Satoshi Nakamoto’s Flying Circus: Ten cringe-makers from a decade in crypto

Over Bitcoin’s lifetime, the industry has developed a particular atmosphere. At various stages the crypto market drew in characters who relied on dubious marketing, often boiling down to promises of quick riches.

Years on, we recall them with a palpable sense of embarrassment. Ahead of the 100x online conference, we revisit the past ten years’ episodes that made some laugh and others wince.

Hey hey hey…

In 2017 New Yorker Carlos Matos took the stage in Thailand to extol the crypto project BitConnect. In a speech that went viral, Carlos said his $25,610 investment had grown to $100,000 within just a few months. He also admitted his wife did not believe him and called the project a scam.

At its peak the project’s native coin sat in CoinMarketCap’s top ten. But by 2018 a class action had been filed against BitConnect for creating a “wide-ranging Ponzi scheme”.

In 2021 the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged BitConnect promoters Trevon Brown, Craig Grant, Ryan Maasen and Michael Noble.

Though many branded Carlos a participant, he said he had been merely a duped investor. His speech became one of the most popular memes about crypto, albeit one that cast the industry in a negative light.

Since 2017 Matos’s lines have been quoted in comments to underline the shakiness of investments in a “promising” project or a meme token.

Zero!

Another appearance that now induces second-hand embarrassment came in November 2018, when bitcoin traded around $3,800.

American businessman Dan Peña proclaimed in highly aggressive fashion that bitcoin would fall to zero.

“One of the most successful calls I made a year ago, when the ‘bitfak’ was at $19,600. I said it was over. […] My protégés lost billions because nobody listened to me. We have a few ‘bitfaks’, and I can say this is very bad, it shows stupidity. And I know who is behind bitcoin, and it’s not some Japanese guy in a cave. I know this guy, and when this comes out — you heard it here first — bitcoin will go to zero. Zero, when this comes out. Zero!” — Peña said then.

Later he also claimed that if people knew who created bitcoin, they would rush to dump the digital gold.

Finally, in 2024 he said that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, was behind bitcoin.

Faketoshi

The saga of Craig Wright, the “Pseudo-Satoshi”, is one of the most striking examples of a failed impersonation.

In July 2024 his website carried a statement denying involvement in bitcoin’s creation.

Before that the “inept Mr Wright” had tried for years to prove he authored the bitcoin white paper. In a BBC interview he solemnly claimed he did not need money or fame and merely wanted to be left alone.

In practice he fought to stay in the spotlight.

He filed defamation suits against critics, including What Bitcoin Did host Peter McCormack, Blockstream’s chief executive Adam Back and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

He eventually withdrew all allegations; by 2024 the case had turned against him. In May a judge issued a written ruling exposing Wright’s document forgeries and his “use of the courts as an instrument of fraud”. In June the materials were referred to Britain’s prosecution service for consideration of perjury and forgery charges.

Bitcoin Jesus

That was the moniker given to Bitcoin.com’s founder, Roger Ver, in bitcoin’s early years. The nickname itself may induce cringing, but that is not why “Bitcoin Jesus” features here.

Ver bought his first BTC in early 2011, when the price was under $1. He invested in various startups, including Blockchain.com, BitPay and Kraken, and became one of the founders of the Bitcoin Foundation.

Over time, though, he turned into a divisive figure amid the scaling debate, remembered as the Blocksize War. That “civil war” led to the Bitcoin Cash fork in July 2017. Ver was soon seen as one of its principal champions.

He promotes Bitcoin Cash as the “true” bitcoin, which many in the community consider misleading. As owner of the Bitcoin.com domain, Ver used various marketing tactics to position Bitcoin Cash as a peer competitor to bitcoin (the latter on the site is often called Bitcoin Core).

He also resorts to emotive debating techniques in defence of his favoured coin. One of the best-known examples was his exchange with Synonym’s chief executive, John Carvalho.

During the interview “Jesus” reacted sharply to his interlocutor calling the cryptocurrency “bikesh” rather than Bitcoin Cash. Ver said he disliked being insulted by people like Carvalho because he “became a multimillionaire before I came into the bitcoin industry.” He then asked about his opponent’s company revenues and pulled a rage-quit, flipping the bird.

Ver never succeeded in convincing people that Bitcoin Cash is the real bitcoin. Since launch the fork has trended down against the original.

In May 2024 the “Bitcoin Jesus” was detained in Spain on US Justice Department tax-fraud charges.

Bitcoin Miami 2021

When strange and absurd scenes dominate big crypto conferences, a market top may be near. Bitcoin Miami in July 2021 offered a case in point, generating an abnormally large amount of cringe content:

At the conference an unknown attendee ran on stage shouting “Dogecoin to the Moon!!!”, while TV host and Heisenberg Capital founder Max Keiser tore up dollar bills and flipped a chair during an interview. Standing on stage with MicroStrategy’s founder, Michael Saylor, he yelled: “We are not selling! To hell with Elon!” It was likely an emotional reaction to Tesla’s decision to sell part of its bitcoin.

BitBoy

Ben Armstrong, also known as BitBoy, was among the most popular crypto YouTubers in the English-speaking world, with more than 1m subscribers.

During the 2021–22 bull run he fretted that he would have to spend months hunting down the right model of Lamborghini.

“I think I’ll need to go to Italy to get the Lambo I want. I don’t want to compromise,” wrote he to his business partner.

Fate smiled on him: in autumn 2021 a dealership delivered a Huracan to Armstrong’s production studio in suburban Atlanta.

But two years later the influencer lost his production company, and his wife filed for divorce. The BitBoy Crypto team kicked Armstrong out of the project. His partners said it was part of “long-standing efforts to help Ben during his relapse of substance abuse”.

On September 25, 2023, police detained Armstrong for attempting to assault a colleague.

Choose rich

The phrase choose rich nods to The Wolf of Wall Street, where Leonardo DiCaprio, as Jordan Belfort, says: “I choose rich every time.”

The quote was not especially popular until Nifty co-founder Nick O’Neill, also known as NFT Nick, began using it everywhere to signal his success and attract attention.

The community quickly found that O’Neill often exaggerated. For example, YouTuber and investigative journalist Coffeezilla reported that the businessman’s penthouse was likely rented. He posted an unconvincing reply from a luxury apartment that he claimed to own.

In the video O’Neill flaunts a bottle of champagne priced at $5,000. Community Notes on X say it costs about $85.

MC Vitalik

Vitalik Buterin is one of crypto’s most recognisable figures. He is known for public appearances dressed as a bear, a dinosaur or in traditional Montenegrin dress. His most memorable performance, however, was a rap about Ethereum 2.0 at Edcon 2019 in Sydney.

The rap focuses on work developers were pursuing at the time, including the move to Proof-of-Stake and zk-SNARKs.

SBF and Caroline Ellison

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and Alameda Research head Caroline Ellison often gave questionable comments in interviews, prompting doubts about their competence and professionalism.

The true scale of the problem became clear only after FTX collapsed. In court Ellison described some quirks of the crypto industry’s “golden boy”: presidential ambitions, an obsession with his hair, a proprietary trading strategy called “trade escort”, and so on.