Autor Cointelegraph By Ethan Lou

As I go about the Miami conference, I wonder, Aside from some of the conference speakers, where are these Bitcoin maximalists I keep hearing so much about?When I tell the customs official I’m going to Miami for the Bitcoin 2022 conference, there seems to be a light in the man’s eyes. He peppers me with questions, even though I’d gotten up at 5 am that day to fly, and my smartwatch is telling me that my energy levels are only at 70%. The customs official has way more interest in the subject than I can handle.Why am I going to the conference? The philosophy of the event fascinates me — it’s a Bitcoin-only conference — with the divide between Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrency world growing year by year.I don’t go into that much detail with the customs official, though. Sometimes, when I interact with too many crypto people, I forget that everyone else has paid so little attention to this space, they still use the terms “Bitcoin” and “cryptocurrency” synonymously. If I offload onto the customs official everything that’s on my mind, he’d probably think I’m autistic or drunk (or maybe both).For a conference aimed at Bitcoin Maxis, the crowd seemed pretty comfortable with “crypto.”Florida state of mindI’ve always found Miami strange, but not in a bad way. Florida is known for the Florida Man meme — all the wild and wacky stuff happening in the Sunshine State like the naked man downtown who bit off someone’s face in 2012. But that’s largely because of Florida’s strong information-transparency laws. As a fellow journalist, I dream about this sometimes. Where I’m from, Canada, we have to fight twice as hard for half the disclosure. Florida is brash and loud because it’s open. In a way, Florida is America.A Florida man was rescued after trying to ride a hamster ball to the Bahamas https://t.co/kZAMqAznEp pic.twitter.com/lklPQvIpqM— Florida Man (@FloridaMan__) May 8, 2022Indeed, writing in The Globe and Mail newspaper, journalist David Shribman would later say that the American center used to be California, which gave the world the movie theatre, skateboards and the linguistic filler “like.” Now, Shribman writes, America’s center is Florida. The state is the home of former-President Donald Trump, but it used to be governed by the moderate Jeb Bush — in a way encapsulating the transformation of American conservatism of the last decade. Florida is home to the “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law, the rebellion against COVID-19 mask mandates and, of course, Disneyland. No wonder this libertarian fantasy world is attracting Bitcoiners and the tech elite.Out of California and into Florida, PayPal’s Peter Thiel has made the move. So has another member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” the venture capitalist Keith Rabois. Elon Musk, too, has a SpaceX launch site in Florida, and Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest has moved to the state as well. Somewhere in there is also why Bitcoin 2022, the Bitcoin-only conference that excludes other cryptocurrencies, has come to this state.Note how so many of these tech people moving to Florida are also Bitcoin people — not just in the eyes of the mainstream who use “Bitcoin” and “cryptocurrency” interchangeably, but Bitcoin-only Bitcoin people. Thiel and Wood were both listed as speakers at Bitcoin 2022. Perhaps that’s only natural.We’re in Miami, Bitcoin! Check out this #Bitcoin2022 recap to see what leaders, developers, celebrities, and builders did throughout the four-day event in Miami. https://t.co/mQahMG2Au4 pic.twitter.com/rEZYoPjaTv— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) April 14, 2022During the conference, one of its hosts Natalie Brunell, speaking on the venture capitalist Anthony Pompliano’s podcast, says Bitcoin represents the “American Dream,” with its ethos of “self-determination, freedom, the idea of creating a better life for your family.” But it’s not just that. That reputation of the Bitcoin-only folks — often called maximalists — is much like that of the new America that Florida has come to represent. It’s loud. It’s big on individual liberties. The open blockchain is transparent to a fault. Thus, Bitcoin is Florida.Or, at least, that’s one idea. On a different episode of the same Pompliano podcast, an enlightening statistic is brought up: 83% of those who own Bitcoin also own another cryptocurrency. For all of Bitcoin’s distinctness and how its identity is separate from the rest of crypto, that does not seem to extend to its holders. As I go about this Bitcoin-only event in the heart of this new America, I would wonder, How organic, really, is this maximalism sentiment running through it all?Stacks community event at Bitcoin Unleashed. Source: TwitterBitcoin to the maxIt’s hardly a controversial thought to say that other cryptocurrencies cannot be truly compared to Bitcoin because they are not sufficiently decentralized — and decentralization is the entire point of the first cryptocurrency. Nor is it outlandish to say that most of the tens of thousands of alternative coins and random “blockchain” projects are either scams or, to put it politely, overly ambitious. But Bitcoin maximalists have been criticized for taking that idea up a notch.On the second day of the conference, there is a zinger thrown during the panel called “Wartime Bitcoin.” The moderator asks what the biggest attack on Bitcoin is. Aleks Svetski, an Australian entrepreneur and author of a book on individual liberties, isn’t first in line to speak. But he seemingly gets invigorated by the question. Svetski gestures at the moderator and another speaker. “Let me go first, please,” he says. Svetski speaks with his hands:“The attack is cryptocurrency. That’s the fucking attack.”Me with two great men (left to right), Aleks Svetski and Mark Moss, at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami. If you don’t know them, LOOK THEM UP. pic.twitter.com/famVsYexeC— Al Blackford (@KetoBitcoiner) April 16, 2022The crowd cheers. Or, at least, some people do. I can hear the hoots. That is indeed quite clever, I think to myself as I watch Svetski. He further explains his thinking:“The easiest way to Trojan Horse everyone is to pretend like you’re building something technically and architecturally similar [to Bitcoin] and add a fucking wonderboy… and then roll it out to the lemmings.”Such rhetoric, though — those who disagree with it, disagree strongly. As the conference goes on, widely followed Twitter account Autism Capital tweets, “We find it incredibly interesting how the majority of the talks at Bitcoin Miami are people justifying Bitcoin against Ethereum…. It’s not a conference, it’s a sermon.”We find it incredibly interesting how the majority of the talks at Bitcoin Miami are people justifying Bitcoin against Ethereum. The fear is real. It’s not a conference, it’s a sermon.“Trust in God, do not be tempted, he will protect you, do not dance with the devil’s ether.”— Autism Capital ? (@AutismCapital) April 8, 2022Indeed, at Bitcoin 2021, the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. was booed when he showed up promoting an Ethereum-based project. Mayweather obviously didn’t do a good job of reading the room. And the boos were perhaps justified, given what happened to theEthereum Max token he was promoting to the outside world. But what was on display at Bitcoin 2021 bordered on the religious. A Rolling Stone article on the event was headlined “Welcome to the Church of Bitcoin.”But I didn’t go to Bitcoin 2021. I only read about it. In person, at Bitcoin 2022, there was much less of that image of Bitcoin maximalism than I expected. Aside from the conference speakers and, I guess, the guys who cheered Svetski, whom I didn’t really see, I would meet very few people who are actual Bitcoin maximalists. In fact, walking in and out of the formal talks and the rest of the conference, it seems as if I am stepping into different worlds.Floyd Mayweather se lució con su playera de ETH en Miami Bitcoin 2021 ??? pic.twitter.com/iPrig4kQbs— JJCampuzano.eth ?? (@das_grasshopper) June 5, 2021Four days in MiamiThe conference at the Miami Beach Exhibition Center is altogether four days, with the first being reserved for industry, the second and third for general admission, and the fourth for a music event called the Sound Money Fest.The way the conference is structured is that there are a few big rooms with stages for the formal events such as the talks, and while those are going on, there is a massive exhibition floor with hundreds of booths by various companies and organizations. There are also quite a few bars strewn around the place.Everywhere, there are a lot of spectacles around — aside from the celebrity speakers like Jordan Peterson and Serena Williams. There is a cyborg bull statue outside mimicking the golden one that stands on Wall Street. Inside, on the exhibition floor, there is another bull that you can ride, a mechanical one operated by the exchange Bullish. The person who lasts the longest at the conference would win a whole Bitcoin.Before #bitcoin After #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/06UVT3PAVS— Documenting Bitcoin ? (@DocumentingBTC) April 6, 2022The exhibition hall also has a Bitcoin volcano, referencing geothermal powered Bitcoin mining in El Salvador, and beside it is a stage with a table set up like at the sports network ESPN. Various personalities would sit around that table throughout the day and give their hot takes.I spend part of my first day in the exhibition hall trying to look for the booth of this Ukrainian mining pool Hiveon. A publicist reached out to me earlier and said a lot about the company’s involvement in the ongoing war with Russia — Ukraine raised more than $100 million in crypto. I found that link fascinating, how crypto found its way into this big geopolitics conversation. Much of that was based on Ethereum, however, not Bitcoin.To give you an idea of how big the exhibition hall is, though, and how absurdly bustling with activity it is, I never really end up finding the company.With 20,000 people from around the world descending on Miami Beach, all the celebrity speakers, the global media attention — it’s hard to believe all of that came out of a white paper by a pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto 13 years ago.It’s easy to see, though, that certain diffusion that happens as all ideas take hold. As Bitcoin grew, the border between it and the wider world blurred — when it became more mainstream, it also became more mainstream.“Crypto” used to be synonymous with “Bitcoin” because there were no other coins. It was all about peer-to-peer money that can’t be controlled by any one party. When more people paid attention to it, they as much started to become influenced by that idea as they started to influence that idea. The result is the tens of thousands of different coins, the Ethereum network and its clones and competitors, the pictures of apes selling for hundreds of thousands, the “blockchain” movement hoping to tap the technology but not the coin, and the scams and the hacks. That is the term “crypto” as we know it today.Peter Thiel making a clear declaration in Miami: the Financial Gerontocracy has declared war on Bitcoin as a revolutionary youth movement for good reason. It is thus time the revolutionary youth should understand their enemies & return fire. [Paraphrased]#BitcoinMiami #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/UWHdy9JyrU— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) April 7, 2022At the core of it all, there’s still that Bitcoin-only movement, still focused on that singular original idea of peer-to-peer digital money. But they seem to be getting drowned out. Even at this conference that is ostensibly all about Bitcoin maximalism, the exhibition hall is flush with the sort of “crypto” companies that the speaker Svetski would call the biggest attack on Bitcoin.The Ukrainian mining pool Hiveon, for example, whose booth I eventually later found, is for Ethereum. Some at the conference are openly selling NFTs. A writer for The Defiant, a DeFi publication, even says, “I see signs that DeFi is taking root in the heart of Bitcoin.” As I go about the exhibition hall, I ask myself, Aside from some of the conference speakers, where are all these Bitcoin maximalists I keep hearing so much about?Much later, I get somewhat of an answer. At the conference, I ran into a team from the media company WGMI Studios that has been going around interviewing attendees. Among the questions it asked is “Bitcoin or Ethereum?” They later compiled the results for me. Out of 298 people, even at this Bitcoin-only conference, 22% said Ethereum, and 11% said both. One of the WGMI studios guys, Nathan Espinosa, tells me later: “We also asked people, ‘NFTs, yes or no?’ toward the end of the event… It was quite interesting to see how [even some of who] chose Bitcoin and talked down Ethereum still supported NFTs.”Cheese & Hayden are in Bitcoin Miami Conference meeting with other crypto’s. That’s awesome for #SAFEMOON Making moves!!! ???? pic.twitter.com/fYjJKVAypQ— SafeMoon Fabo (@FaboisMe) April 6, 2022More bullOn the third day, I see the mechanical bull again, the one on the expo floor that anyone can try to ride to win a Bitcoin. I quickly Google the tips and tricks on how to ride a mechanical bull and sign up. How hard can riding a mechanical bull be? I last four seconds.I turn to less-physical pursuits after that. I play “Lightning” chess where players have only about five minutes to make all of their movies. I lost two games and won two games, which I think is a respectable finish.What I truly gain from that chess experience, though, is a spreadsheet of all the side-parties going on that an opponent gave me. Among the 32 events on just the third conference day, there is a yacht party or two and a beach event by Maxim magazine — just to give you an idea of what was on offer.BitMEX took this pic at Bitcoin 2022. Looks nice, needs more adoption. Source: TwitterETHMiami’s party is, unfortunately, miserable with under a dozen people. I am there for no more than 10 minutes before chugging my beer and walking out.A much better party — and one with an open bar — seems to be one by this outfit called Bad Bitch Empire, which bills itself as a private crypto investment club for ambitious women. Yet the promised free drinks turn out to be a mirage, and there are way too many people all squeezed shoulder to shoulder on a tiny rooftop patio.I go around asking people about my observation, that, somehow, at this Bitcoin-only conference, I’ve encountered so few Bitcoin maximalists. A man who works at a Bitcoin ATM provider tells me he feels the maximalists are vocal but not necessarily in the majority. Where are the maxis at the conference? “I don’t know, but I see them only on Twitter,” he tells me. Everyone seems to agree with my observation.Last night at the #bitcoin Miami afterparty sponsored by $Croge pic.twitter.com/HBpLTJokLN— Comet (@CometCalls) April 8, 2022I also bump into someone from SpaceX, but it turned out he wasn’t an attendee at Bitcoin 2022. In fact, quite few people at those side-parties were, and that’s what strikes me. One sullen British guy, who works at a crypto hedge fund, tells me that the conference is not the point. It’s the meetings you have with all the people who are in town, he says.I guess he has a point. The conference talks are streamed online anyway. If you’re solely after the information presented, you don’t even need to leave your bedroom. It’s the human connection with the hordes of other crypto folks all in one place that is the real point of such events. So, why pay $1,099 if you can just hobnob for free at the side parties?That night at the Bad Bitch Empire event, Bitcoin 2022 itself doesn’t really stand out among the dozens of crypto events going on around it — the Maxim beach party, the yacht gatherings, even that little ETHMiami gathering, as unspectacular as it was. It’s kind of like how, at the conference itself, its theme of Bitcoin maximalism seemed so lost among the wider crypto presence — even if, without Bitcoin 2022, there would have been none of these side events promising free drinks.The final hoursOn the last day, at the Sound Money Music Festival that is to cap off the conference, I speak to a trio of friends who are the absolute opposite of Bitcoin maximalists. One of them, a graphic designer who has gone into NFTs, an artist who goes by WHUT, proudly tells me that he holds no Bitcoin at all.When I press him, he says, “I have, but it is like a fraction. It doesn’t really make sense to even speak about it. But I do have — my bag in Tezos is pretty heavy. I own like over 70 NFTs.” As an artist, he says, that’s what he gravitated toward. He adds that all the altcoins have advanced the crypto mission that began with Bitcoin.Another among the trio, a recording artist named Cassius Cuvée, says:“Mass adoption — by way of Web3 — is by NFTs. Artists are driving the adoption… You can’t have Web3 with only Bitcoin, basically.”Whatever you make of their view, you can’t dispute that these guys believe it, and they’re not alone among the thousands of attendees of what is supposed to be a Bitcoin-only conference.It might seem, on the surface, that the conclusion to draw would be that this Bitcoin-only conference is becoming pointless. But the other perspective is that the very existence of all these non-maximalists validates this conference’s purpose. What’s the point, after all, of spreading maximalism if everyone is already a maximalist? Maybe the hordes of non-maximalist crypto people of the past days are exactly the sort of attendees the Bitcoin 2022 organizers want.Last main day of #Bitcoin MiamiGreat work by the organizers to pull off something of this scale.Can’t wait to come back again next year! #Bitcoin2022 pic.twitter.com/BrlrcRr5M6— Bruce Fenton (@brucefenton) April 8, 2022“Crypto” once meant “Bitcoin.” Now crypto has grown to become not only a world of which Bitcoin is only a small part, but also one which Bitcoin doesn’t really want to belong. To some, that’s a natural progression. To others, it’s a perversion. But to everyone, it’s a process that is plainly happening. Therein must lie the true raison d’être of the conference, its reason for being what it is: to counter that rising tide, to play the yang to the growing yin.It’s hard to say how successful that mission statement is, but like how people say any publicity is good publicity, what matters in any endeavor isn’t so much how far you go but that you take a little step each day and do not stop. Exposing all those thousands of crypto folks to maximalist thought — maybe that in itself is a victory.

Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith took a plea deal after breaking sanctions against North Korea and was formally sentenced earlier today— the final chapter in a two-year journey as bizarre as it is shocking. Journalist Ethan Lou, author of Once a Bitcoin Miner, attended the infamous event in North Korea at which Griffith spoke. He was asked to submit a statement for Griffith’s sentencing, although that statement was ultimately not filed with the court. Here he tells the inside story of what happened.Pyongyang, April 18, 2019Virgil Griffith had been on North Korean soil for only a few hours when he casually told fellow travelers and their local guides that his trip was unsanctioned. Unique in the world, the United States bans its citizens from going to North Korea without explicit permission.Griffith, an American in Singapore working for the Ethereum Foundation, had sought such permission unsuccessfully, he recounted at the round dinner table at Pyongyang’s riverside Pothonggang Hotel. Griffith had made his case the best he could on why he should go to that Pyongyang cryptocurrency conference in 2019 but was denied. And so, he decided to go anyway, he told people at the table.An image submitted by prosecutors in a New York court shows Virgil Griffith explaining cryptocurrency in North Korea in April 2019. The words “No Sanctions!” are highlighted in a detail box. Source: U.S. Department of JusticeUp and at themFour days later, in a building shaped like an atom, Griffith told a crowd of North Koreans how they could harness blockchain in negotiations with the United States. At the time, bilateral talks had been bogged down by the question of which measure should be unwound first: the United States’ economic sanctions or North Korea’s nuclear program.Griffith said both could happen simultaneously through a smart contract tied to a North Korean missile.“If all the news reports say that sanctions on North Korea have been lifted, the missile will deactivate.”Then, when explaining how smart contracts work, Griffith used the idea to “shave my cat” as an example. His presentations were mostly speculative, farfetched and based on publicly available information. It’s unclear how serious he was — he certainly had not taken the U.S. government’s opposition to his trip seriously.UnsanctionedGriffith believed in being forthright, even if it was uncomfortable. Almost immediately after returning to Singapore, Griffith went to the local U.S. embassy to talk about the trip with a special agent. Perhaps, in some way, he thought he was doing his government a favor by telling them all about the cloistered kingdom. Griffith did not expect that meeting to ripple throughout the U.S. government, but Special Agent Brandon Cavanaugh of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence unit in New York was soon brought into the fold, and then the circle grew to three lawyers from the Justice Department plus Treasury Department attorneys. On Thanksgiving of 2019, Griffith was arrested in Los Angeles.Accused of helping North Korea bypass sanctions by teaching it about blockchain, Griffith ultimately accepted a plea deal for 63 months in prison and was sentenced in April 2022.It was the final chapter in a two-year journey as confusing as it was shocking — the story of how an adventuresome utopian and his North Korean trip had come to disturb the merciless forces of geopolitics and national security.Griffith, through his lawyers, did not respond to an interview request, but documents filed with the court paint a vivid picture of the days following the trip and the decisions and moves made then — a crucial, illuminating period during which FBI agents as much went after Griffith as he fell into their lap.“Day 6. At the conference. From inside the building looking out. This monument here is of a pen and then there’s an atom on top, symbolizing science and writing and stuff.” Source: Ethan Lou on TwitterInternet Man of MysteryGriffith was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1983. He has unruly hair that would later make the North Korean restaurant servers describe his head as “big.” In 2008, a little before Bitcoin first came into the world, Griffith, a hacker, was profiled by The New York Times Magazine and dubbed the “Internet Man of Mystery.”He once suspended his doctorate studies to participate in the reality show King of the Nerds. He was also taken to court after planning to publicly unveil security flaws in campus identity cards, a matter later privately settled. In Griffith’s words, he is someone who likes to poke the proverbial bear. He once told his parents, “I regularly roll grenades into the room, and someone needs to really jump on it.” A friend described him as viewing life as a video game.In May 2019, about a month after Griffith met the State Department agent in Singapore, the FBI reached out. Griffith was visiting friends in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory that had become a bit of a crypto hub, where he had rented a small apartment. The FBI told Griffith it wanted a meeting.Griffith agreed immediately. He had little sense of any danger to himself. He did not hire a lawyer and traveled to New York at his own expense. Among the FBI employees he would meet was Special Agent Cavanaugh.“Day 4. We went up some really high tower. Virgil called North Korea a ‘Wes Anderson movie.’ I thought that was very clever.” Source: Ethan Lou on TwitterPlead the FifthGriffith showed the agents photographs of himself in North Korea and provided to the FBI propaganda he had taken home as souvenirs, including newspapers and other literature. Visually, Pyongyang had been eye-opening for Griffith, with the pastel colors of its apartment buildings evoking, in his view, a Wes Anderson movie.North Korea’s insular culture fascinated Griffith so much that he got a tailored Mao-style suit. Much of the country’s literature was also unintentionally funny. One newspaper headline Griffith saw in North Korea read, unironically, “Institute for women set up under the care of great men.” A coffee-table book he brought back used the Comic Sans font. Griffith treasured his North Korean souvenirs to such an extent that he sent them to the nonprofit Internet Archive to be digitized.However, what the government saw in the material Griffith brought from North Korea was starkly different. Michael Krouse, a Justice Department lawyer and former U.S. Marine, would later take note of Griffith’s Mao suit and, together with his colleagues, observe that Griffith dressed in a “North Korean military-style uniform.”For Special Agent Cavanaugh, the gist of his takeaway from that May meeting was that Griffith knew that going to North Korea to teach blockchain was illegal but did so anyway, intended to do so again, and wanted to make a symbolic cryptocurrency transfer between North and South Korea. Cavanaugh was not going to let that go.The North Korean suit was not a good look, either in a fashion sense or in court. Source: U.S. Department of JusticeBetter get a lawyer, sonOn Nov. 12, Griffith was on a business trip in Northern California. The FBI reached out again, and Griffith and Cavanaugh once more found themselves in the same room, this time at the FBI’s San Francisco field office. Griffith had gotten a little spooked from his last meeting, but he again did not hire a lawyer. And this time, Griffith also gave the FBI permission to search his phone.Griffith’s decisions may seem baffling. Before one of those FBI meetings, he talked about it with his friend Eric Corley, an editor for a hacker magazine, for whom he once wrote. In his recollections, Corley said he tried to dissuade Griffith from going: “I kept warning him it was a trap.”But Griffith “insisted” on going to the FBI and “telling the truth” without a lawyer, Corley said. The presentation Griffith had given in North Korea amounted to no more than publicly available information, he thought. He did not believe he had done anything wrong. Shortly after that meeting, Griffith “was convinced they totally got where he was coming from,” Corley said. He called Griffith’s sentiment “ironic.”Day 3. We took a look at where the conference was held. This is the very room in which Virgil Griffith spoke to the North Koreans. We, eight foreigners, would be seated around that circular table. They called us a “delegation.” 20/15 pic.twitter.com/T94mxrldKA— Ethan Lou (@Ethan_Lou) October 27, 2021North Korea, accused of rampant human rights violations and pursuing nuclear weapons against the international order, has long been under a blanket of economic sanctions, often led by the United States. Those sanctions punish North Korea economically by barring it from international trade, which the U.S. is able to do because it effectively controls the global financial infrastructure. Cryptocurrency is theoretically a way for North Korea to get around that. After all, the country has already been accused of hacking and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Griffith’s visit had set off all manner of red flags within the U.S. government.After Griffith’s San Francisco meeting with the FBI, Justice Department officials in New York worked hard to build a case against him. It was not without its challenges, and the matter came to a head a little after midday on Nov. 18. Another Justice Department lawyer, Kyle Wirshba — a Harvard Law School graduate with a gentle voice — learned that the Department of the Treasury had issues with the case. The department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said it was “a gray area” because it might not be illegal if Griffith’s presentation in North Korea was general information and not tailored for the audience.Did the Justice Department know the specific nature of Griffith’s presentation? That information became urgent and vital. If the matter went to trial, a Treasury Department expert would need to testify to support the charges. That afternoon, Wirshba posed that question to the FBI’s Special Agent Cavanaugh. He also wrote to his fellow lawyer Krouse, telling him about another government official: “So, of course, the deputy chief has problems.”COUNTDOWN TO SENTENCING: Virgil Griffith Pled Guilty To North Korea Sanctions Violation Conspiracy, Now Asks For 24 Months While US Probation Recommends 63 Months; Vitalik Buterin Urges Mercy – Inner City Press story: https://t.co/JF5hUuZJ0b pic.twitter.com/o5PKFaBO63— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) March 5, 2022Around this time, the Justice Department faced another issue: The gravity of the matter had finally dawned on Griffith. He knew that he had told the FBI that North Korean attendees left the conference with a better understanding of cryptocurrency than when they arrived, that he had acknowledged that his talk amounted to a “non-zero tech transfer,” and that Cavanaugh, perhaps, did not really believe him when he said he only talked about publicly available information. Around this time, Griffith hired a lawyer.So, if Griffith were no longer going to cooperate with the authorities, perhaps he would run? The FBI deemed Griffith a flight risk and needed to arrest him quickly. The bureau told Griffith not to leave the country, but Griffith was under no obligation to comply. And without the Treasury Department’s support, there was no justification to detain him. The case no longer appeared so easy.On Nov. 18, the same day that Wirshba learned of the Treasury Department’s concerns, a busy afternoon unfolded at the Justice Department. By 8:00 pm, it had bugged a lawyer from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control too many times. In an email to his colleagues that night, Cavanaugh said: “DOJ asked us to hang on reaching out to the OFAC. Apparently, one or more people have already reached out […] and he’s becoming frustrated. Just wanted you to be aware of the sensitivity.”Don’t skip townDepending on your perspective, the Justice Department either thought too little or too much of Griffith. As he was based in Singapore, he had not made arrangements to be in the United States beyond that business trip to Northern California. He also knew unequivocally by then that the law was after him. But Griffith complied with the FBI’s request that he not leave the country.He stayed with friends in Los Angeles and also decided to spend Thanksgiving with his parents and sister’s family in Baltimore. He told the authorities of those travel plans and sent his itinerary through his lawyer to ensure they knew where he was and that he was not trying to run away.Griffith still believed in doing the right thing and that it was important to have demonstrated that he tried to follow the rules. He believed in the integrity of the justice system, that everyone gets what they deserve and that the innocent have nothing to fear. A question would arise in the coming days: Was Griffith some sort of scheming mastermind? A traitor bent on undermining his own country? The days following North Korea show that the answer is complicated.Virgil Griffith is paying heavily for his mistakes.Despite all the damning accusations against him, Griffith had a certain honesty — a naivety perhaps reinforced by his involvement in the cryptocurrency space, where the law was lax and the only moral compass people had to guide them was their own. Deep in that world, Griffith had simply been too far removed from the wider world with its own values and rules, agendas, intricacies and rigidity.Two days after that frantic day on Nov. 18, following another flurry of emails and a conference call, the Justice Department prevailed. The prosecutor, Wirshba, had gone to bat with the Office of Foreign Assets Control during the call, and in the view of his colleague Krouse, that conversation went well — “thanks to Kyle’s advocacy.” The OFAC said that, if requested at trial, it would provide a witness to testify that Griffith had broken the law.The FBI has disclosed that agents from other investigations accessed Twitter, Facebook data in Virgil Griffith/North Korea crypto case because *default setting* in Palantir is to allow all FBI agents access to everything from all cases. That’s quite amazing. pic.twitter.com/DP7Kq3NGce— Martyn Williams (@martyn_williams) August 26, 2021ArrestedAbout a week later, on Thanksgiving morning, Griffith was arrested while boarding a flight from Los Angeles to Baltimore, based on a formal complaint from Special Agent Cavanaugh in New York — sworn just one day after Wirshba resolved the Treasury Department’s concerns. The complaint was eight pages and more than 2,000 words, but where it discussed the facts of what happened in North Korea, it contained not even a single piece of information from sources other than Griffith. It was just the man’s own words over the past seven months that had been weaponized against him.From there, a new chapter in Griffith’s life began. Even when he was later released on bail for a period, he had to abide by strict conditions. Griffith was eventually held in New York’s infamous Metropolitan Detention Center, an unpleasant preview of the future that loomed for him. At that moment at the airport on Thanksgiving of 2019, when the law took him away under the dull and steely sky, Griffith had just experienced his last day of freedom, though he did not yet know it.Lou writes about the North Korea affair in-depth in his new book, Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West. Check out Magazine’s Journeys in Blockchain profile of him below.Acid, Bitcoin mining and a bad trip to North Korea