Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…They decided what they're going to do—Vitalik's going to write for free for Bitcoin Weekly. They're going to post the first paragraph of all of his articles on the site. Then they're going to hold the rest of the article, essentially for ransom, where there's a fee that has to be crowdfunded by people for a certain amount of bitcoin for each article, that people have to pay into a wallet address to unlock everybody seeing the rest of the article. Interesting. It's not just a paywall, it's the only way anybody gets to read this is if enough people are pulling up. It's like a Kickstarter for Bitcoin articles. Amazing. With this, they start making a pretty decent amount of bitcoin. Good for young Vitalik. This goes on for a few months. Unlike the original post, Kiba, the publisher, is not exactly one of the most reliable employers on the market. Bitcoin Weekly goes under by the end of the summer that year in 2011. People really liked Vitalik's writing. That August, a dude in Romania named Mihai Alisie and his girlfriend Roxana, who were fans of Vitalik's writing, thought, hey, what if we started an actual magazine to give Vitalik's writing a new home and he can be the head writer? They reach out to him, unclear if they knew that he was a high school kid in Canada or not, but, hey, it's crypto.…

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