Ethan Lou is a journalist who later became a Bitcoin miner and then a two-time writer. His latest book, Former Bitcoin Miners: Scandals and Unrest in the Wild West of Cryptocurrencies, Is a modern western movie about the rebirth of a gloomy millennial generation in the wild west of cryptocurrencies-including scammers, party drugs and North Korean cryptocurrency conferences.

“Want to attend the cryptocurrency conference in North Korea in April?” Not a common question, but a question Lou asked me in early 2019.

The Pyongyang blockchain and cryptocurrency conference attended by about 100 people is a highlight of Lou’s book. This is because eight months after the incident, that is, in November 2019, Virgil Griffith, who Lu knew who worked with the Ethereum Foundation, violated sanctions and illegally provided him with “high technology”. Information” and was arrested by the FBI. The North Korean government.

On the first day of the trial in September this year, Lou watched the “very emotional” Griffith in the gallery of the New York courtroom. Plead guilty Accused of conspiracy to violate sanctions laws, which may allow him to spend more than 6 years in prison.This surprised Lou, who pointed out that Griffith’s lawyer had asked The judge allowed to wear two suits, “so that he can wear different clothes on different days”, which shows that they also expected the trial to last more than one day.

Lou believed that the meeting was a harmless opportunity to see North Korea. He recalled how Griffith’s initial arrest shocked everyone who attended the meeting.He explained that the event was advertised as a cryptocurrency conference, and he “thinks that we will hear the opinions of North Korean cryptocurrency people because North Korea is accused of doing a lot of dark things with cryptocurrency.” He was referring to Accuse State-sponsored hacking, etc.

However, there is no North Korean cryptocurrency person.

“It turns out that those of us participants are required to serve as moderators.”

He said that although some attendees such as Griffith appeared to be ready to give a speech, “most of us think we will get information from Koreans,” he added, and he refused to give a speech. Since most presentations were prepared a few days ago, the content of the event only included “surface-level, Wikipedia-type information.” Lou pointed out that the event was organized by the “cultural side” of the North Korean government, and their “cryptographer” has never been made public.

It’s still the 6th day. in a meeting. Look out from the inside of the building. The monument here is a fountain pen with an atom on it, symbolizing things like science and writing. 26/15 pic.twitter.com/iMDuwOG5Br

-Ethan Lou (@Ethan_Lou) October 27, 2021

“I don’t think Griffith intends to benefit North Korea in any tangible way. I don’t think he brought any benefit to North Korea, nor did he gain any personal benefit from it-he paid a lot of money for attending the meeting.”

This group of happy conference participants missed the expected North Korean cryptocurrency insights, which they gained in friendship and interesting stories-most of their time was spent visiting Pyongyang and “drunk with our Korean caregiver”.

“Of course, this is a very interesting insight into North Korea, but there is no encryption insight.”

Trained reporter

Lou is 31 years old and was born in Harbin, a city in northern China near the Russian border. As his father was studying for a doctorate, he soon moved to Germany. Engineering-related work there. He grew up in Germany and developed a passion for reading and writing, which inspired his “very natural choice” to study journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

Alum and author @Ethan_Lou join in @Ryerson_Alumni A book on November 23 talked about his new book “The Once Bitcoin Miner: Scandals and Unrest in the Wild West of Cryptocurrency.”

Activity response: https://t.co/FmpyidjGD7

-School of Journalism (@JSchoolNow) November 12, 2021

Lou discovered Bitcoin while exploring the dark web with friends around 2012. This secret weakness of the Internet can only be accessed through the Tor browser, and was once the host of the infamous Silk Road drug market, where BTC was used as a payment method. Its operator, Ross Ubricht, After his arrest in 2013, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, resulting in the U.S. government Seizures and Subsequent auction 144,000 bitcoins.

In the following year, he encountered Bitcoin again in New Brunswick, Canada, on the Atlantic Ocean. During an interview, Lou worked as an intern at a local newspaper. Anthony Diorio, The founder of the Canadian Bitcoin Alliance.

After the internship, he returned to Toronto and worked as a reporter for the Canadian News Agency and the Toronto Star. He was familiar with the thriving Bitcoin scene there. There, Di Iorio moved to the city and co-founded Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin. Very active now.

Lou’s book tells that another role in a conference is Gerald Cotten, who founded the QuadrigaCX exchange in 2013. Die in india In 2018, he brought the private keys of his 115,000 customers’ bitcoins to the grave.

Lou bought his first Bitcoin from Cotten’s exchange that year, and quickly “ordered 10 LSD on the dark web at a price of 0.412 Bitcoin.” There is no turning back in his cryptocurrency journey.

Encrypted Cowboy

After working with the Toronto Star from 2013 to 2015, Lou was hired by Reuters and sent him to New York in early 2016 and later in the same year to Calgary, where he focused on reporting on the energy industry. Alberta is rich in oil, and Calgary is the largest city, which is what Texas is to the United States to Canada. With the history of cowboys before oil, Calgary has always been proudly rooted in the west. The oil boom of the past few decades has undoubtedly attracted a new group of bold adventurers seeking wealth in the west.

Here, Lou organized a weekly Bitcoin gathering, and we met there. Lou’s is not the only show in town, because Jan Cerato, A local crypto hype, he held a party at a cowboy-themed salon nearby on different days of the week, somehow here we go Treat him as a competitor. In Lou’s book, Cerrato plays a comedy role through his misfortunes. In the same circle, I gradually respected Lou as a serious journalist-he once told me that even if it meant going to jail, he would protect his sources, and I never doubted the validity of his statement.

A few months ago, Lou started mining for Bitcoin. When he was looking for his bicycle near the loading dock of the Reuters building, he stumbled upon a pile of treasures-eight abandoned Dell Optiplex 780 computers.

“Each person can hold two GPUs, so it’s not a lot, but I eventually bought GPUs and used them to mine,” he recalled, adding that he needed to rent a car for $15.63-which annoyed him. ——Dragging the computer in his apartment a few blocks away.

“In the end, it became a dedicated facility with ASICs.”

As Bitcoin forks, the crypto industry is moving one mile every minute, and the bull market is raging. When he was working on the news station, his new BTC mine was buzzing. Lou recalled, “I really didn’t have a chance to take a step back and evaluate everything.” Until one day, sitting in his gray cubicle, he “suddenly realized that if I think so, I can pick up the phone and buy a big one. Elephant.” He is a cryptocurrency millionaire.

I didn’t buy an elephant that day, but its smell was an adventure. Lou felt that it was out of reach in his nine-to-five life. He resigned. “I have a feeling, I guess any typical millennial just entering the labor market will feel it—maybe they call it a quarter-life crisis. Am I in the right place? I’m doing something meaningful to me Is it something? Since I have a way, why not take a risk?” He recalled.

He continued to take risks. In addition to those in North Korea, his book also described in detail the time he and I spent at the “hillside resort on the island of Thailand and the members of the cryptocurrency incubator”.

“The big boss who funded everything was the early Bitcoiners and made a lot of money. People came and went, moved in for free, and indulged in crazy orgy. At least once, they allegedly brought a shaman.” Lou Zai Written in Chapter 16.

His other adventure is a book of his own, Pandemic field notes: a suspended journey across the world,This is Publish last year. It tells of his travels through Beijing, Singapore, Germany and back to Canada on the cusp of the pandemic. The pandemic seems to follow him. With air travel almost closed, he hid in an empty apartment in Bayreuth, Germany. Six days in the weeks during the eye of the storm.

I won’t be an outright bargain, so although I won the first book @Ethan_Lou I bought the second one. #amreading #??November #bookstagram pic.twitter.com/m7FeN4Qnnr

— Jeanne Kwong ??? (@Jeanne_August) October 29, 2021

Encrypted West

Critics have long said that the cryptocurrency industry is similar to the Wild West. Lou agreed, but made it clear that “I don’t think this comparison is an insult. I think there are a lot of cool things about the Wild West, at least its ideas. What attracted people to the West at that time was what attracted people to use cryptocurrency now. thing.”

Although the true Wild West is largely based on “injustice, colonialism and barbarism,” Lou said that the dream of the Wild West is in our minds.

“The Wild West has a strong attraction, mainly because it is a place with a lot of opportunities and wealth-it is also spacious, open to everyone, and most importantly, it is not affected by the domestic social hierarchy. .”

“If you go to the west, you can abandon your past, you can bury your name, and you can be born again,” he said. The inspiring idea is that poor European farmers move to the wastelands of the Americas, or maybe Di Iorio West moved to Toronto, where he co-founded Ethereum.

Lou stated that the border of the Wild West eventually moved westward, so it is in a state of encryption.Although more Veteran players like visa with A city like miami Is entering a partially tamed land, and many early pioneers, such as Coinbase, have already Try to disinfect In the early days of its idealism, its notorious gambling salon has been upgraded to a modern glass office.

However, the encrypted Wild West Center is fighting back. Lou uses Shapeshift as an example, Industry players Whose CEO Eric Wallis Yes transition The company changed from a “corporate structure” to a DAO because it wanted to make it more difficult for regulators to control it. More and more hawks,” Lou explained.

“A lot of laws have suddenly entered this space. At the same time, people are thinking of ways to flout the law.”

Lou believes that Metaverse marks the next frontier.

“Our online life is as real as our current offline life. Online, we have no rights-we are unconditionally subject to digital masters. I think we are already living in a Metaverse.”

The battle for rights and freedom in Metaverse will be the main conflict in this new field. Lou said that this will include a competition between centralized applications run by enterprises and permissionless decentralized applications running on the blockchain.

He took Facebook as an example, now aptly called Meta, its Facebook Zero initiative allow Mobile users in certain developing countries can access “a limited form of the Internet curated by Facebook, but it’s free”, adding that “big companies are shaping the way we perceive reality” because it will lead to a whole The Internet experience consists only of Facebook.

“Decentralized applications are the key to preventing the dominance of large technologies. Metaverse is not only inevitable, it already exists.”