by Ben Mezrich
Cameron stood there, the dust swirling between him, Tyler, and Facebook’s former number two. He stared at Moskovitz, Moskovitz stared at him. And then, suddenly, Moskovitz stepped forward and hugged him.
It was a Burning Man moment. Here “radical inclusion” reigned supreme. This moment might have gone completely differently if it had happened in the real world, outside this desert realm, in New York or Silicon Valley. Would the world outside this world even allow it? Or would some force, someone, or something get in the way? No one would ever know, because it had happened here, and in this way. And for at least the brief moment of time that it took to hug it out on the playa, the past was the past—the water of discord was under the bridge.
After they’d separated, Moskovitz shook both their hands and invited the twins to a grilled cheese party at his camp the next day. As it turned out, Cameron was too busy working through his feelings to remember where the camp was located. But maybe that was for the best; as he later discovered, Zuckerberg had flown into Burning Man on a helicopter to help serve the grilled cheeses. If Cameron and Tyler had attended, who knows what would have happened? Was it even possible that they might have also hugged it out with Zuckerberg? On the playa, among the dust of the earth and the sea of humanity, among all that spirituality, love, and gratitude, could even the Winklevii and Zuckerberg have let bygones be bygones over grilled cheeses?
Well, it was a nice idea.
* * *
Cameron opened his eyes to find himself sitting behind his desk in his glass office in New York, as far from the Black Rock City desert and Burning Man and the never-ending playa as he could be. Sometimes it was hard to know why a specific memory bubbled up when it did; that hug on the Esplanade seemed like such distant history. And yet it had been simmering in the back of his mind for some time. Maybe it was because he and Tyler had founded a startup, their first since Harvard Connection/ConnectU almost a decade ago.
The idea was called Gemini—a fully regulated, fully compliant, virtual currency exchange headquartered in New York.
Once Silk Road had gone down, Mt. Gox had become Bitcoin’s biggest liability. And then, two weeks after Charlie’s arrest and the NYDFS Virtual Currency Hearings, where the twins had spoken in front of Lawsky and the regulators, Mt. Gox had collapsed. Karpeles, in a last-ditch effort, had frantically approached the twins to see if they would fund an emergency bailout of Mt. Gox. But it had already been too late—800,000 bitcoin had been looted from customers’ accounts by sophisticated hackers—a loss worth over $450 million at the time.
After the fall of Mt. Gox, the twins had become convinced that Bitcoin desperately needed a new wave of entrepreneurs and companies that could sweep away the broken pieces of that first wave—the Charlies, the Karpeleses. If there was no safe and secure place for people to buy, sell, and store virtual currency, the innovation would soon fail. Even before Mt. Gox’s collapse, Cameron and Tyler had been searching for entrepreneurs who were building the next generation of exchanges—but they hadn’t been able to find anyone who they believed was taking the right approach.
The twins believed that for an exchange to be successful, it needed four fundamental pillars seared into its DNA: licensing, compliance, security, and technology. Some entrepreneurs they talked to had the technology part right but didn’t emphasize compliance enough, while others were not focused enough on the security. There was always a corner being cut or a dangerous compromise being made. No one was embracing all four principals equally, and eventually the twins had decided that they would have to take matters into their own hands.
On January 23, 2015, Cameron had announced their plans to the world:
Today, my brother, Tyler, and I are proud to announce Gemini: a next-generation bitcoin exchange. What exactly do we mean by “next generation”? We mean a fully regulated, fully compliant, New York–based bitcoin exchange for both individuals and institutions alike. Why? Because it’s about time.…
Cameron knew it was ambitious, another big bet on a par with their original purchase of 1 percent of the new currency and their still unrealized ETF. He and Tyler had been assembling the Gemini team for more than a year. Their goal was simple: bring together the nation’s top security experts, technologists, and financial engineers to build a world-class cryptocurrency platform from the ground up with a security-first mentality. A fully regulated exchange in the heart of the old-world financial realm: New York. One that asked for permission, rather than forgiveness. They weren’t trying to hack their way around regulation; they were going to help build it. In light of how ambitious the venture was, they had named their new venture, well partially, after one of NASA’s early space programs: Gemini. The comparison to NASA’s second spaceflight project, which was meant to be a bridge from the Mercury program, which had put men into orbit, and Apollo, which put them on the moon, made sense to Cameron: if it succeeded, Gemini would be a bridge to the future of money.
But they hadn’t been thinking only of rocket ships when they’d chosen the name. Gemini was also the Latin word for “twins.” As such—and as they’d explained in their announcement—“it inherently explored the concept of duality.” The old, legacy world of money melding with a future filled with virtual currency, both intersecting on the Gemini platform.
Eight months after their announcement, on October 5, 2015, Gemini had opened its doors to the world.
Their goal was not just to build a billion-dollar company—a “Unicorn,” in Silicon Valley parlance—their goal was to build something more. A company that would last for a hundred years—what they called “Centurion.” Cameron and Tyler were playing the long game. Gemini, they often joked, was trying to be the fastest tortoise in the race.
Cameron and Tyler were not just Gemini’s founders, but they were also its investors, through Winklevoss Capital. They didn’t just have their skin in the game—they were all in, down to the bones.
Sitting in his office, Cameron wondered if the recurring memory of that moment at Burning Man had something to do with the fact that he and his brother were finally entrepreneurs once more. The first time since college, since they’d approached Mark Zuckerberg with their idea.
Did he keep coming back to that moment when he’d come face-to-face with Facebook’s number two, because he and Tyler had finally reached the point where they could move on from where they’d started? Had their second act finally eclipsed their first?
Cameron realized his brother was at the door of his office. He guessed that if Tyler knew what he was thinking, he’d have told him that he was reading into things too much. Cameron has always been the dreamier one. To Tyler, real life didn’t have first, second, or even third acts. Life was a ride down a river in a boat.
“You see it?” Tyler said, almost offhand, like it was the most meaningless question in the world.
Cameron glanced past his brother, through the open door. Winklevoss Capital, now also home to Gemini, was bustling. They were hiring so fast to keep up with Gemini’s growth and with Bitcoin’s that Cameron recognized only half of the people who populated the desks in the open area, a sea of monitors, software engineers, operational personnel, customer support representatives, and more. Although their ETF was still a dream, Gemini was humming along, and over the past year, the price of bitcoin had been enjoying a steady rise since January.
“See what?” Cameron asked.
“Look at your computer.”
Cameron shifted in his seat, then faced the screen on his desk. His eyes moved to the ever-present ticker at the bottom, and then he paused. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought it was a mistake—a zero where something else should have been, a glitch of pixels on the screen.
Bitcoin had just hit $10,000 a coin. Cameron knew there were many reasons that had led to this incredible rise: regulation around cryptocurrencies had gotten clearer, and most people didn’t believe that governments around the world were going to outlaw the new forms of money. More and better entrepreneurs had moved into the space,
built more infrastructure, making it easy to buy, sell, and store bitcoin. There was a greater level of education—people had started to see that Silk Road wasn’t Bitcoin, that there was so much more to the technology.
In effect, it was akin to how the internet had started off as a niche, hard-to-use thing—and then had just proliferated over time, as infrastructure and user-friendly applications emerged, and as more entrepreneurs flooded into the space. And so bitcoin had risen, and risen and risen—and was now at $10,000.
The calculation wasn’t hard for Cameron to do in his head. As of that moment, the entire market cap of bitcoin had reached over $200 billion. Beginning in 2011, they had acquired 1 percent of that market. And since they’d started buying the virtual currency, they hadn’t sold a single bitcoin.
Cameron looked at his brother, then smiled.
“I’m six foot five, two hundred and twenty pounds, and have a billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin,” he said. “Oh, and there’s two of me.”
His brother was ready with a line of his own:
“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars … in bitcoin.”
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had just officially become the world’s first known Bitcoin billionaires.
31
FROM DUMAS TO BALZAC
January 4, 2018.
1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California.
A state-of-the-art campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, the headquarters of one of the biggest companies on earth.
One might imagine a brightly lit corner of a vast, open floor of cubicles.
A boyish man edging toward his midthirties. An expressionless face beneath a mop of slightly curly, auburn hair, caught in the glow of a laptop computer. A gray hoodie, flip-flops, shorts.
A vast room, inside the headquarters that he had built on top of an idea that began as a revolution and morphed into something else, something worth many billions of dollars, something huge and omnipresent and, as of late, controversial, maybe enduring another mere “speed bump” in its never-ending quest for total, worldwide adoption and domination, or maybe, finally fraying at the edges.
His back to the vast room, the man, still boyish, though he was married and the father of two, might have begun to type.
As with every year at approximately this time, there was a mission statement to write: looking back on how far he’d come since the year prior, telling the world what he had planned for the year ahead. Why he was writing such a thing was not a question that anybody would ask. As the CEO of the juggernaut that had connected the world, changed how it interacted, he was one of the most powerful people on the planet. His words mattered.
“Every year I take on a personal challenge to learn something new,” his statement began. “I’ve visited every U.S. state, run 365 miles, built an AI for my home, read twenty-five books, and learned Mandarin.…”
It was an enviable bucket list. As he continued typing, he moved from accomplishments to history—how he’d begun chasing these experiences in 2009, when the economy was faltering, before his company was profitable. Because things suddenly felt similar today:
“The world feels anxious and divided.…”
It wasn’t just the world that felt disjointed; many felt his company was feeding that anxiety. Mistakes had been made, lines had been crossed. Fake news spewed and targeted to millions of unwitting eyes. Election interference that seemed so profuse, it just might have altered history. Egregious amounts of user data packaged, given away, hacked. A business model built on the commodification of private lives …
“This may not seem like a personal challenge on its face, but I think I’ll learn more by focusing intensely on these issues than I would by doing something completely separate. These issues touch on questions of history, civics, political philosophy, media, government, and of course technology.…”
Somewhere in that vast room, one of the many dozens of computers in one of the many dozens of work spaces may very well have been open to a screen showing the current price of bitcoin. At the moment, the virtual currency sat at a little over $16,000 a coin. Incredible by any measure—considering that in 2009, the early days that he had just referred to in his letter, Bitcoin had just been starting its journey worth well below a penny a coin.
No doubt he knew that history—because that was how he approached everything. He studied, he learned, he consumed. He must have known that the price of a single bitcoin first reached parity with the U.S. dollar in 2011. Had continued to rise, but was mostly unknown, until the events in the tiny island nation of Cyprus in 2013 caused the price to run above $250 a coin. More volatility followed, but by the end of 2013, the price had hit $1,000.
And then it had crossed $10,000 in November of 2017, then doubled over the next month to $20,000—before sliding back down to where it sat today. It was impossible to know where that price would go from here, or even what, at the moment, Bitcoin really was. A commodity in the midst of a bubble? A new currency? The future of money? A new system, one that would usher in a new, more decentralized world?
Whatever it was, it had been something for a few years now, since 2009, and he hadn’t seen it happening, or he hadn’t taken it seriously enough, or he had simply chosen to stay on the sidelines.
But other people had seen it happening and had taken it seriously. Certain people had not only been accumulating bitcoin, but they had also been instrumental in its incredible rise.
He began to type again.
“One of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs. decentralization. A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands.… But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies and governments using technology to watch their citizens, many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.”
Ironic, how fast technology could turn on its head, how a revolution could suddenly become what it was supposed to be fighting against—the Establishment—a centralized monopoly, a data cartel, holding the world’s data hostage.
“There are important counter-trends to this—like encryption and cryptocurrency—that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.…”
Encryption and cryptocurrency—the type of counter-trends, digital barbarians at the gate that could dismantle empires.
But the truth was, revolutions were a lot like entrepreneurial ideas. They could spring wholly built from a creative source, a brilliant mind: maybe a boy genius in a hoodie and flip-flops. They could be co-opted, borrowed, changed just enough to seem unique. They could be subverted—on purpose, for reasons of profit—or involuntarily, a victim of their own growth, their cells becoming cancerous. Revolutions could even be stolen.
There was no way to know what would come next; whether he was just writing a mission statement to try and mollify his growing number of detractors, tacitly acknowledging the sound of digital tumbrels rolling in, declaring something, or just contemplating.
Either way, he hit a few more keys and posted the statement to his blog, instantly sending his words to more than one hundred million followers, a fraction of the 1.5 billion people who logged into his company every day.
Then he turned off his computer and watched the screen as it went dark.
Epilogue
WHERE ARE THEY NOW … ?
Much as The Accidental Billionaires and The Social Network strove to tell the story of Facebook’s founding—that first year of inception and adoption—Bitcoin Billionaires is an origin story, both of the characters within these pages, and of the cryptocurrency itself. We’ve watched Facebook grow and change over the past decade, and similarly, it will be interesting to
see where Bitcoin goes. In my opinion, the story of this new era of cryptocurrencies is just beginning.
One of the greatest strikes against cryptocurrencies has always been their volatility, which the past year has only served to highlight. Since I started writing this book, the price of Bitcoin has declined more than seventy percent; at the same time, the crypto industry has grown by leaps and bounds, with new companies aimed at servicing, profiting from, and building on this novel technology that springs up every day. The blockchain is everywhere, and Bitcoin knows no borders; Bitcoin believers in nearly every country in the world continue to HODL (hold), even as Wall Street struggles to understand where crypto fits within financial structures that seem more antiquated every day.
There is no doubt in my mind: the Bitcoin revolution is real, and cryptocurrencies are here to stay.
* * *
As of this moment, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss still remain Bitcoin Billionaires. Together they are the CEO and presidents of Gemini, their crypto exchange, which now has over two hundred employees and is growing by the day. Gemini has been described as the most regulated crypto exchange and custodian in the world, and on its own is thought to be valued at well over a billion dollars. The twins are also early investors in Ether, Zcash, Filecoin, Tezos, and many other cryptocurrencies.
Tyler and Cameron continue to be Bitcoin’s biggest advocates. They believe that though Bitcoin has come a long way since its infancy, there is still a long way to go. If, as they believe, Bitcoin is truly gold 2.0, it is still radically undervalued. Gold is a seven-trillion-dollar market; Bitcoin, currently, is valued at only a fraction of that amount.
Whatever happens next, there is no doubt that the Bitcoin story is far from over. Moreover, the technology behind Bitcoin has only barely begun to infiltrate the financial, technological, and online worlds. The technology that makes Bitcoin work—the blockchain and crypto private keys—has the potential to decentralize not just money but also data in a way that could “give the internet back to the people”—freeing user information from the siloed monopolies of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. The irony is that Bitcoin and its hashes may very well do what Facebook so spectacularly failed to do—protect its users’ data from hackers, misuse, and overarching authority, and allow a form of online communication that is entirely and truly free.
