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Charlie Shrem: The Journey of Bitcoin - [Making Markets, REPLAY]

·49 min·3 clips

Charlie says Bitcoin looked like the only peer-to-peer cash when ACH took three to four days.

Eric Golden frames the interview around the psychology and structure that shape markets. Charlie Shrem starts with his Brooklyn upbringing and Orthodox Jewish background, then explains how Bitcoin entered his life through business and online commerce more than theory. BitInstant and the Bitcoin Foundation sit at the center of his early story. He describes those years as a period of fear about Bitcoin's political associations and whether the project would stay offshore. The conversation keeps coming back to the people who pushed him toward libertarian and Austrian ideas. He says reading those writers changed how he understood government, money, and economics. He also admits that much of that reading came later, including while he was in prison. The financial crisis hangs over the exchange. Shrem ties it to the anger he felt as banks were rescued and ordinary people lost houses and jobs. He describes Zuccotti Park as part of the same emotional backdrop. For a while, he saw Bitcoin as just another e-commerce business, and he once expected crypto to stay offshore. That changed as the project matured and moved back toward the United States. The interview touches the early fear around Bitcoin's political associations. Shrem says that fear pushed some people to leave for Panama. He does not romanticize the space. Scams and fraud are still part of the story, and he says they will keep happening to everyone. His answer is to keep building good products and keep getting rid of bad actors. Golden closes by pulling that history back to the present question of what Bitcoin can still become if it is built here.

As heard by us

Charlie Shrem's early Bitcoin story, told through belief, timing, political baggage, and the push to build useful products.

Charlie Shrem's path from Brooklyn and Orthodox Judaism into Bitcoin gives the episode its center. The conversation tracks how an early believer first saw Bitcoin as an e-commerce business and only later as something larger.

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Why you'd press play

You want the early Bitcoin story from someone who was there before it got polished.

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