the staff gleefully ran around
the
empty
offices
like
schoolchildren, Wences sat
down in the glass-enclosed
conference room. He looked
exhausted. He explained that
he had expected some kind of
respite once he sold off
Lemon in the winter. But
before he’d been able to come
up for air, he was back under,
trying to get Xapo running,
and
dealing
with
the
unending series of crises that
seemed to be an endemic
issue for Bitcoin companies.
The problems, though,
seemed to Wences only like
more
evidence
of
why
Bitcoin was necessary. In the
current
system,
financial
institutions were given the
power to determine what
sorts of businesses could live
and die. His vision for what
Bitcoin
could
do
had
remained
steady.
While
others were talking about
micro-payments and smart
contracts, he was still fixated
on the idea of a digital gold
that people anywhere in the
world could hold without
requiring
any
permission
from anyone. This was still
the kid who had grown up in
Argentina,
watching
his
family look for a place that
was more secure and reliable
than the peso to store their
savings.
It might have just been
the exhaustion, but Wences
was sourly dismissive of all
the talk about Bitcoin’s
potential as a new payment
system. He was an investor in
Bitpay but he said that fewer
than one hundred thousand
individuals
had
actually
purchased
anything
using
Bitpay.
“There is no payment
volume,” he scoffed. “It’s a
sideshow.”
The real story, he said,
was the steady viral growth
that
had
already
taken
Bitcoin, by Wences’s count,
from a few people on that
first day back in January 2009
to six million users.
“People buying half a
Bitcoin, storing it, treasuring
it, and talking about it—and
getting more than one person
in,” he said. “That’s all
Bitcoin has been about for
four years—and that’s all we
need to get to where we want
it to be.”
He did believe it would
eventually
be
the
best
payment network the world
had ever seen. But that would
happen only when a billion
people owned some Bitcoin.
He
made
the
familiar
comparison to the Internet in
1993. Back then, he had
crowed to his mother when he
got one of the first ten million
or so e-mail accounts, which
allowed him to exchange
messages with a professor in
North Carolina. His mother
had derided it as a curiosity:
how would it help her
communicate with anyone
she
knew?
But
Wences
believed back then that the
ability
to
freely
send
information
to
anyone,
anywhere in the world, would
eventually matter. And he
ended up being right. Now he
believed that the ability to
send
money
to
anyone,
anywhere in the world, free
would eventually matter.
“I thought I was lucky to
have lived through that once
—and I can’t believe I get to
see it again,” he said. “This is
just the spot. It feels exactly
the same way—it was so hard
to explain.”
In the meantime, he said
there would be setbacks as
governments banned it and
banks made it harder to
transfer dollars and pesos to
Bitcoin companies.
“I’m patient. This takes a
decade, or two decades. I’m
not going to go home because
this takes one more decade.”
From
Buenos
Aires,
Wences flew to Brazil for his
first vacation in what seemed
like years. Belle and the three
children met him and they
stayed at a house near the
beach in Rio and caught all
the World Cup games they
could. But even before the
World Cup was over, Wences
and the family were up in
Utah for the latest exclusive
conference held by Allen &
Co., this one an even higher-
profile event than the one in
the spring, drawing Jeff
Bezos, Bill Gates, and Rupert
Murdoch.
There had been lots of
good news for Bitcoin in the
weeks since he had been in
Argentina. The United States
Marshals
Service
had
auctioned off the 29,655
Bitcoins it had seized from
Ross Ulbricht, and the winner
was
a
major
venture
capitalist, Tim Draper, who
was working with the startup
that employed Nick Szabo.
Once
U.S.
government
officials had sold Bitcoins it
would be hard for them to
treat Bitcoin as an outlaw
currency. The Winklevoss
twins, meanwhile, had made
their latest regulatory filing
for their Bitcoin exchange-
traded fund, which was now
set to trade on the Nasdaq
Stock Exchange under the
ticker symbol COIN. The day
before the Allen & Co.
conference began, Wences
officially announced the $20
million he had raised from
Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin,
and several other investors,
making him the best-funded
Bitcoin company in the
world, according to publicly
released data.
At the Allen & Co.
conference,
Wences
was
given one of the speaking
slots before Jeff Bezos and
Warren Buffett took the
stage. Wences gave what was
becoming a standard talk,
beginning with the history of
money, and going on to
discuss the potential for
Bitcoin to provide financial
services to poor people who
had long been shut out. He
touched on Xapo only briefly,
at the end. After Wences
came down and took a seat
with Belle, Bezos said from
the stage that it was the kind
of talk that kept him coming
to these events.
In the hallway walking to
lunch, after the Bezos-Buffett
conversation, Wences spotted
Bill Gates, who had been
notably
reticent
about
Bitcoin. Wences knew that
Gates’s
multibillion-dollar
foundation had been making
a big push to get people in the
developing world connected
financially,
and
Wences
approached him to explain
why Bitcoin might help his
cause. As soon as Wences
broached the topic, Gates’s
face clouded over, and there
was a note of anger in his
voice as he told Wences that
the foundation would never
use an anonymous money to
further its cause.
Wences was somewhat
taken aback, but this was not
the first time he had been