“And just then, as the photographer was shooting away and the lights were flashing, I was up on the chair, making it rain!”
Without warning, Charlie leaped into a reenactment of the story he was in the midst of telling, right up onto the circular, maroon-colored leather banquette, nearly upending the liquor bottles on the gunmetal gray table in front of him, the pretty girls on either side of him diving out of the way just in time. Then Charlie had his hands up over his head and he was tossing two enormous wads of twenties into the air. Everyone in his corner of the two-story, postindustrial lounge cheered as the bills billowed down, a tropical storm of green paper caught in the dancing disco lights.
Charlie watched the bills floating around him, magnified a hundred times by the enormous mirrors that ran up all four walls, all the way to the balcony. The mirrors were surrounded by lights, the balcony circumnavigated by Edison bulbs, and almost everything seemed cloaked in glass, giving the whole place a steampunk feel; but the lasers and the DJ and the huge, glowing bar that took up most of the downstairs, the second bar upstairs, the catwalk-like stage running along one side, the gold sign outside, the lit-up menus that glowed like magical parchments at every table, all of it felt like a contemporary reinterpretation of the 1980s, when clubs reigned supreme. A Bright Lights, Big City/Wall Street, lines-of-coke version of the 1980s, artwork hanging along one interior wall, black sketch-work on huge canvasses that would have been at home in Patrick Bateman’s blood-splattered apartment.
Five thousand square feet of Midtown debauchery, right on Thirty-Ninth Street, and Charlie was there putting on the Charlie Show, like he’d been doing almost every night since the place opened. Because he wasn’t just standing up on a couch in his corner of the club; he was standing up on a couch in his corner of his club, or at least, that was how everyone saw things. The fact that he was merely a small partner in EVR—pronounced “EVER,” the city’s hottest “gastro-lounge,” a club Charlie’s college friends had opened and the only one that accepted Bitcoin from customers—didn’t matter to anyone. When Charlie was there—and he was there a lot—he always made it rain.
“The only good thing about cash is that you don’t have to worry about cleaning it up after you toss it in the air. Nobody’s ever been arrested for littering twenties.”
Charlie grinned, lowering himself back down onto the couch, the two girls moving closer to make room for the rest of their party. Charlie’s partner in EVR, Alex, was next to a woman on Charlie’s right, but Charlie couldn’t remember her name because he was already four Jamesons in. Another college friend, Mike, had his arm around the woman to Charlie’s left, Angela something, who wrote for some magazine, which probably should have made Charlie more careful about what he said but actually had the opposite effect. For the first time in Charlie’s life, people listened to him, and he had discovered that was a high on a par with whatever he could get from the consumables and smokables lining the shelves of the Bakery back at his office.
Damn, it was fun being king. And at the moment, that’s how Charlie saw himself, one of the Kings of Bitcoin, a true crypto rock star. And it wasn’t just him; the photo shoot he’d just described, of him throwing money up in the air to make it rain, had been for a full-page, color profile in Bloomberg Business Week, announcing Charlie as one of the newly minted Bitcoin millionaires—early adopters smart enough to get on the train before everyone else. And the Business Week piece was just one of dozens of articles introducing Charlie to a world where BitInstant was being touted as one of the most successful crypto-related startups.
The progress BitInstant had made in such a short time was incredible. The company had gone from processing a million dollars a month to doing almost that much in a single day. Charlie had calculated that at the moment, BitInstant was processing 35 percent of all bitcoin purchases. The demand for the service had been so intense, that the few times he’d had to temporarily shut the site down for server upgrades and maintenance, the downtime had caused an uproar among his customers. He’d received concerned emails from Tyler and Cameron, but Charlie had brushed it off; BitInstant had made him a celebrity in the Bitcoin world, and a microcelebrity in the outside world. This was Charlie’s Moment, and he knew it.
In just a few short months since the twins had invested, Charlie had traveled the world, speaking to groups of Bitcoin fanboys in London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, and Tel Aviv. Bitcoin had opened up a life for him that he never knew existed, let alone that he could be a part of. It had made him a millionaire. And it had freed him from that brisket-soaked basement in Brooklyn—literally. Though in this, Bitcoin had had a bit of help, from a very unlikely source.
A soft hand touched Charlie’s shoulder from behind the leather couch, and he turned just as an incredible-looking blond woman, way out of his league, leaned over and kissed him on his scruffy cheek. She was dressed like an EVR cocktail waitress, because that was her job, and was holding a tray of tequila shots, because shooting tequila at night was Charlie’s favorite activity—but this wasn’t some routine, sterile peck on the cheek because Charlie had ordered a round, or was a part owner, or was throwing twenties like confetti on New Year’s Eve.
No, he and Courtney had been together for two months now. Charlie had fallen in love with her from the minute he’d first set eyes on her, just days after EVR had opened its doors. He’d asked Alex if she could always be his waitress, but even with this help, Charlie had been way too afraid to actually ask her out on a date. Despite his growing Bitcoin fame, he didn’t know how to talk to girls like Courtney. The night he’d gone out with Cameron and Tyler after that first meeting in the Bakery, when he’d met the Bulgarian model, had ended with him on a couch in Cameron’s apartment, alone, in vomit-soaked sneakers.
He couldn’t have handled the same thing happening with Courtney. He’d fallen for her so hard, he’d spent more time thinking about her than about the overworked servers at BitInstant. Luckily for Charlie, his friends had taken charge of the situation by inviting them both to a staff happy hour and then collectively not showing up, leaving Charlie and Courtney alone, together.
Out of sheer social terror, Charlie had signaled for a Bacardi. And he hadn’t stopped signaling until he’d consumed so much Bacardi that he’d thrown up all over Courtney. When he’d gone to the bathroom to clean himself up, he’d assumed she’d be racing for the door, but for some reason she’d stuck around. At that moment, Charlie had known she was the one.
It wasn’t until their second date that he’d told her about “the Edict”—that he had a fundamentalist Jewish family that wouldn’t accept her, moreover, that being with her could actually lead him to being thrown out of his entire community, as insane as that sounded. And it wasn’t until another month later, when one of his sisters, overhearing him on the phone with Courtney, had squealed to his mother, that—everything at home had erupted. His mother crying and screaming, his dad actually ripping his shirt. After all of that came the ultimatum: the family or Courtney. Charlie hadn’t had any trouble making up his mind. He was in love, and more importantly, he was ready to get out. What had started with Roger Ver’s teasing about “sky people” had turned into a full-on, existential crisis, and Courtney had walked straight into that crisis with her tray of tequila.
He’d packed his belongings, climbed out of the basement, and made a break to EVR, moving in with his college friends, to an apartment several of them shared that was literally above the club. He was opening up a new tab in the bar of life.
“It’s after one,” Courtney whispered in his ear as she added the tray of shots to his table. “Don’t you have a meeting tomorrow morning?”
“I always have a meeting tomorrow morning,” Charlie said.
Then he reached for one of the shots. Sure, Courtney was probably right, adding tequila into the mix after 1:00 A.M. was never a great idea. But he wasn’t concerned about the meeting, even though he wasn’t exactly sure which meeting it was, or where, or with whom.
He had to go to a lot of meetings. He was, after all, CEO. And customer service. And chief compliance officer. He handled just about everything except the departments that Voorhees and Ira ran, or the deep computer stuff, which Gareth still took care of from his own bat cave in Wales, or wherever the hell Gareth lived.
With Voorhees and Ira, Charlie never had to worry; they were brilliant and professional, and had been instrumental in building BitInstant. In fact, they had developed some of the proprietary software that BitInstant was currently using, something that Ira had begun working on before BitInstant and that he and Voorhees had been letting Charlie use for free—a little fact that Charlie hadn’t yet mentioned to the Winklevoss twins, because he didn’t think it was that big a deal. Anyway, Voorhees and Ira were the glue keeping BitInstant together.
They weren’t just part of his team, they were his friends, which these days to Charlie meant they were pretty much the only family he had. They were also both growing, just like he was.
Voorhees was becoming as big of a name in Bitcoin as Charlie. Even though he ran BitInstant’s marketing, he was also working on a side project called SatoshiDice, a Bitcoin gambling website that was rapidly becoming a major draw in the Bitcoin community. The idea behind the game was simple: players sent bitcoin to an address that was either a winner or a loser. If “lucky,” they’d receive a multiple of the bitcoin they had wagered. If “unlucky,” they’d receive only a fraction. The game was instantly incredibly popular.
Of course, since it was a gambling site, its legality for American customers was unclear. To Voorhees, this was a frustration both business-wise and philosophically speaking. He, of course, didn’t believe the government should be involved in regulating gambling, especially bitcoin gambling. The whole point of building SatoshiDice on the Bitcoin blockchain itself was to keep it far away from the hands of the U.S. government.
For Charlie’s part, he couldn’t even begin trying to understand the U.S.’s byzantine gambling laws. In fact, he had only just recently started giving himself a crash course on U.S. money transmission laws—the exact laws that governed BitInstant’s business activities. He’d only done this after BitInstant’s lawyers and the Winklevoss twins had convinced him that it was critical for him to understand and comply with U.S. laws and regulations, not just for BitInstant’s sake, but for his own sake as well.
Since Charlie was both the chief compliance officer and CEO of BitInstant, laws and regulations were something he knew he should be taking seriously; but details had never been his strong suit. Still, he was trying. In fact, he’d learned enough to know that even his wearing three hats—CEO, chief compliance officer, customer service—was itself a conflict of interest. And only recently, this tightrope act had gotten complicated.
Someone with the handle BTCKing had been buying tons of bitcoin through the site with what appeared to be an endless supply of cash. As per the firm’s rules, for security reasons, because large Bitcoin transactions could, on their own, be considered suspect, and BitInstant didn’t have the resources to do deep-identity checks of their customers, BitInstant had capped regular customers’ daily purchase limits at $1,000—but it had become clear BTCKing was trying to evade those controls; on one single day, he’d attempted to purchase $4,000 worth of bitcoin, using a technique called “structuring.”
Although it didn’t necessarily mean BTCKing was up to no good, it was an alarming attempt at circumventing BitInstant’s controls. When Charlie had discovered what had happened, he’d immediately banned BTCKing from using BitInstant, personally sending him an email: “We have all your deposits on record, your picture from bank security cameras. Any attempt at a new transfer will result in criminal prosecution.”
But after much thought, Charlie had relented. After all, the guy had only been trying to buy more bitcoin. What was so bad about being eager? Wasn’t that good for everybody?
Charlie had eventually messaged the guy back, reaffirming that his current account and email address had been banned, but that he could open up a new account with a new email address if he wanted.
Charlie had no idea who BTCKing was. Most likely, he was a dealer or reseller, who bought bitcoin low and sold it to other people at a higher price. Charlie didn’t really care, and furthermore, he didn’t really believe it was any of his business. And why should he worry about some random guy he’d never met, and probably never would meet? BTCKing? Even the name was a joke—everyone knew who the new, real King of Bitcoin was.
In a few months, Charlie was going to be speaking at Bitcoin 2013, the same conference that the Winklevoss twins were keynoting. The twins might have been on page A1 of the New York Times, but Charlie had made it rain in front of a photographer in Bloomberg, and he was running the scene with his beautiful girlfriend at EVR.
Charlie was a crypto rock star on his way up, and like the price of Bitcoin, he was never going to come back down.