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

by Ben Mezrich

Just as Facebook was developed to enable social networks to move from the physical world to the internet, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin were developed for a financial world that now functions largely online. The technology behind Bitcoin isn’t a fad, or a bubble, or a scheme; it’s a fundamental paradigm shift, and it will eventually change everything.

With respect to Zuckerberg’s moral character at that point in his life, they were less gray than black-and-white. When in another IM he told his friend “You can be unethical and still be legal—that’s the way I live my life,” he was voicing a philosophy that would make future Facebook stockholders rightly nervous.

After their meeting at the Oasis, after Jake had gone off script and told them the real reason why they hadn’t been able to make any headway in their quest to become Silicon Valley venture capitalists, they had retreated back to New York. It seemed completely absurd; nobody would take their money, because everyone’s endgame was the same. Facebook had become this huge vacuum, sucking up every entrepreneurial dream in the area, and that meant Tyler and Cameron were poison. They had a last name that nobody dared put on their cap tables, no matter how badly they needed cash. Winklevoss money was the kiss of death.

The idea that people should be able to do whatever they wanted with their own money, independent of any government oversight, was a cornerstone of the libertarian ideology that had fueled much of the interest in Bitcoin up to that point.

she was suddenly reminded of an old Russian proverb: The less you know, the more soundly you sleep.

Cameron was convinced that the people who were most likely to fight Bitcoin were those who had the most to lose by its adoption. Which meant all the middlemen, rent seekers, and toll collectors of the legacy financial world—the banks, money transmitters, money remitters, credit card companies, and governments. Cameron and Tyler also knew that government regulation would come; and unlike many in the room, they believed that it was important to embrace and help shape that eventuality.

These two opposing statements perfectly illustrated the divide in the Bitcoin community. The libertarians and anarchists saw Bitcoin as a weapon in their war against regulated society. The entrepreneurs and VCs increasingly gravitating toward cryptocurrency wanted Bitcoin to be part of that society, a new, programmable money for the modern world.

The big money wasn’t interested in backing something dirty or illegal—not for moral reasons, but because those things weren’t good for business. It was what the twins had been saying all along.