Today we have a special episode; I am sharing the panel that I was a part of at Consensus 2022, titled: 10 Years Later: Bitcoin's Commercial Beginnings from Those Who were There. The panel included Jered Kenna, Jonathan Mohan, and Adam B. Levine. Jered Kenna was the Founding CEO of the first US Bitcoin exchange, Tradehill / Bitcoin.com. Jered is an investor and former Marine. Jered Kenna is currently the Founder and CEO of 20mission Co-living / 20mission Cerveza, an investor specializing in start-ups and an entrepreneur at heart. Jonathan Mohan, Kickstarted the New York Blockchain community in early 2013, leading to one of the longest-running and one of the largest Blockchain-related meetup groups in the world. He is currently the Head of Partnerships at DLTx, a public company expanding web3 by deploying blockchain infrastructure at scale across major global industries. Adam B. Levine has been exploring, chronicling, and inspiring the world of Bitcoin and non-currency tokens since 2011. He’s a serial entrepreneur, the founding managing editor of Podcasts at CoinDesk(2019), founder and host of Speaking of Bitcoin(2013) and CoinDesks’ Markets Daily podcast. Adam is also the founder of Tokenly, Inc.(2014). Adam currently spends his time building state-of-the-art creativity-enhancing AI tools as the founder and CEO of 330.ai (2021). We discuss various topics, including our journey down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, the Early Bitcoin community, wild stories from the early days, how the space has evolved, and much more. We begin the conversation by sharing how we got into Bitcoin and the initial community that formed around Bitcoin in the early years. We highlight the iconic Crypto Castle in San Francisco, where many projects were incubated. Our next conversation topic centered around the experience of living through and being a part of Bitcoin’s infancy. We discuss why we believed Bitcoin had the potential to change the world. We discuss how the community was very cooperative and not competitive in the early days of the industry. We also touch on how pseudonymity permeated the early online community of Bitcoin. We had a funny conversation about the first Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bitcoin Savings and Trust, run by Pirate@40. Another fascinating conversation topic was the watershed moment in 2013 when a Congressional Hearing publicly declared being a Bitcoiner is not a felony. Our next major conversation topic centered on how Bitcoin and the Crypto Industry have changed over the last decade. We touch on how archaic regulation has stifled US innovation and has forced entrepreneurs and builders who want to pursue careers in crypto abroad. We also discuss why we are still so early in crypto and Bitcoin’s journey. We finish our conversation by discussing our craziest early Bitcoin stories. Please enjoy my conversation with myself and my friends, some of the most iconic Bitcoin OGs.
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