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Eleven years ago this week, one of the first great Bitcoin documentaries, The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
The film is rare in that it was made by someone with real skin in the game.
It centers around Daniel Mross, a Pittsburgh-native computer programmer who began mining bitcoin in 2011 and went on to found Bitcoin-focused investment fund Maximalist Capital.
Filmed by brother Nicholas between 2013 and 2014, when bitcoin was headed to $100 for the first time, Dan travels the world to meet major figures in the space, as yet only four years into its lifespan.
They meet Charlie Shrem, then-CEO of bitcoin exchange service BitInstant as it worked through sudden supply issues resulting from Mt Gox downtime; Eric Voorhees, when BitDice was still a big deal; and Mark Karpeles, who gave a secretive tour of Mt Gox’s office in Japan only months before it went down for good.
Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam also make cameos. Coinbase was timely: The global Bitcoin economy was actively reckoning with the growing need for more crypto exchanges in light of the Mt Gox debacle.
The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin has a 7.1 rating on IMDb
The Mross brothers even visit Gavin Andresen — still lead maintainer at the time — at his Massachusetts home. “Do your neighbors know that you’re at the center of one of the most disruptive technologies?” Daniel asked.
“I think they know that I do this wacky Bitcoin project… I don’t think they know quite how big it is yet,” Andresen replied.
One electric scene shows Roger Ver — before the Block Size Wars, when he was Bitcoin Jesus — explain the benefits of Bitcoin (and BitPay, in which he was an early investor) to a Korean grocery store owner in the Bay Area.
Bitcoin and BitPay’s low fees compared to credit cards were a major selling point. “I guarantee over the next couple weeks you’ll have lots of computer nerds that love bitcoins, [who] will be coming in here specifically to shop at your supermarket so that they can pay with Bitcoin,” Ver said.
The store owner had the perfect follow-up: “And there’s no central office that they could raid or anything like that?…So who’s the owner of bitcoins: everybody that owns bitcoins?”
Ver replied: “Yeah! Just like, ‘Who’s the owner of gold: whoever owns some gold.’ Short of shutting down the entire internet and the entire world, there’s no way to stop Bitcoin.”
When we speak of Bitcoin nostalgia, this type of scene comes to mind. What we all would do to return to a time when simply explaining the fundamentals of Bitcoin as it is in the moment, and not what it could be sometime in the future, brought real wonder into people’s lives.
Bitcoin’s magic affected all sorts of people. “Mr Bitcoin,” a drug dealer who did business via Silk Road out of an internet cafe in Los Angeles, told the filmmakers:
“I think of it as a global thing when I’m on the computer — I’m doing business with the world. When I first heard about it, I was laughing about it. It took me a week to just even think about this for real…I mean, I’m not gonna lie — I get booty off this. I kind of like talking about this stuff with girls, like girls be like, ‘That shit is hot,’ and like, ‘You’re not on your street, and you got a little nerd knowledge; this is great.’”
But if nostalgia is really about severe homesickness, as Krauss suggests, then what is “home” in the Bitcoin context?
Watching The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, the answer is clear: our homes, literally.
The film starts with Daniel showing off his home mining setup — a handful of GPUs sprawled across a basic table in his basement.
Then, as the film progresses and the mining difficulty rises alongside bitcoin’s price, he upgrades to some of the first ever ASIC rigs, still in his basement.
By the end, though, Daniel is forced to give up mining altogether, having been actively priced out during filming. “When I started, Bitcoin mining was a hobby for geeks, now it’s a big business. In order to continue mining and continue playing the game and be competitive and profitable, I would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on gear.”
