. Do you think this process of your experience there has made you more libertarian or a little bit less and more understanding of the role of the government in these kind of situations. The life roles that I've been through and Courtney as well, it's made us hate labels. First and foremost, we hate labels, just any type of label, even Republican, Democrat,

independent, because when you subscribe to a label and you call yourself, now you constantly have to defend that label for the rest of your life. And that sucks. And it's hard to get away from that. Once you've defended a label, I know what you mean, yeah. And it's stupid. So first of all, labels are dumb, and we should never subscribe to them. But it's okay to still talk about them, you know, like talk about different labels and everything. So I don't know if it's made us more libertarian. I think it's actually, I know you're going to laugh, but I think it's made us very like middle of the road type of people.

We're not anarchists, but we're also not statists. We believe that there is a basic role of government that needs to exist, but it needs to be like a quarter of the size of it is today. I believe, and I don't care if people yell at me on the internet. Many libertarians believe this too, because they're libertarian, right? Anarchists believe that there isn't no role in government, but libertarian believe that there is a small role. Now, I don't like to say I'm a libertarian, but I believe there is a small role. But what I'd like to see and what we believe now is that we've gotten a lot more,

and I know a lot of felons and bitcoins do the same thing. We get a lot more involved in, like, your local, like, politics and where you live. And so we believe that local politics matter, but federal politics don't. I mean, I don't care about, like, honestly, like, federal politics is stupid. I don't care. If you ask me, like, what my take is on impeachment and the republic, it's like, I'm busy. Like, it doesn't matter. If you were to ask me about my thoughts about them wanting to double the size of the parking garage of the local botanical gardens,

I'm going to fucking go nuts because I care about, you know, local politics. That's just the way we work now. So what continues to drive your belief and Bitcoin and like, where do you hope to see it going then in that case? I'm just happy with where we are today. I'm happy with our community and I'm happy with, you know, how things have played out so far. For me, at least, as long as we continue to grow at the pace that we're growing, I think we're going to do a very good job. I'm pretty happy with our community and our industry. as a whole. And so I really wouldn't change much about that. You know, I think that we're doing a

really good job. You've been doing a great job of helping contribute to the community with your podcast. I started actually listening to it after SF Blockchain Week was, you know, when I first heard about it and then I started listening to a bunch of it, and it's been really amazing. What led you to decide to go from being sort of a entrepreneur? Not that, you know, running a podcast isn't an entrepreneur, it's still an entrepreneur, but like running like a business, like bid instant, and then you had some other products you were working on as well to becoming a more media personality. Why did you go down that path? I have the show. And then over the years, I've built a number of small businesses that continue to operate independently on their own here in Florida in various

sectors of business, and it allowed Courtney and I to live off of that during the bear market and not have to live off of any crypto. I made a decision to not become a CEO of a large Bitcoin company ever again. I don't want to be in that spotlight. I don't want to be in a position of power. I don't want to be in a position of influence like that ever again. I don't. I'm done with that. I love the show. I love starting small businesses. I love employing people. I don't want to ever have a full-time job again. You know what my life schedule is now? I wake up at six. I go to my office at seven. I work. I'm in the studio at 10. I go back to the office at 11. I'm in the office till about two. And then at two o'clock,

I'm done. I want that schedule forever. That's a really good schedule. I hope at some point I can get to that kind of discipline and having that leisure time. How do you like doing a podcast? What's it like starting a podcast in 2019? How do you like it? What are you learning? It was actually my therapist idea to start the podcast because he told me he's like, you're too idle in like your life. I was sitting with him and, you know, I have PTSD. So does Courtney. So we see therapy, you know, weekly. And we were sitting as obviously. He's like Charlie like, you're very successful. But your businesses kind of run their own. You have too much time. So do something. And I said, I don't really know what to do. And then I always wanted to do a podcast for many, many, many.

years, but I never, I always wanted to do like a radio show. When I was in prison, radio was my lifeblood, right? I had a little radio, a little FM AM radio, and I would listen to radio all day and all night, not even music. I would listen to radio programs. I would have my own schedule. I knew which stations, played which shows, and they were largely like non-political shows. I would listen to like a ton of NPR shows because a lot of their shows are non-political. I would listen to sports shows. I would listen to a lot. I love And I fell in love with how radio programs are produced. And I felt like the glory years of radio are lost. And so, except for like NPR and how they professionally produce their show.

When my therapist gave me the idea, I said, I said to myself, why don't I do like a highly produced show, like a super highly produced show, almost pretending as if my show was like on NPR. And that's how I treat untold stories. Every aspect of the show is it's not a news journalism show. and it's a very curated and pre-planned out and formatted and written show just like yours. And I was going to kind of do it on my own. I was interviewing different production companies when through a mutual friend I had met Jason Yanowitz, who's the CEO of the Blockworks Group.

And Blockworks said, we love you. They only had like two or three shows at a time. They had Pomp's show and Meltem. And I think now they have like 20 shows. We want to do this show with you. And so I actually had to pay them for the first like four months, just to produce my show. So I was like deep in the hole. And then I was like deep and I was like 20 grand in the hole for this damn show. And I was okay. I didn't want to break even. I didn't want to make

money. But I knew that in order to do this show the right way, you had to spend money. Now, I do every show in a studio here with Wayne, audio engineers, you know, I have content writers. Just like you, you have your whole system. And I love doing it. Lockworks has been able to find really good sponsors that the first thing that gets written in the contract that they get no control over like what content I put out and that's like a deal breaker. They were able to find me really, really good. That's super important.

Yeah, because again, this is not a news journalism show. This is entertainment, my show. I don't want the sponsors to have any say in like what I can and cannot say. I've been very fortunate. So I need to spend like hours with you picking your brain on like how to make because you have quarter million downloads. You have a crazy amount of downloads,

and I'm not even, like, I'm a tenth of that. So I want to get to where you are. I know. We're a little bit higher than that, but we've been around. You're a top 1% podcast in the world. I mean, it's insane. This has been an unbelievable show.

It's somewhere between a quarter million and a top 1%. So congratulations, and thank you for continuing to do that. We've had about like 5 million downloads over the course of the six years or something. So it's nowhere near the top 1% of the podcast, but, you know, we've done a bit of things in a lot of, the crypto space, I suppose. I mean, Untold Stories is great. I really like it. I've heard a couple of episodes.

Like I said, I heard the one with Ben Masrich, and it's fantastic. So happy to spend time with you anytime you want to shoot some ideas around. We have a mutual sponsor, Pepo. We'll give them a shout out really quick, and they're great company in social media. I'm excited to continue working with them. They're such a cool sponsor because they make us work. Like, some sponsors just say, like throw a 30-second, you know, add in there. But Peppo is like,

constantly making us do stuff and work together. And that's so cool. And I like when they do that, you know, when they make us do stuff, because then we know that they're going to continue getting value out of it and then sign up for another year. I like them too. I like the community that's growing there. It's like this very niche little community. Yes, they're able to build this nice community.

Thank you for so much for having me on the show. I'm glad we could do sort of an untold stories on Epicenter. It feels very much like the style of interviews. that you do on your podcast. I'm happy that you were able to tell your story on Epicenter. Most of the stuff I said today, I've never actually said before or done on any show, very fresh and very new. So I'm happy to have done it. Thanks a lot. And yeah, we'll keep in touch. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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