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In an eight-man boat, the twins’ seats were located in the “engine room”—the term for the middle of the boat, where the biggest and most powerful rowers sat.
After Facebook’s IPO, the twins’ $45 million in shares soared. It appreciated fifteen times and went on to be worth more than $500 million. If Quinn Emanuel had taken its fee in stock, the firm would have earned upward of $300 million for six months of work.
but their father had made his fortune building a consulting firm that counted many New York–based Fortune 500 companies as clients.
Divya Narendra, had already begun his next chapter. After receiving his law degree and MBA from Northwestern University, he’d gone all in on his new venture SumZero—a social network for investment professionals. Instead of sharing photos, users shared investment ideas. SumZero didn’t have billions of users—its users had billions of dollars.
“The market cap of the entire Bitcoin economy is only about a hundred and forty million. That’s million, with an m. Gold is seven trillion. And gold is pretty much useless. Walk into a store and try to buy a pack of gum with gold.”
‘Bitcoin’ with a capital B refers to the protocol, in other words, the entire Bitcoin Network,” Voorhees said, his more measured tone a stark contrast to Charlie’s verbal sprint. “While ‘bitcoin’ with a lowercase b refers to the digital asset that travels along the Bitcoin Network.”
Which left only rhodium, palladium, platinum, silver, and gold—five of the eight noble metals. Rhodium and palladium wouldn’t be discovered until the 1880s, well after money had been in use for thousands of years; and platinum’s melting point would have been too high for preindustrial furnaces.
Howard Sr.’s father, the twins’ great-grandfather, was very upset at the time, because he thought horses were far superior to the auto—you could rely on them, they didn’t break down, and cars couldn’t work in the field.
if you bought your first bitcoin with a “red phone,” you were a real OG. The “red phone” referred to the ubiquitous phones that were present at MoneyGram locations.
Mt. Gox. The ridiculous name had an even more ridiculous origin. Its owner, Mark Karpeles, a twenty-eight-year-old French émigré to Shibuya, Tokyo, who called himself the King of Bitcoin and who had spent much of his twenties posting cat videos to YouTube, had purchased the company from an entrepreneur who had originally built the website as a trading hub for cards from the game Magic: The Gathering. Hence the name Mt. Gox, an acronym that stood for “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange.”
First off, there was no way they were going to leave any significant amount of bitcoin on Mt. Gox—a website that was once a magic card exchange and was now run by a crazy Frenchman who had made his mark putting cat videos on YouTube. Mt. Gox was a Dumpster fire waiting to happen.
Cyprus, according to some, was named for its rich natural veins of copper.
As the first money into Tesla and SpaceX, Lee was already so far ahead of the curve he was almost invisible. And his interests in space had only made him more convinced that Bitcoin was the future of money. “Space is full of asteroids,” he said as he lined up the cue for a shot on one of the pockets. “And asteroids are full of metals, precious metals—diamonds, titanium, especially gold. In fact, there’s already a database that speculates how many billions of dollars in gold the closest asteroids contain. The technology is getting better every day, just ask Elon. Pretty soon, we’ll be mining
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In 1998, Paul Krugman, the famed Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist, infamously said that “by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
“it’s a thing. I think it was from Anthropology 101. Society is made up of structures. That’s how we cope with all of the things we can’t control—life, death, illness, love, the fucking weather. We make structures and we live in them. But when we cross out of those structures, we enter a weird, strange, odd state.” “A liminal state,”
The twins are also early investors in Ether, Zcash, File-coin, Tezos, and many other cryptocurrencies.
