Patrick Courrielche: Is Bitcoin dangerous to America? The topic has been popping up more and more on our screens. But the speculation was sent into overdrive after President Trump condemned Bitcoin and other new digital currencies.

To get to the bottom of Bitcoin, we’ll first look into the origin of this tech phenomenon. We’ll talk to a few experts on its emergence and impact on America. And we’ll hear a story about the lengths to which the U.S. government has gone to halt its growth.

But I want to warn you before we get started. At first glance the topic of Bitcoin seems complicated. It has its own language and challenges the way we think of money. That said, if you stay with us, you’ll know more about Bitcoin than most. And today that’s vital because some say the disruptive technology driving this new phenomenon could even be bigger than the Internet. Understanding Bitcoin has now become mandatory.

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Billy Bambrough: One of the many similarities or comparisons that people make is bitcoin to the early days of the Internet.

Mike Cernovich: What would happen for example if Gulf nations rather than trading oil in dollars moved to bitcoin. That would I think destroy America as a global empire.

Peter Morici: governments are worried, however. I don't know that anybody can prevent it.

Lyn Ulbricht: they needed a scapegoat. And Ross was their scapegoat. That's my opinion and I think I personally think it was because of the Bitcoin.

Patrick Courrielche: Everyone is talking about Bitcoin. But what it is? Simply put, it’s a new currency system.

When we think of money, our minds typically conjure up images of greenbacks – U.S. dollars…that physical paper money we sometimes carry in our wallets.

Adryana Cortez: Bitcoin is also considered money, but it’s a brand new form of currency that only comes in electronic form – there is no physical coin or bill. This kind of digital money is called crypto currency.

Billy Bambrough: Yeah I think the simplest way to think about Bitcoin and other crypto currencies all of which do stem from Bitcoin originally is best thought of all those Internet cash.

Adryana Cortez: That’s Billy Bambrough, a freelance journalist that’s been covering crypto currencies since 2012.

Billy Bambrough: So just like you have cash that you use in a store Bitcoin or other forms of crypto currencies are or could be considered cash that you use on the Internet. So it's digital cash. It doesn't fit quite into the same definitions of a traditional currency. It doesn't fit quite into the definitions of a traditional commodity like gold. It's somewhere in between the exact you use case has not quite been pinned down yet because it is something entirely new.

Adryana Cortez: Internet cash isa brand new, disruptive development in currency. The history of money helps illustrate this fact.

Patrick Courrielche: Before we had currency, people had to rely on the barter system – where you would trade something of value that you possessed for something of value that someone else possessed. For example, your stockpile of furs were a form of currency to purchase, say, a bale of wheat that you needed. But often there was a problem. What you had of value wasn’t always what someone else wanted in a barter deal. Person A may have had a bale of wheat that you wanted, but they didn’t need furs…so the trade wouldn’t happen. You’d have to find out what Person A wanted, let’s say they needed wood, then you’d have to find Person B that had wood and trade your furs with that person – assuming they wanted furs. Then you could take your newly acquired wood and go back to Person A and trade your wood for their wheat – that is, assuming they still had the wheat. As you can see, bartering was a bit complicated and as societies grew, it became even more difficult – so a need for currency arose in order to facilitate trading.  

Adryana Cortez: Throughout history, people have used all kinds of physical currency.

Milton Friedman: [defines money]

Adryana Cortez: That’s the late and famed economist Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman: [defines money]

Adryana Cortez: Most pre-industrial revolution cultures decided on some form of currency to facilitate trade.

Peter Morici: for example, the Indians shall walk on, which were basically beads, is that would be limited in supply with limited the supply of Shell Wampum. Was it was difficult to make.

Adryana Cortez: That’s economist Peter Morici, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Peter Morici: Anybody could make it in the Indian community. However, it took a lot of time and effort.

Adryana Cortez: It’s that time and effort in creating the shell wampum that gave it value to the Indian people.

Patrick Courrielche: For thousands of years, gold and silver have been used as money. We’ve mined these precious metals and forged them into coins, each branded with an official stamp by some trusted third party to guarantee their purity. The work that went into mining it, refining it, and pressing it into coins helped establish the value of the coin. But gold and silver didn’t necessarily have any intrinsic value. They had value because everyone agreed that they had value.

Peter Morici: Know money is based on faith. People need to understand this after all.

Back in the days when we used gold, we'd make gold value. The answers people made it valuable. They decided it was valuable and we'd exchange it for goods.

Adryana Cortez: But as time passed, the use of gold and silver coins as currency became inefficient. People needed to trade in denominations smaller than the value of each coin. They needed a form currency that was easier to handle. So, in part, to solve this problem, governments began issuing paper currency.

Patrick Courrielche: In the United States, for many years our currency, the U.S. dollar, was backed by gold. This was known as the Gold Standard. Our central bank, called the Federal Reserve, would issue paper money, with the total of all U.S. Dollars in circulation representing the physical amount of gold held by the Treasury Department. The paper money itself had no intrinsic value, but it was a form of accounting that represented an actual portion of gold. In other words, the dollar was just an accounting system to keep track of how much gold everyone owned. The Federal Reserve could not just print extra paper money at will…it was generally limited by the amount of the precious metal held by the Treasury.

But that all changed in 1971

President Nixon abandoned the Gold Standard. Of course that wasn’t even remotely true. Today, the value of the dollar has plummeted by 84% since Nixon made the announcement. Again Billy Bambrough.

Billy Bambrough: So the the U.S. system at the moment and many other monetary systems around the world are based on fractional reserve lending and on central banks deciding how much money to print when to print it how to manage the economy…

Adryana Cortez: From 1971 on, the U.S. Dollar was no longer backed by gold, but instead it was backed by a promise from the United States government. Its value being derived by, among other things, how stable the government is and how much money is in circulation. The U.S. Dollar became just an accounting system of value backed by nothing but a promise, with the banks acting as a trusted third party that records the economic transactions in a ledger, like our bank statements and credit card transactions statements. With gold no longer restraining how much money was in circulation, the central bank was free to create U.S. Dollars out of thin air.

Patrick Courrielche: Today, every major country has this type of currency system. Because of the stability of the United States, our currency became very powerful throughout the world because people trust that they can safely hold their property in the U.S. Dollar without their assets losing value. Modern day Venezuela, on the other hand, is unstable…which is why you see their paper currency littering their streets…it’s worthless.

But even with the stability of our government, in the early 1980s, some began to question our currency system and the government’s ability to monitor almost every financial transaction. At the time, American cryptographer David Chaum expressed the idea of an anonymous electronic money to avoid Big Brother’s watchful eye. A cryptographer is someone that designs safe ways to transfer information electronically without the information being intercepted or duplicated by a third party.

Adryana Cortez: A movement began to form around this desire for privacy. The people drawn to the movement were called cypherpunks – cypher referring to a secret way of writing…what is referred to in the digital world as encryption.

Patrick Courrielche: In the early 90s these cypherpunks coalesced around an electronic mailing list to share their ideas – and the movement slowly grew. People like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and lesser known names like American cryptographer Hal Finney were cypherpunks.

By 1997, the originator of the concept of crypto currency, David Chaum, secured some venture capital to start an Internet currency he called Digicash. Other cypherpunks also entered the ring, each attempting to create their own online money that was as secure and anonymous as cash in the physical world. However, the idea didn’t spread. Corporations and merchants weren’t so keen on the idea of anonymous Internet cash. They liked capturing your data from traceable electronic transactions like credit cards. But perhaps more importantly, consumers weren’t lining up to use digital money. David Chaum said at the time, quote, “As the Web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them.” End quote. By the end of 1998, David Chaum’s Digicash filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The other electronic currency outfits failed as well.

People hadn’t yet understood the precious data they were giving up to Big Tech companies with every Internet transaction. And besides, in the late 90s it was easy for everyone to open an account with a bank or credit card company. They welcomed everyone. No one was being banned from these financial institutions. So the demand for a new Internet cash was near zero.

Still,by the turn of the millennium, even with the failed attempts at a crypto currency, a few forward thinkers saw the eventual development of Internet cash that was completely separate from the US dollar. Again, Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman: [predicts Bitcoin]

Patrick Courrielche: The race for a crypto currency was largely shelved by the early 2000s, but little did the cypherpunks know that their passion was about to be given a rebirth by a mysterious anonymous figure…a figure that would develop a disruptive new technology that could threaten the government’s monopoly on printing money.

More after the break.

Adryana Cortez: Welcome back. I’m Adryana Cortez.

So the race for a digital cash, or crypto currency, had been largely shelved by the early 2000s. Corporations and merchants preferred credit card transactions where they could capture data on their customers. People also hadn’t yet understood the attack on their online privacy. As a result, there was no demand for crypto currencies. But an event of global proportions was about to give rise to a mysterious character that would breath new life into the idea.

With the fall of Lehman Brothers in the throws of the 2008 financial crisis, many Americans lost faith in the United States monetary system. Cypherpunks began revisiting the idea of a digital currency divorced from the centralized Federal Reserve…the system that many felt threw the global economy into chaos.

On October 31, 2008, in the midst of the crisis, an unknown web user, or perhaps a group of users, going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a white paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash Systemand published it to the web address bitcoin.org. Satoshi then posted a link to the document on a cryptography mailing list, stating quote “I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”Satoshi was proposing a new form of Internet Cash…it was the Napster of currency.

The system Satoshi developed was a decentralized currency system called Bitcoin, one that eliminated the need for banks as the middleman. Again, Billy Bambrough.

Billy Bambrough:But because of the two thousand and eight financial crisis in which Bitcoin was created and can be seen as a catalyst for interest in bitcoin people have decided that perhaps this monetary system is not the best one.

Adryana Cortez:As we mentioned earlier, our U.S. currency is just an accounting system, with third parties like banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions all recording transactions and keeping track of value. In one way or another, each of these third parties fall under our central bank…the Federal Reserve. Satoshi designed a system that replaced this centralized banking system with a decentralized collection of computers that automated the accounting the banks performed. This automated system – known as the blockchain – records electronic transactions on a public ledger residing on thousands of computers all across the world in a way that is near impossible to hack. The system removed a costly middleman like Bank of America, Visa and Paypal that deducts large fees. This blockchain technology also partially anonymized every transaction - keeping everyone involved out of the watchful eye of the government. Satoshi Nakamoto created the first Internet cash. Instead of shells, or gold coins, or paper dollars – this new Internet cash system used Bitcoins. The technology was revolutionary.

When I send an email to someone, both I and the person receiving it have a copy of the email. Satoshi’s technology devised a way to send a digital object – the Bitcoin – to someone without leaving a copy with the sender. So when I send a Bitcoin to someone to purchase an item or pay for a service, I no longer have a copy of the Bitcoin…the person I sent it to now has possession of that digital coin. It’s handed off just like cash. The transaction is recorded into a public ledger through an automated system of computers throughout the world…removing the middleman and the fees they charge.

A key of the system is that the computers that perform the computation behind these transactions are rewarded with Bitcoin. Just like when people mine mountains in the hopes of finding gold, these computers compete to perform the computation of Bitcoin transactions in hopes of being rewarded with Bitcoins from the system. As a result, these computers are called miners.

Satoshi released the blockchain computer code that operated this new Internet cash system on January 3, 2009, and the first transaction was recorded just a few days later when Satoshi Nakamoto sent ten Bitcoins to a member of the cypherpunk movement Hal Finney.

A key feature of this Bitcoin system is that there is a limit to the amount of Bitcoins in circulation. Unlike the U.S. Dollar that can be printed by the Federal Reserve at-will – the maximum number of Bitcoins that will ever exist is twenty-one million. Satoshi forced the Bitcoin system to mimic the limits set up by the Gold Standard…where the number of U.S. dollars was confined to the amount of gold in the Treasury Department. This is a very important point. Today, as the Federal Reserve continues to print money, the U.S. Dollar loses purchasing power over time because there are more dollars in circulation. If you think of dollars as shares of stock in the United States – the more dollars that there are, the smaller the share of the United States you own. So the value of a U.S. dollar decreases from year to year. That’s why the price of products continue to rise every year…it’s because your dollars are losing value. Satoshi wanted to solve this problem of inflation by limiting the number of Bitcoins that could ever be in circulation to a finite number…21 million. So from year to year, the value of a Bitcoin will not be diluted like the U.S. dollar.

The first known commercial transaction using Bitcoin occurred in 2010 when a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Papa John’s pizzas. The price tag for the two pies? 10,000 Bitcoins. In July 2019, that same amount of Bitcoins would trade for roughly one hundred million dollars.

In the first couple of years of Bitcoin, few merchants were adopting the crypto currency. It needed a kick-start…one that could prove Bitcoins ability to actually serve as digital cash. That would come with the creation of an online marketplace that would not only prove the legitimacy of crypto currencies – but would also show how much the government feared this new Internet money.

The first broad audience to see the potential of crypto was the Libertarians. They believed in small government, liberty, and free markets. They wanted an end to the War on Drugs, and saw the Federal Reserve as the key culprit behind the 2008 Financial Crisis. One of their leaders, Ron Paul, called for an end to the Fed and a return to a financial system backed by gold. But even as it became abundantly obvious that our central banking system played a primary role in the financial crisis, it also became clear that Washington D.C. was not going to end the Federal Reserve’s reign.

The emergence of Bitcoin provided a new revolutionary way forward. If the Federal Reserve could not be removed…it could just be ignored. If people adopted crypto currency, they could make financial transactions privately between two consenting adults without the banking system as a middleman…just like paper cash. Crypto currency promised true liberty – a paramount principle for Libertarians.

Curtis Green: I got into cryptocurrency. Really? You're up very early on.

Adryana Cortez: That’s Curtis Green, author of Silk Road Takedown.

After the financial crisis, Curtis was, like most Middle Americans, in a bad financial place. Jobs were not easy to come by. The Utah native had a bad back. So work options for Curtis were limited. He began looking for online work and possible investment opportunities that could produce a quick return. That’s when he ran across a discussion of Bitcoin on a web forum.

Curtis Green: So I started following a little bit and I wasn't I wasn't a big I wouldn't have cut into it a big time. I was. I get it intrigued me. And I would the queen talk was up at the time, just just started. And that's where ninety nine point nine percent of all Bitcoin discussion was taken.

So I was there quite a bit early on. And and as I was reading that discussion, they learn more of what it can do. The benefits I learn about how it's a ledger and how it got educated

I saw this bitcoin as being a way of big digital money and they solved a huge problem. They beat the double spend.

Adryana Cortez: The double spend problem is perhaps the first barrier blocking most people from taking crypto currency seriously. An idea embedded in all of us is that digital files can easily be copied. So if someone can copy a digital Bitcoin, it would allow a coin to be spent more than once…or the double spend. So how could Internet cash not be counterfeited? Satoshi Nakamoto solved the double spend problem with Bitcoin.

Curtis Green: But Satoshi, that the developer of bitcoin came up. I don't know how he figured it out, but he figured out how to stop this double spam. So if I have one bitcoin, I submit to you that bitcoin goes to you and it can't be duplicated. So yes, that to me, that was that was fascinating

Adryana Cortez: The more Curtis dug into Bitcoin, and the blockchain technology driving it, the more he was sold on the system.

Curtis Green: But as I started learning did, it intrigued me more and more and more and I could solve a lot of problems and yell the big bang. Being able to have control of your own money instead of having a one on one bank or one person or company being in control where you can easily take back that control where you decide.

It's revolutionary and it's going to change the way we do things. I put one chain and I use block chain as a cryptocurrency, because block chain is the technology behind cryptocurrency. That's why I put launching technology up there to the invention of the cell phone, to the invention of the computer. That's what it's going to do to liberate it helped liberate us and help us with our daily lives in the future.

Adryana Cortez: To try and make money from this new movement in currency, he set up his computer to become a miner – configuring his hard drive to help with the computations behind Bitcoin transactions. When his computer performed this computational task successfully, he received a reward…a small amount of Bitcoin. As time went on he started to generate some income from this, and he wanted to connect with other enthusiasts of the crypto currency.

Curtis Green: And then all of a sudden I I was looking for more places to talk about bitcoin. Well, the Silk Road. Came up

Adryana Cortez:But what Curtis didn’t know at the time was that the website Silk Road was about to become a target of some of the most powerful institutions in the world.

More after the break.

Patrick Courrielche: Welcome back.

So as Curtis became more fascinated by the potential of Bitcoin, he began searching for other places to talk about the crypto currency. The website Silk Road began to pop up in online message forums as THE place to be for the Bitcoin revolution.

Silk Road was an anonymous online marketplace located on what’s called the dark web.

As we promised at the onset of this show, an entirely new language comes with the discussion of Bitcoin. So before getting into Silk Road, you will need to understand what exactly is the dark web.

The dark web is a collection of websites that cannot be found by searching Google or through normal web browsers. The only way to get to a website on the dark web is to use a web browser called The Onion Router, or TOR for short. Think of the dark web as an alternate Internet universe invisible to normal web telescopes like Google or browsers like Safari or Chrome. 

On the regular Internet, anyone attempting to track you can easily find your real identity, your physical location, all of the websites you’ve visited, what kind of computer you’re using, your operating system, your browser…they can follow you wherever you go next, and gather information all along the way, including even your website log-ins and credit card info. Your so-called private information is typically out there for anyone to exploit…if they are savvy enough.

TOR, on the other hand, allows web users to browse through an encrypted network, protecting the privacy and identity of all of its users. It does this with several layers of encryption around the user, hiding all of the user’s private information in what could be thought of as a digitally locked box that can only be opened with a key. To add an extra layer of security, when a TOR user punches in an address for a website on the dark web, TOR does not take them directly to the website. The browser instead routes the user through multiple TOR servers all across the world before reaching the intended website…making it near impossible for anyone to track the identity and original address of the user. Websites on the dark web only allow the TOR browser to connect to their site to increase the privacy and security of its users.

The dark web allows people to send emails, texts, and other communications privately and anonymously – this is how many journalists speak to whistleblowers, how citizens in countries like China or Iran communicate safely and avoid the censorship of their governments. Using the dark web is how the famed publisher Wikileaks communicates privately with whistleblowers that give them leaked data, like the DNC emails during the 2016 election.

This may lead many people to believe that the dark web is a network set up by anarchists or outlaws. But the TOR browser was actually designed in the mid 1990s by the Navy to protect U.S. intelligence communications online. TOR gave journalists, their sources, dissidents, informants, activists and others a way to communicate with intelligence agents without fear of being discovered.

The Silk Road website that Curtis had heard about on the Bitcoin forums lived on this dark web…so he decided to check it out.

What he found out was that Silk Road was an e-commerce website on the dark web, like eBay or Amazon, but the site emphasized anonymity and security. To do this, it married TOR and Bitcoin. The only way to visit Silk Road was through the TOR browser…and the only way to purchase products on the site was with Bitcoin – making the entire transaction between the seller, buyer, and website anonymous. It was also the first massive trial for the use of Bitcoin as Internet cash – and it was quickly becoming a phenomenal success.

In addition to the marketplace, Silk Road had community forums where people talked and helped each other solve problems. Curtis was drawn to these forums.

Curtis Green: They were talking about Bitcoin. They were talking about if there wasn't, there was a community in it. And because there was two different there was there was the merchant side where the stuff was sold. And there was also then there was the the community thread. And that's what is really interesting...

Patrick Courrielche: Community boards like these can be found all across the regular Internet. Places like Reddit, 4chan and the comment sections of websites are just message boards where people gather to communicate with likeminded folks. The boards on Silk Road were just the dark web version of these message boards.

Curtis Green: I was trying to learn how to run a program that nothing to do with their clients. And I can't even remember what the program I was having a problem with when I posted it. Hey, I'm having an issue with this program that somebody popped up so I can help you. And he walked me through it step by step on how to get through my problem. But I was happy with that program.

Patrick Courrielche:Through these message boards Curtis became acclimated with the predominant philosophy behind the core users of the site.

Curtis Green: it was the community behind. And that's and that's why I was there. And then obviously, I lot others. There's these things that libertarian view or, you know, we control. We should be able to put into our own bodies what we want if as long as we don't harm the third person.

Patrick Courrielche:Many on the Silk Road message board were anarcho-capitalists – a form of libertarianism that has a radical view on capitalism, free markets, and the role of the state. They advocate for an elimination of the centralized state that they view is an oppressor that always rules by force and diminishing freedom. The Silk Road administrator himself would post on the message board that the site was founded on libertarian principles. Silk Road users vehemently opposed the war on drugs – and felt they should in fact be legalized because, in their view, besides the principle that people should be able to put in their body whatever they want…many libertarians on these message boards believed that the war on drugs was unwinnable. They thought legalizing them would reduce the violence associated with the street trade.

Because of the anonymous nature of Silk Road, and the emergence of the Internet cash Bitcoin, Silk Road became an extraordinary petri dish to experiment with these libertarian free market ideas. People sold all kids of items on Silk Road.

Curtis Green: Well, you get everything on that. You could buy shirts, you could buy a computer, you could buy a software. And it was all the shit.

Patrick Courrielche: But the items that were most prominent on the site – the product that would eventually make Silk Road a national headline – were the drugs.

Curtis Green: I think it was 77 percent of the drugs that were on the site was marijuana. And so the grand majority was the substance that's legal. And I don't know how many states now, even in Utah, they just legalized medical marijuana.

Patrick Courrielche: But the other 23 percent included MDMA, or ecstasy, cocaine, heroine, LSD, meth, mushrooms, and other illegal substances. How much of these were actually being sold was unknown, but they were no doubt listed for sale on the site. Enthusiasts of Silk Road believed the portal itself was helping reduce the violence associated with the procurement of these substances on the streets because the people would be buying them with or without the Silk Road marketplace. Many believed making the transaction anonymous and shipped rather than handed off in some back alley, eliminated the potential of violence at the point of sale. Drugs have always been sold online, but the emergence of the dark web and Bitcoin made Silk Road the right idea at the right time for this type of illegal marketplace.

Curtis had libertarian leanings, and believes people should generally be able to do what they want to do with their body as long as it doesn’t hurt another person.

Curtis Green: I don't drink, but if I want to drink, I want to be able to take as long as I don't get in the car and drive drunk and kill somebody. Then when I do it, my home is my business and that's it.

Patrick Courrielche:But he says drugs weren’t the reason why he was at the site…it was the community board and their discussions of Bitcoin.

Curtis Green: I didn't go there because of drugs. I'm not a drug dealer, but I don't I'm not. I've never taken an illegal street drug in my life. And but when I got there, I noticed the people they were talking about, that they were talking more about a cryptocurrency...

Patrick Courrielche:But even with illegal drugs being sold, the site wasn’t anything goes. They had their own community rules. The site administrators didn’t allow anything to be sold on the site the harmed innocent people or was necessary to harm people to be brought to market. They prohibited counterfeit money, stolen items, intentional fraud, and pirated software. Hitmen were not allowed and neither was child pornography. Anything else that didn’t meet these criteria was fair game. The site’s community believed Silk Road helped people avoid the regulation of the State – in their eyes an oppressive entity that attempted to control every aspect of people’s lives. They thought Silk Road was a way to take back control from the government.

While on Silk Road, Curtis obviously saw the drugs for sale and noticed people talking about them on the community board.

Curtis Green: I saw that people were were were buying substances that were very questionable. And so I came up with the idea. It was called the harm reduction.

Patrick Courrielche:He thought starting a harm reduction forum on the site could help addicts and others expressing an interest in self-harm. Years earlier, Curtis earned his EMT license and worked as a volunteer on an ambulance.

Curtis Green: And I wanted to help people. That question of my exact medical background and to help them, this is the big one today. They are probably going to commit suicide or they were wanting to think about doing drugs. I would I would scare them away from it. I would I would get phone numbers for help if they had a drug problem or if people are thinking about committing suicide.

Patrick Courrielche: At the time in 2011, the creator of Silk Road wasn’t known. But there was a function to send a message to the site administrator. So Curtis reached out to the admin and brought up the idea of starting a harm reduction forum.

Curtis Green: and I said, hey, I think this this would be a great idea. And he thought it was awesome. He thought, oh, yeah, we definitely need that. So he. And then he says, oh, by the way, I'll give you a moderate. So that's basically how I've gotten this little girl. It was just it was basically to help people with their issues.

Patrick Courrielche:The Silk Road administrator set up Curtis as the moderator of this forum, giving him more access to the site than general visitors.

But Curtis couldn’t have known that by taking on this role, his life was about to change forever. Before it was all done, federal agents would raid his home, torture him, fake his death, and framed him for a crime that threatened to put him in prison for life. And at the bottom of it all was a little thing called Bitcoin. 

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