SimplyAbuDhabi XXXVII

For lots of start-ups, selling themselves to Facebook, which was well on its way to becoming a globe-spanning monster, was not only possible, but probable. Over burgers and fries at the Oasis, a famed Silicon Valley burger joint, a twenty-something founder broke the news to the twins that neither he nor his peers would touch them. “You think the suits would let [other entrepreneurs] take a penny from the two guys Zuckerberg hates more than anyone else in the world?” he said. “Your dollars might be green, but they’re marked.” Foiled by their nemesis again, they retreated to New York. They had given up rowing after competing at the Beijing Olympics but failing to win medals. Then, after it emerged that Facebook had done an independent valuation that meant the twins’ settlement was perhaps a couple of hundred million dollars lighter than it should have been, they attempted to get the case reopened. The courts denied their request. Defeated, the twins took a holiday to Ibiza. And it was there, amid the din of electronic dance music at the famed nightclub Pacha, that a short, muscle- bound New Yorker accosted them: “Hey, are you the Winklevii?” he asked. He wanted to bend their ear about a “revolutionary” idea — a new take on “the oldest social network on earth” – meaning money. 106 | SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL | 107 It was July 2012. At the time, bitcoin was a strange idea that attracted stranger people. It was the first working example of a cryptocurrency — electronic money that could be moved peer to peer with no need for banks, with transactions verified and registered in a shared online ledger called the blockchain. The idea for this decentralised, stateless digital currency had been introduced a few years earlier, in October 2008, in an obscure white paper published by someone using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Lehman Brothers had imploded the month before. The global financial system looked like it might disintegrate. Trust in institutions, particularly banks and the governments that regulated them, was shaken. This alternative system struck a nerve. As did the idea that this new money was borderless and would not be beholden to any central authority, which appealed to libertarians and unscrupulous traders, who would sell their wares for bitcoin on corners of the “dark web” that didn’t pop up on Google search. Very few serious financiers paid it much attention, even if the idea was, at least theoretically, interesting. That was the world of bitcoin when the twins stumbled upon it courtesy of their new acquaintance, the New Yorker they’d met in Ibiza. Back home, he introduced them to Charlie Shrem, a diminutive, fast-talking New Yorker who lived in his parents’ basement. Shrem was the founder of BitInstant, one of the first companies that enabled anyone to pay cash for bitcoin, which was still difficult to obtain. After months of research and some soul-searching, the twins not only invested in BitInstant, but used the company to buy a whole lot of bitcoin.