Brief of some days, for the many who weren't present...
https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/2021/03/03/the-reformed-bitcoin-maxi-who-...
The reformed Bitcoin Maxi who saw the light: Erik Voorhees
“It seemed to me antithetical to have a decentralized digital economy where
there is only one chain.”
Elias Ahonen by Elias Ahonen
March 3, 2021
in Columns, Journeys
“We felt like we were doing God's work,” explains cryptocurrency
payments pioneer Erik Voorhees as he recalls trying to convert the
unbelievers in the early days of Bitcoin.
The man whose gambling platform SatoshiDice was once responsible for half
of all Bitcoin transactions, is now an elder statesman of crypto and the
CEO of the ShapeShift exchange.
He remembers Bitcoin being written off as a joke at the Money 2020
conference in Las Vegas back in 2012. At the time he was working for
BitInstant, one of the first Bitcoin exchanges, and they had a booth right
next door to PayPal.
“I remember the PayPal people nearby kind of snickering at us. A couple
of them had maybe heard of Bitcoin. If they'd even heard about it, it was
a total joke — a stupid scam on the internet, or something. It was a
totally unproductive conference.”
History has not been kind to the snickerers and scam-sayers, many of whom
have since been converted. In 2020, eight years after the conference,
Paypal finally joined the fray, enabling users to buy and sell crypto, and
it will soon add it as a method of payment at 29 million merchants.
Voorhees spread the gospel of Satoshi at the conference alongside Charlie
Shrem and Roger Ver. Shrem was the founder of BitInstant, viewed by some
as a martyr to the cause after serving two years in prison on a case
related to an exchange user reselling Bitcoin on the darknet marketplace
Silk Road. Ver was perhaps the biggest believer of all, earning the
nickname ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ for his charismatic promotion of the
currency.
“In terms of proselytizing, Roger was the absolute best. He was a total
maniac about it” Voorhees recounts with a chuckle.
“Even for Charlie and I, who were very much supportive of the general
sentiment, It was pretty overwhelming and just incessant.”
“Everyone that works at a startup feels a little bit like they're
changing the world, that they have this huge mission, and certainly every
company tries to amplify that,” he says, being a CEO himself. But for
Bitcoiners, Voorhees clarifies, “it is really a ‘change the world’
kind of thing, and to change the world on a fundamental level. It's to
change the institution of money itself — that is a profoundly tall
order.”
Vorhees explains that he sees Bitcoin as nothing less than revolutionary:
“It's not just a better user-interface for the money that people had
before. It’s a different type of money that changes government, changes
culture, changes social and economic relationships on a very very deep
deep level. That's why it's taken so long to to catch on, to get
recognized, because it is trying to move into such an entrenched
institution.”
It's 2012. @ErikVoorhees @rogerkver and I decided to pool our money
together for the first #Money2020 event. We told them we wanted the best
booth we could afford, but we needed to be next to the @PayPal booth so
we can show the world OUR financial system!
Welcome, Paypal! pic.twitter.com/5BzvQDfvFb
-- Charlie Shrem (@CharlieShrem) October 21, 2020
Libertarian roots
Now 35, Voorhees spent his early ‘90’s childhood in the mountains of
Colorado before moving to the University of Puget Sound near Seattle in
2003. He studied international economics and business but doesn’t really
feel like he learnt either.
“In the entire major of economics, though I had courses in the history
of economic thought, I never learned about the Austrians,” he says,
referring to the Austrian School of economics. Often ignored by mainstream
Keynesian economists, Austrians are obsessed with things like hard money
and decry unbacked fiat currencies so they have been embraced by gold-bugs
and the Bitcoin community, which is after all, often called ‘digital
gold’.
A freshly minted graduate in 2008, Voorhees left to pursue adventure in
Dubai where “anyone with a college degree could immediately get a job,
because they were growing so fast.”
Working as a marketer for a real estate agency, he watched from a distance
as the world he thought he knew began to buckle under the weight of the
unfolding Global Financial Crisis. Dubai did not feel its effects until
half a year later, he recounts, describing the intervening time as “this
very weird period where Dubai was going through this massive economic
boom, and the rest of the Western world was falling apart.”
From this desert oasis spared from the global drought, the business and
economics graduate “started really understanding money on what I felt
was a very fundamental level.” For Voorhees, the story of money is a
simple one: “money emerges as the good that is bartered for most
frequently.” That used to be gold and is currently fiat money, but it
could just as well be something else, if a more useful and efficient money
was embraced.
Upon this realization, Voorhees took on a “very strong aversion to fiat
currency and to government control of money” because as a believer in a
market economy, he felt that no government should control the price or
distribution of any goods. “Money was actually the most important good
of all, and thus most important to not be centrally planned. And yet it
was even in, you know, allegedly capitalist economies,” he says.
“A capitalist economy that has a government-managed money system
seemed completely antithetical, but I didn't have any answers or
solutions to that other than some kind of return to the gold standard,
which seemed somewhat anachronistic.”
Voorhees returned to Colorado after two years abroad, soon moving to New
Hampshire to join The Free State Project, an organized political migration
which he describes as “a multi-decade initiative to move 20,000 radical
libertarians to one small jurisdiction [New Hampshire] to hopefully have
an outsized influence on the political structure.” It was there, in the
company of fellow radical libertarian political activists, that Voorhees
encountered Bitcoin in 2011.
“At that point I got completely hooked, and a year later ended up
leaving New Hampshire and moving to New York to join Charlie Shrem at
BitInstant.” There, he took the reins of marketing as employee number
three.
It was around that time that Charlie Shrem, Roger Ver, and Erik Voorhees
— each of whom would go on to become crypto-luminaries in their own
right — pooled their money together to set up a Bitcoin booth at the
Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas. “We needed to be next to the PayPal
booth so we can show the world OUR financial system,” Shrem recounted.
Vorhees says they failed to convert anyone to Bitcoin at the conference
despite their best efforts.
Belief in false profits
Vorhees admits he used to be a Bitcoin Maximalist, a believer in the one
true coin who rejected all false currencies. “I used to be a maximalist.
Obviously when I got into Bitcoin, it was kind of the only coin,” he
says.
“As other coins came out I dismissed them, scoffed at them, and
generally didn't like them because I felt like they were a distraction
from the important project.”
Though he tried to focus on Satoshi’s vision, the new projects started
gnawing at him and he realized that many of them “were doing things that
Bitcoin wouldn't do or couldn't do.” By mid 2014, his conversion was in
full swing.
“My whole mindset began changing. One of the most important things about
Bitcoin is that it is decentralised. And it seemed to me antithetical to
have a decentralized digital economy where there is only one chain — you
know, one code base, one chain, one set of economic rules. It seemed very
appropriate that you would get multiple different digital assets, and that
was actually part of the decentralization, part of the virtue of Bitcoin
was that Bitcoin isn't the only thing there.”
He tempers this by adding the usual provisos — most tokens are garbage,
many are scams, a majority will fail. “It's only a minority of them that
are interesting, but a minority is a lot more than one.”
ETH Folks... try not to become to Binancechain what the Bitcoin Maxis
are to Ethereum