The refrain that Bitcoin will change the world is almost universal when you talk to early adherents. For one thing, it's unstoppable, and appears to many to be an honest arbiter compared with a system of commerce they view as broken – that is, the existing financial system with central banks and commercial lenders like JPMorgan and Citigroup in charge of the money supply. Bitcoin's hardcore followers are known as maximalists because they are unwilling to accept any other cryptocurrency as valid. Bitcoin, to a maximalist, is where the digital token conversation begins and ends. The vitriol is real and most often unleashed online. It even extends to subgroups of Bitcoin supporters, who tore each other apart between 2015 and 2017 debating how much information a Bitcoin block should contain.
Such tribalism is rampant in crypto. The community that supports Ripple and its digital token XRP are notorious for this. I'd been the focus of their attacks in the past after I wrote stories for Bloomberg News questioning the company's claims that it was just on the verge of mass adoption by global banks. The Ripple/XRP pitch is that XRP can replace the US dollar as the dominant currency in the enormous correspondent banking system. As noted before, that's the bank network needed to move national currencies like dollars or yen across borders. Banks have no interest in switching to XRP for their correspondent banking, as I reported. That critique unleashed a Twitter flame war on me that was rarely elevated beyond ad hominem attacks on my looks and intelligence. (One of my favorite milder jabs was from a Twitter user who took a picture of me speaking on Bloomberg Television and added a gold chain around my neck, a cigarette hanging from my lips, and some sunglasses. I'd gone on TV wearing a black, collared shirt with the top two buttons open – a grave sin, I know, but maybe it was my Magnum, P.I. moment. I laughed at that one.)
But crypto trolls also made my work in-box unusable for a week or two when someone in the XRP Army signed me up for every email newsletter in the world. The spam that inundated me was insane: lumberjack newsletters from rural Canada, cooking newsletters from Korea. There was also a threat made to unmask my personal and financial details on the dark web, the illicit part of the Internet used by identity thieves, drug dealers, and child pornographers. I didn't think that was funny.
But back to Bitcoin. Its code is seen as honest by maximalists, as having established clear and simple rules that must be followed if transactions are to be validated. Another rule caps Bitcoin's issuance at 21 million, meaning there will only be that many in existence once the limit is reached. The inability to print more Bitcoin is anti-inflationary, and very unlike traditional finance where the ability to print dollars or euros is seen as a benefit of issuing a national currency.
In Bitcoin, there are no gray areas of banking or usurious interest rates or shady deals. The code is all; it is your guide. It allows value to be sent from one person to another anywhere, anytime, with no one who can stop it. It's the anti–Wall Street solution to a problem many people had a hard time putting their finger on, and it elicits a powerful response in a certain type of person. That problem, for those who have trouble articulating it, is that as I said earlier Wall Street exists for almost no other reason that to be the ultimate rent seeker, to sit in the middle of every transaction taking a cut of the capital that is created around the globe. (My favorite example of this is a group of interest-rate swap traders who worked for a brokerage called ICAP in New Jersey. These traders became known as Treasure Island because they made around $20 million a year each just for sitting in a chair and picking up a phone. There would be one bank on the line, and the ICAP trader's job was to find another bank to complete the swap trade. The amounts of money we are talking here on a yearly basis are in the hundreds of millions, and corruption on the Treasure Island desk led to US government investigations and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.)
As far as grievances go, wanting to be anti–Wall Street is not a small one in the Bitcoin world, nor unjustified. Vitalik certainly held many of these convictions. He explicitly linked the new type of monetary system Bitcoin enabled to the cause of human freedom as he was sitting on the grass talking to Erik Voorhees at PorcFest. And he wrote about ways to help promote mainstream adoption of Bitcoin in several of his magazine stories. He wanted to give people the option to know this freedom. The more people he met in the community, the more entrenched his beliefs became. He'd even found one such group of like-minded souls in Toronto, led by a then 30-something man named Anthony Di Iorio who is fond of tracksuits and baseball caps.
The Bitcoin bug bit Di Iorio in 2012. Before that he'd had a peripatetic career in lots of different fields, not unlike many of the early digital currency adopters. His family owned a patio door company in Toronto where he worked for a few years, but when they sold it in 2008 he left because he didn't want to work for the new owners. He started a company called CityDrill Inc. and purchased an Italian rig for $1 million that allowed him to drill enormous holes into the earth to convert buildings to geothermal heat. He bought and sold properties around Toronto. In 2010, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, he became interested in economics and the seemingly simple yet quite complicated question of what is money? This quickly led him to economic thinkers from the Austrian School and libertarian ideals.
He never liked being told what to do and hated school. Growing up, his family expected their children to be normal, and that was the last thing Di Iorio wanted. The one thing that came easily to Anthony was technology. When he discovered Bitcoin in 2012 it was as though all the previous difficulties in his life aligned to point him in the direction of this digital savior.
“I really thought the solution to a lot of the world's problems was this thing called Bitcoin,” he said. Unlike many of the people in the early years of Bitcoin – who lean toward the very young – Di Iorio could remember the world before the Internet. Bitcoin would prove a more important innovation, he believed. “I understood right away this technology would allow me to be my own bank.”
He locked himself in his bedroom in his apartment in the Richmond Hill section of Toronto, reading everything he could about Bitcoin. Then it came time to emerge and meet others in the Bitcoin world. He looked around the city but couldn't find any meetups. Oh well, he thought, I'll do it myself. He'd been to a few libertarian meetings at a bar called Pauper's Pub, so he created an invitation on meetup.com advertising beer and wings and an opportunity to “talk all things Bitcoin.”
It was Saturday, November 3, 2012, when the seven or so people filed in to sit in the bar's red booths. It was the first Bitcoin meetup in Toronto that any of them was aware of, and in attendance was one Vitalik Buterin. On the invitation Anthony had asked that attendees tell the group what appealed to them about Bitcoin, be that investing in it, mining, or development. Vitalik, who in his meetup.com profile picture is sporting some seriously hard Terminator sunglasses, replied (maybe in a Schwarzenegger voice), “All of it.”
Vitalik and Anthony struck up a relationship that would prove pivotal to the development of Ethereum. Vitalik, though, was still unhappily attending Waterloo. He wanted more face-to-face contact with his Bitcoin brethren and thought pushing the limits of blockchain software was possible using the code Satoshi Nakamoto had created in 2008.
Nothing he'd reported on for Bitcoin Magazine, nor any of the conversations he had at the Toronto meetups – not even his revelations at the San Jose conference – made him doubt this conviction. By the time PorcFest ended in late June 2013, he was set to travel to Europe for the most ambitious part of his plans, and to test his theory firsthand.