A Quick Reflection from my interview with a Bitcoin OG — Charlie Shrem

Last Friday I got the privilege of co-interviewing Charlie Shrem alongside Anthony Garrett from Gonzaga, with Patrick Mclain from Mousebelt leading it. Charlie absolutely blew me away, talking about the early early Bitcoin days back in 2011 when he would have literal online chat conversations with Satoshi Nakamoto and the rest of the early adopters. There was a lot to unpack but chats like this are what make me love learning and being involved in web3. Here are some quick bullets overviewing the interview:

A Background on Charlie Shrem

• Charlie founded BitInstant — the first Bitcoin Exchange
• He was what I think of as one of the founding members or early adopters of Bitcoin, which made for a great history lesson during the talk. This all started when he was a Junior in college.
• He then went on to found Bitcoin Foundation, which aimed at building back up the Bitcoin reputation
• Charlie now hosts his own podcast called the Charlie Shrem show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-charlie-shrem-show/id1462346183

The Bitcoin Story

• Bitcoin was not created for the 1st world. It helps 3rd world countries the most because it creates universal sound money
• Paypal was only P2P payment at the time but it was centralized
• There was an IRC chat service with Bitcoin Developers and Satoshi all in the same channel
• You would download the software sent by satoshi and it would start mining. All the computers would have the ledger in their computer in real-time. If you closed your computer it would turn off on your computer, but all the other computers stayed updated
• People started selling socks, MREs, and radios on the forum with Bitcoin. They were selling these for .like 10,000 Bitcoin for a sock
• Arab Spring happened and Egypt and other countries were shutting off their internet, Ethereum was able to rise because its platform gave them immutable data where they didn’t have to rely on government and central bodies for data storage
• Craig Wright and others tried to say they were satoshi — “the messiah”
• Gavin Andreson believed Craig at one point until they proved it wrong
• False messiahs wanted to fork bitcoin slightly for a payout and create some back door in self-interest
• The Byzantine General problem is the true solution to Bitcoin which was solved by Satoshi

Future of Crypto and Adoption

• He thinks the most likely crypto to use is some sort of government-issued stablecoin mechanism
• A transparent financial system will help shrink the gap between the wealthy elite and the middle class. The wealthy only transact with the wealthy so they all stay wealthy. But if it is decentralized then they don’t control the exchanges and every part of the process anymore, thus helping balance out the power.
• People growing up today don’t know a world without Bitcoin existing, so eventually, everyone will have grown up with Bitcoin which will help the adoption in the long run.

How to Scale Bitcoin

• Lightning Network: Bitcoin blocks are produced every 10 minutes, so for everyday purchases, we needed a solution that allows for transactions instantaneously. The Lightning Network essentially creates a bunch of mini blocks in between the main Bitcoin blocks, and then once a new block is created every 10 minutes, then all the mini blocks are added to the big block.
• Other sidechains — both of these give up decentralization

How to Learn the History

1. All the conversations between Satoshi, Gavin Andreson, Craig Wright, Roger Vares, etc are online. It’s wild to see the actual conversations and they’re all public. Charlie believes if you understand the original days of Bitcoin it will teach you all there is to know about the past and future applications and tech behind Bitcoin.

• https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/forum/bitcoin-forum/7/
• https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/

2. Search up crypto obituaries and learn how they failed

• Play a game with a friend and see how fast you can lose all your money. You will learn more that way than trying to beat the market. Failure is key

Some Last Insights

• Don’t turn technical problems into political ones (covid)
• Wars always originate because of money disputes
• People can think of IPFS as a decentralized version of google drive
• Cashapp, Kraken, and others made by some of the Bitcoin OGs so he supports those platforms especially
• He used a printer analogy to describe Segwit — a soft Bitcoin fork that altered its transaction makeup. Charlie said that if printers are nodes, printers were to print pages as fast as possible but also the physical printers need to be small and affordable. Segwit tried to solve this by just decreasing the font size of the words on the pages.
• “We don’t want to end the fed, we want to transcend the fed” — satoshi
• American Idol had people call in to vote on contestants which became popular in their first season. Then they were the first ones to have your text in your votes, and this was revolutionary. Charlie said you can still see on Youtube Ryan Seacrest teaching the audience how to text a vote in.

To Finish

Hearing Charlie talk about the original purpose of Bitcoin and his journey from being a Junior in college downloading random links from Satoshi Nakamoto to founding the first Bitcoin Exchange was incredible. It definitely lit a fire in my interest to explore more of Bitcoin’s past (as if I needed to obsess over crypto any more than I already do).

The interview will be available on Youtube soon via Mousebelt. Thank you again Mousebelt for the opportunity, and Patrick for leading the interview. And of course, thanks to Charlie for sharing his story!

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