CoinDesk Had a ‘Stash’ of BTC, and Other Stories Told by Consensus OG Joon Ian Wong

I by no means would have thought Vitalik may have grow to be fairly the icon that he’s as we speak. Or that Katie Haun could be one of the profitable VCs of all time. And even that Arthur Hayes would have this redemption narrative. For most individuals I believe it might have been fairly troublesome to foretell the place they ended up as we speak. Even perhaps Brian Armstrong. This isn’t immediately CoinDesk associated, however I interviewed him in 2014 when he got here to London as a part of this massive Coinbase world tour. It’s a must to keep in mind Coinbase began out as a pockets, competing with the Blockchain Dot Data. There was no change enterprise. I believe it was the world tour after they pivoted to grow to be a brokerage. We had the interview close to the CoinDesk workplace in Fitzrovia in London, after which that night there was this very long-running meetup known as Coin Scrum, which has been working since 2013, at a bar in East London close to the place I dwell. It was a packed home. , Brian Armstrong is gonna come and discuss to us (even again then Coinbase was one of many better-funded startups). So he gave his discuss and I keep in mind a band of individuals got here into the bar led by Amir Taaki [who, at the time, was one of the most prominent Bitcoin Core developers] and began heckling him. , “you are centralized.” “You’re fiat.” There have been three or 4 of those guys, who I believe all lived in the identical East London squat, shouting at him from the gang. Even again then, he was very even-tempered. He was making an attempt to answer them level by level. However he form of acquired drowned out. There’s this type of endearing picture of the area again then. I simply do not assume you may ever see Brian Armstrong and Amir Taaki in the identical room ever once more. Individuals like Gavin Wooden or Vitalik, they’d go to those meetups and bars and attempt to persuade those that their factor – Ethereum, no matter – was this nice, great factor. You’d have a motley crew of individuals listening to them. And from these not possible beginnings, you may have form of these quote unquote company titans of the day.