Last Notes
July 15, 2020 (6 years ago) — The Day Teenagers Hijacked Twitter's God Mode
On July 15, 2020, the largest social media security breach in history played out in a single afternoon. One hundred and thirty high-profile accounts were taken over: Obama, Biden, Musk, Gates, Bezos, Buffett, Bloomberg, Apple, Uber, CashApp. All of them used to post Bitcoin scam tweets. The attackers never exploited a single line of code. They picked up the phone and asked nicely.
The technique is called vishing. Posing as Twitter's own IT staff, the crew called employees and talked them into handing over internal VPN credentials. Once inside, they found an admin panel called Agent Tools: a support tool used daily that could override the security settings of any account on the platform, swap the email, kill 2FA, hand over full control. They used it first to steal rare short Twitter handles to sell to gamers. Then someone escalated.
Around 8 PM UTC the scam tweets started. Musk first, then Obama, Biden, Gates, Bezos, the rest in rapid succession. Twitter's response was drastic: lock every verified account out of tweeting until engineers could contain the breach. The scam wallets collected over 400 Bitcoin transactions totaling just over $100,000. These teenagers had temporary control over accounts that could have moved markets or triggered an international crisis. They ran a double-your-money scam.
Bitcoin caught them. Every transaction landed on a public ledger. Analysts traced the flows within hours. When the crew tried to cash out through exchanges, KYC checks flagged them. The ledger they thought was anonymous became the evidence trail that led to their doors. The mastermind, Graham Clark, was 17 years old and lived in Tampa, Florida. He was arrested 16 days after the hack, charged as an adult with 30 felonies, and sentenced to 3 years. His associates, including "PlugwalkJoe" Joseph O'Connor, received sentences stretching to 5 years.
They chose Bitcoin because they thought it was untraceable. It was the opposite.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 14, 2016 (10 years ago) — The Startup That Turned Twitter Handles Into Bitcoin Addresses
On this day in 2016, Seattle startup iPayYou launched Pay-by-Twitter: send Bitcoin to any Twitter handle, no wallet address needed. An automated tweet notified the recipient, who clicked a link to claim the funds as bitcoin or convert them to dollars deposited into their bank. The same trick worked with email addresses. Founder Gene Kavner, a veteran of Amazon, Microsoft, and Expedia, was aiming at Twitter's 310 million monthly users.
The elegance was in what it removed. No copying a 34-character address, no QR codes, no "which wallet do you use?" The Twitter handle WAS the payment address. One feature was almost heretical: you could cancel a payment after sending it. Bitcoin transactions are famously irreversible, and iPayYou deliberately softened that edge to make Bitcoin feel like a normal payment app.
The idea had a predecessor. ChangeTip had let people tip Bitcoin via Twitter mentions, got acquired by Airbnb in 2016, and was shut down. iPayYou positioned itself as the fuller successor: a complete wallet, not a tipping toy.
The punchline came from Kavner himself. Three months later, on October 27, 2016, announcing a gift card marketplace, he said: "the world of Bitcoin is desolate. The lack of fully integrated, seamless ways to spend bitcoin for everyday goods and services is what iPayYou aims to fix." The company eventually pivoted entirely to gift cards, and the Twitter wallet was discontinued. iPayYou had solved the "where do I send it?" problem beautifully. But in 2016, even frictionless sending couldn't answer the harder question: what do I spend it on?
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 14, 2016 (10 years ago) — The $550 Million Man Walks Out on $95,000 Bail
After 11 months in Japanese detention, Mark Karpeles, the man who ran MtGox when 850,000 BTC vanished, stepped out of jail in Tokyo, visibly thinner and forbidden to leave the country.
MtGox had been the world's largest Bitcoin exchange until its February 2014 collapse, when it reported 850,000 BTC missing (roughly 200,000 were later recovered from an old cold storage wallet). Karpeles, the French-born programmer who had acquired the exchange in 2011, was arrested in Tokyo in August 2015 on charges of embezzling ¥341 million (about $3.2M) of client funds and inflating Bitcoin balances in bogus accounts. He denied the embezzlement, saying he intended to repay and that the data manipulation was done for the company.
Japan's pretrial system held him for months without trial, with prosecutors re-arresting him on new charges to extend detention. On July 12, 2016, the Tokyo District Court finally approved bail: ¥10 million, about $95,000. Two days later he paid it and walked out.
The scale mismatch was striking. At roughly $650 per bitcoin, the missing 850,000 BTC were worth about $550 million; the bail came to about 0.017% of that. Who paid it was never confirmed, though speculation pointed to his Japanese wife, who had relocated to Canada.
The verdict took another three years. In 2019 he was acquitted of embezzlement and convicted only of data manipulation, receiving a suspended sentence. For the largest Bitcoin catastrophe in history, the man in charge served no time beyond the detention he had already endured.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 13, 2011 (15 years ago) — The Countdown to Brazil's First Bitcoin Exchange
On July 13, 2011, developer Leandro César announced on Bitcointalk "The countdown to the first brazilian Bitcoin exchange!" and linked to mercadobitcoin.com.br. Visitors found no order book and no wallet — just a ticking clock, built in Flash. Forum regular Fireball pointed out the obvious: the site "only has a countdown on it." César was announcing a product he hadn't finished building, written in Python, wagering publicly that Brazil would want a Bitcoin exchange by the time the clock hit zero. The original thread is still live: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28575.0
One early reply stands out in hindsight. Roger Ver, already one of Bitcoin's loudest evangelists, wrote back: "Bitcoins are going to change the way the world does business. Nice work!"
The timing looked terrible. A month earlier Bitcoin had touched roughly $31, its first speculative peak, then crashed into single digits while commentators wrote obituaries. But César moved fast: within nine days the countdown had given way to a registration page — a Google Form whose first dropdown option was "Vender Bitcoins" (Sell Bitcoins).
Brazil turned out to be the right bet. The largest economy in South America, ninth largest in the world in 2011, and its currency was barely served by the international exchanges. Mercado Bitcoin took BRL deposits through Banco do Brasil, plus a second rail that dates the era: Liberty Reserve — then just another way to move money online, shut down by the US government in 2013, its founder later convicted in a scheme that laundered $6 billion. Early exchanges built on whatever rails existed.
Of the exchanges born in 2011, almost none survived. Tradehill closed within a year, Bitcoinica was hacked three times and folded, and MtGox collapsed in 2014. Mercado Bitcoin became Latin America's dominant Bitcoin exchange and, 15 years on, it's still trading.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 13, 2011 (15 years ago) — The Kernel Hacker Who Wrote Bitcoin's Mining Engine
On July 13, 2011, at 03:02 in the morning forum time, Con Kolivas opened the official CGMiner support thread on Bitcointalk: a GPU miner written in C for Linux, Windows, and OSX, "provided entirely free of charge by the programmer in his spare time." Plenty of miners were circulating in mid-2011. This one would outlast every generation of hardware it ran on.
The headline feature was dynamic intensity. In 2011 your miner and your gaming rig were the same machine, so CGMiner throttled itself automatically the moment your GPU was needed for a game or video playback, then scaled back to full hashing when the computer went idle. Under the hood it ran the phatk OpenCL kernel with the BFI_INT, BITALIGN, and VECTORS optimizations of the era, but users praised something less glamorous: it could restart dead GPU threads on its own. Replies called it the "best one so far," reliable and low overhead.
Then someone in the thread did a double take: "are you the linux kernel scheduler guy?" He was. "Yes, I am the linux kernel scheduler guy, -ck." Kolivas wrote BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, Linux kernel patches devoted entirely to desktop responsiveness. His day job: anesthesiologist. An Australian anesthesiologist who rewrote how Linux schedules your desktop, mining Bitcoin on the side.
That obsession with responsiveness is exactly what dynamic intensity was, a miner that yields to the human using the machine. CGMiner went on to add FPGA support, then ASICs, hardware that did not exist when it launched, and became the standard mining software for years. Not bad for a side project posted at 3am.
Original thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.0
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 13, 2012 (14 years ago) — Bitcoinica's Third Hack Drains the Victim Recovery Fund
In September 2011, a 17-year-old programmer in Singapore named Zhou Tong launched Bitcoinica, Bitcoin's first leveraged trading platform. Users could bet on BTC's price with borrowed money, and nothing like it existed. Within months it was handling more volume than most exchanges.
Then the hacks began. On March 1, 2012, attackers compromised Linode, Bitcoinica's hosting provider, and drained 43,554 BTC. In the fallout, the source code leaked, and buried in that code, in plaintext, sat the API key to Bitcoinica's MtGox account. On May 11, a second attack took another 18,547 BTC and Bitcoinica shut down for good. Co-founder Tihan opened a MtGox account to hold what remained: a recovery fund, the only realistic path to repayment for hundreds of customers. One Bitcointalk user, DarkEmi, had deposited 5,000 BTC, most of his savings. Another had wired $38,626 saved over two years and verified his claim three times.
The detail that decided everything: the API key in the leaked code was never rotated. Not after the first hack, not after the second. For months, anyone who read the code held a working key to the fund meant to make the victims whole. On July 12, someone finally used it. Within hours, roughly 40,000 BTC and $40,000 in cash drained out of the account, flowing through AurumXchange into Liberty Reserve, a digital currency the US government would shut down for money laundering in 2013. The next morning, developer genjix broke the news on Bitcointalk: Bitcoinica had been robbed a third time, and this time it was the victims' money.
Two weeks later, AurumXchange published its findings and the story turned. The laundering account traced back to stevejobs807@gmail.com. Erik Voorhees recognized the address at once; he had corresponded with it for months. It belonged to Zhou Tong. MtGox added that the account had been opened from a Microsoft Singapore IP, where Zhou worked. Zhou posted that same day, denied everything, named a former associate, Chen Jianhai, as the thief, and offered 5,000 BTC in compensation.
Forum veterans were skeptical, but nothing was ever proven in court. In August 2012, Wendon Group was appointed receiver under New Zealand law. By 2014, fewer than 2% of Bitcoinica's customers had received any compensation at all.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 12, 2010 (16 years ago) — L1 Bitcoin Determined to be Impractical for Micropayments
At 12:04 PM on July 12, 2010, a Bitcointalk user named Mionione asked an uncomfortable question: what stops someone from flooding the network with 0.00000001 BTC transactions, bloating every node's storage one satoshi at a time? The thread is still readable at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=287.0
Four minutes later, at 12:08 PM, Gavin Andresen replied by quoting a comment already sitting in Satoshi's code: "To limit dust spam, require a 0.01 fee if any output is less than 0.01." Gavin didn't write the rule. Satoshi had, before anyone asked. At July 2010 prices, 0.01 BTC was worth about a tenth of a cent, but a user named llama saw the real cost instantly: "That pretty much ruins the possibility of using bitcoin for true micropayments." Gavin held the line: "I don't think Bitcoin should try to solve too many very hard problems all at once."
Satoshi himself said nothing that day. His verdict came three weeks later, on August 4, 2010, in the same thread: "Bitcoin isn't currently practical for very small micropayments. Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01."
Read that phrasing again: "without an aggregating mechanism." Satoshi didn't say micropayments were impossible. He said they needed a layer Bitcoin didn't have yet. Six years later, developers started building exactly that mechanism. We call it the Lightning Network.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 12, 2013 (13 years ago) — BitInstant Suspends Service
On the evening of July 12, 2013, the biggest Bitcoin on-ramp in the United States went dark. BitInstant, founded in 2011 by Charlie Shrem and Gareth Nelson, let anyone walk into a CVS drugstore or a Western Union location, hand cash to the clerk, and receive Bitcoin. No bank account, no wire transfer, no exchange signup. That design made it the dominant way Americans bought their first coins.
It was also the trap. An anonymous, walk-in cash channel was exactly what an unlicensed reseller supplying Silk Road drug buyers needed, and the same feature could not serve one group without serving the other. By July 2013 the company was buried under roughly 17,300 customer service complaints, facing a fresh class action lawsuit, and holding a warning letter from New York regulators demanding money transmitter compliance.
The shutdown notice framed everything as temporary: the team would "close shop and dedicate the entire team's efforts to creating the next generation of BitInstant." The next generation never shipped. Six months later, on January 26, 2014, Shrem was arrested at JFK airport on federal money laundering charges, while still serving as Vice Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation.
Prosecutors charged that Shrem knowingly let Robert Faiella, an unlicensed dealer known as "BTCKing," push over $1 million through BitInstant without anti-money-laundering checks, reselling the coins to Silk Road drug buyers, and that Shrem never filed the required suspicious activity reports. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in December 2014 to two years in federal prison. In 2018 the Winklevoss twins, early BitInstant investors, sued him over roughly 5,000 Bitcoin; the case settled in 2019. BitInstant never reopened, and its collapse pushed FinCEN registration across the US exchange industry.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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Roleta russa.
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July 12, 2017 — A 22-Year-Old Intern Photobombs the Fed Chair with a "Buy Bitcoin" Sign
He got escorted out of the room within minutes. Seven years later, the sign he scribbled that day sold at auction for over a million dollars.
On July 12, 2017, Janet Yellen, then Chair of the Federal Reserve, was delivering the Fed's semiannual monetary policy testimony to the House Financial Services Committee. Live on television, a young man seated directly behind her held up a handwritten sign: "Buy Bitcoin."
The sign belonged to Christian Langalis, a 22-year-old intern at the Cato Institute. He had drawn it on a yellow legal pad with a fine-point pen. Committee rules explicitly forbid holding up signs during testimony, and staffers escorted him out shortly after.
Langalis said afterward he had no idea it had gone viral. His phone had died before the hearing even started, since he arrived so early to get the seat. He found out only once someone told him, after he had already been walked out of the room.
Bitcoin moved on the moment. CoinDesk reported the price climbed to session highs, trading 3.7 percent higher at $2,418.46 by 2:27 PM Eastern that same afternoon. The image spread everywhere within hours, becoming one of the most recognizable pieces of Bitcoin folklore from the entire bull run era.
Langalis kept the sign in a sock drawer for years. In April 2024, he auctioned it through Scarce City, a bitcoin-only marketplace, at Pubkey Bar in New York. A pseudonymous bidder known as "Squirrekkywrath" won it for 16 BTC, worth roughly 1.03 million dollars.
Yellen never mentioned Bitcoin once during that hearing. The sign behind her became more famous than anything she said.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 11, 2019 — Trump Calls Bitcoin "Based on Thin Air" the Same Day the Fed Chair Called It Digital Gold
Two of the most quoted official reactions to Bitcoin in its history, hours apart, from two branches of government, same evening.
That afternoon Fed Chair Jerome Powell had told the Senate Banking Committee Bitcoin was "a speculative store of value, like gold." Hours later, Trump logged onto Twitter with a very different verdict, in the middle of a White House social media summit with online allies.
Trump's tweetstorm ran three parts. First: "I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade." Second, on Facebook's Libra: "If Facebook and other companies want to become a bank, they must seek a new Banking Charter and become subject to all Banking Regulations, just like other Banks." He closed defending the dollar: "We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever."
The market reacted immediately. Bitcoin dropped 7.1% within 45 minutes of the tweets, part of a rout that took the price from above $12,000 toward the $10,000s over the following days. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reportedly counted it as a win just to have a sitting president tweeting about Bitcoin at all. CoinDesk later labeled this Trump's "Genesis Post," the first time a presidential statement had directly moved Bitcoin's price.
The reversal that followed is now well known. By 2024 Trump had become an outspoken crypto advocate, and in 2025 he announced a Strategic National Bitcoin Reserve, sending the price up 8.2% in a day, the exact opposite reaction to this tweet six years earlier. Powell's gold comparison from that same July afternoon has aged rather better.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 11, 2010 — A Finnish Student Gets Bitcoin Slashdotted, Crashing the Website Within the Hour
One campaign to get noticed by tech nerds overwhelmed bitcoin.org's hosting in under sixty minutes, then indirectly created Mt. Gox a week later.
Martti Malmi, an early forum regular known as sirius, had spent weeks campaigning for this moment. "Slashdot with its millions of tech-savvy readers would be awesome, perhaps the best imaginable!" he wrote on the forum, pushing others to help make it happen.
On July 11, 2010, it worked. Malmi sat in his dorm room, headphones on, a can of energy drink beside him, watching Slashdot prepare to post. This was the moment he had been chasing since finishing an internship months earlier, purely to get Bitcoin real outside attention.
The bitcoin.org website and forum ran on modest rented hosting, unable to handle more than about one hundred simultaneous visitors. Within an hour of the post going live, the site buckled and went down, alongside a wave of dismissive comments from readers. Malmi scrambled to scale up hosting capacity that same day.
The next morning made the difference clear. Bitcoin software downloads jumped from around 3,000 in June to over 20,000 in July. Gavin Andresen's Bitcoin faucet gave away 5,000 free BTC the day after the post and ran completely empty.
Among the people who found Bitcoin through that Slashdot post was Jed McCaleb, who owned an old, dormant domain from an earlier project trading Magic: The Gathering cards online: mtgox.com. Seven days later, he quietly announced a new exchange on that domain. Within three years it would handle 70 percent of global Bitcoin trading, then collapse. Mt. Gox traces to one overloaded website, July 11, 2010.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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Now he is free from pain and suffering.
May he rest in peace, Lycan.
#catstr
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July 10, 2019 — Two Days That Framed How Washington Saw Bitcoin
Over two days of testimony, the most powerful central banker on earth was forced to explain Bitcoin to Congress. What he said about it surprised almost everyone.
The backdrop was not Bitcoin at all. In June 2019, Facebook had unveiled Libra, a proposed global digital currency backed by a consortium of 28 companies. Washington panicked. A company with billions of users launching its own money was a threat regulators took seriously.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell was already scheduled for his semiannual testimony to Congress that week. Libra hijacked the agenda. On July 10, before the House Financial Services Committee, Powell warned Libra "could rise to systemic importance just because of the mere size of Facebook." Bitcoin fell roughly 7% over the three hours he spoke, dragged down purely by association with a project it had nothing to do with.
The next day, July 11, Powell moved to the Senate Banking Committee. Senator Mike Crapo asked him directly what he thought of Bitcoin as a threat to the dollar. Powell's answer became the most quoted thing he ever said about it: "Almost no one uses Bitcoin for payments. They use it more as an alternative to gold. It's a store of value, a speculative store of value, like gold."
It was a genuinely two-sided statement. "Speculative" was a warning. But "an alternative to gold" was close to an endorsement of the exact thesis Bitcoiners had argued for years.
The irony: Washington summoned regulators to confront a corporate coin, Libra, that never launched and died within two years. In doing so, the Fed Chair gave Bitcoin its most credible official description yet.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 9, 2011 (15 years ago) — Bitcoin's Mining Difficulty Jumps 31.5 Percent, the Largest Single Increase Ever Recorded
New miners were still piling in. By the time it happened, the price rally that caused it had already collapsed.
Bitcoin's difficulty adjusts roughly every two weeks, targeting an average block time of 10 minutes. More hashing power means blocks get found faster, so difficulty rises to compensate. On July 9, 2011, it rose 31.5%, the largest single jump in Bitcoin's history.
The cause traces back a month. Bitcoin's price had spiked hard after a Gawker article on the Silk Road marketplace brought mainstream attention, peaking near $32 on June 8. Easy money brought a wave of new miners rushing to buy GPUs, breaking the "gentleman's agreement" Satoshi had asked for in 2009 to keep mining CPU-only.
The irony: those GPUs came online in late June and early July, after the price had already cracked. The June 19 Mt. Gox hack sent Bitcoin briefly to a penny before recovering to single digits. Hashrate kept climbing anyway, hardware lagging weeks behind sentiment.
This was not isolated. All of 2010 saw 32 difficulty increases out of 33 adjustments, averaging 22.85 percent. 2013 saw 30 positive adjustments averaging 17.16 percent amid two massive rallies and the shift to ASIC mining. A decade later almost to the month, China's 2021 mining ban triggered drops as steep as 27.9 percent, the mirror image of July 2011.
Fifteen years and several bull markets later, the July 9, 2011 record for a single difficulty increase has never been broken.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
July 9, 2014 (12 years ago) — Andreas Antonopoulos Resigns from the Bitcoin Foundation
He called it "the complete lack of transparency." By then three board members had already resigned in disgrace and the organization had less than two years left to live.
The Bitcoin Foundation was founded in September 2012, modeled on the Linux Foundation, with a stated mission to standardize, protect and promote Bitcoin. Its real job was giving the currency a respectable public face after years of association with crime and fraud.
Antonopoulos led the Foundation's anti-poverty committee and had built a reputation as one of Bitcoin's most credible public educators. When he criticized an institution, people listened.
The Foundation gave him plenty to criticize. In January 2014, vice chairman Charlie Shrem was arrested on money laundering charges tied to Silk Road. In February, Mark Karpeles resigned after Mt. Gox, the exchange he ran, collapsed. Then in May 2014 came Brock Pierce, elected to the board despite longstanding public controversy over his past associations, none of which had ever led to charges. His appointment triggered a wave of member resignations.
Antonopoulos had already been pulling away, having quietly stepped down as head of the anti-poverty committee weeks earlier. On July 9, 2014, he made it final, posting on Twitter: "I can no longer have even the smallest association with the Bitcoin Foundation, because of the complete lack of transparency."
By April 2015, the Foundation disclosed that assets had collapsed from over $4.6 million a year earlier to just $12,553.06. Antonopoulos went on to publish Mastering Bitcoin later that same year and became known for coining "not your keys, not your coins."
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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July 9, 2013 (13 years ago) — Kipochi Launches Bitcoin Wallet with M-Pesa Integration in Kenya
A tiny in-house demo, never meant for the public, leaked to the global press within days. Two weeks later a telecom giant in London quietly ordered it killed.
M-Pesa was already the most successful mobile money system on earth. Roughly 70 percent of Kenya's adult population used it, and it accounted for close to a third of the country's entire GDP.
Pelle Braendgaard, co-founder of a small wallet startup called Kipochi, moved from Nicaragua to Kenya in May 2013 to build the integration himself. Within a month he had a small demo working, limited to a handful of in-house staff, meant only to show Kenya's Central Bank and local telecoms what was technically possible.
It leaked anyway. Global outlets picked up the story instantly, and coverage spiraled into claims that a third of Kenyans already had a Bitcoin wallet, a wide exaggeration of a demo built for a handful of staff.
Within a week or two, Kipochi's connection to M-Pesa through merchant gateway Kopo Kopo was cut off without warning. Braendgaard later learned the order had come not from Kenya but from Vodafone headquarters in London, spooked by the same exaggerated press coverage.
Kenya's Central Bank was the calm party in this story. In August 2013 it quietly told Braendgaard it had no objection to Kipochi continuing, as long as it partnered with a regulated institution. The telecom giant, not the regulator, pulled the plug.
Kipochi struggled on for roughly another year before closing its Kenya operations. Braendgaard eventually founded Notabene, a company that helps crypto businesses comply with financial regulation, the very force that had ended his first Bitcoin venture.
#bitcoin #bitcoinhistory
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