Planet Money #753 (Rerun 16 Oct 2019): Blockchain Gang
Rerun of a show from 2017. Charlie Shrem found bitcoin early, got into it like other kids would get into Ayn Rand. Founded BitInstant, which helped people something something with bitcoin. Other people who liked bitcoin at the time were criminals, some of them used BitInstant, Charlie knew this. He got arrested, convicted of aiding and abetting something or other, and two years in prison.
Prisoners aren’t allowed cash so they used tins of mackeral from commissary, which is not a great currency. You could only buy 14 tins at a time, plus one time the guards redistributed all of one inmate’s mackeral, left it lying around for others to pick up, inflation. He started thinking about how to “digitize” it. You’d have prisoners writing down transactions in physical notebooks, and to solve the problem of trust you’d have several write down each one, and then at the end of the day everyone would compare and sum up. Sounds like this never got implemented though?
When he got out he discovered that bitcoin is now mainstreamish, the existing institutions have adopted it rather than being replaced like he wanted. He starts a new crypto-related venture, which as of 2019 is no longer a going concern but now he has a podcast.
Planet Money #753 (Rerun 16 Oct 2019): Blockchain Gang
Rerun of a show from 2017. Charlie Shrem found bitcoin early, got into it like other kids would get into Ayn Rand. Founded BitInstant, which helped people something something with bitcoin. Other people who liked bitcoin at the time were criminals, some of them used BitInstant, Charlie knew this. He got arrested, convicted of aiding and abetting something or other, and two years in prison.
Prisoners aren’t allowed cash so they used tins of mackeral from commissary, which is not a great currency. You could only buy 14 tins at a time, plus one time the guards redistributed all of one inmate’s mackeral, left it lying around for others to pick up, inflation. He started thinking about how to “digitize” it. You’d have prisoners writing down transactions in physical notebooks, and to solve the problem of trust you’d have several write down each one, and then at the end of the day everyone would compare and sum up. Sounds like this never got implemented though?
When he got out he discovered that bitcoin is now mainstreamish, the existing institutions have adopted it rather than being replaced like he wanted. He starts a new crypto-related venture, which as of 2019 is no longer a going concern but now he has a podcast.