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Audio and transcript from the March 3rd, 2022 installment of “Conversations with the Coop” with crypto journalist Laura Shin, the host of the Unchained podcast and author of the new published book “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze”.
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Crypto Texan: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Conversations With The Coop. This is where we source questions from the Index Coop community to gain insights from today's leaders in crypto. I'm your host, Crypto Texan. Today, we have Laura Shin on this installment with Conversations With The Coop. Laura is the host of the Unchained podcast and author of the newly published book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze. Laura, thanks for being here with us today. How's it going?
Laura Shin: Oh, my God. I'm having the best week ever.
Crypto Texan: I know you've been pretty busy. I've seen you on Twitter. You're doing a lot of interviews. How's that going for you? Pretty hectic?
Laura Shin: Oh, my gosh. It's been hectic, but so wonderful. I went to London after my book was published the day after, and the day after I revealed who I believe the DAO attacker is, and I went to a conference at Chainalysis on Thursday, and so many people came up and said such lovely things, and I then went to a conference in Oxford the next day. I saw some crypto people in the UK, including some sources who helped me with the book, and I gave them and copies, and I was also able to actually see a number of personal friends who obviously I hadn't seen for years because of the pandemic.
Then one other thing that was really special was I had done study abroad in Oxford in college, and it is just a place that means so much to me. So to go back there right after a major life milestone to this place that just feels so close to my heart, literally, I walked around to all my old haunts, and I was actually crying a lot because, I don't know, it's hard to explain, just revisiting a place that just was so formative for you, and then going back at a time when you have had this major life accomplishment. It was very moving.
Then last night here in New York, I had my first official book reading and signing, and it was totally sold out and they were actually turning people away at the door because I think some people signed up with the Ethereum meetup and didn't realize they had to give their names to the Strand or pay the Strand or buy a book or whatever. So I mean, it was a ... Honestly, a lot of authors have a hard time kind of drumming up an audience for their book signings. So the fact that this was sold out was just, it was wonderful and a lot of people came up and said that they had been listening to the podcast for years. I mean, just overall, the whole thing, I just felt like I was glowing. So it's been really great.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. Well, yeah, definitely a whirlwind, I can imagine, and I'm one of those people who's been listening to your podcast for quite a long time as well back when it was Unconfirmed, I think is what it or you had two at one point, something like that.
Laura Shin: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. So how did all of this get started, just your background and just how did you get into crypto in general?
Laura Shin: So I was covering personal finance for Forbes as a freelancer for a while, and I'd actually also been covering it for other outlets before then. I was frankly getting a little antsy just because when you cover personal finance, it's not a beat like crypto that changes all the time. It's a beat that probably hasn't changed very much for decades.
So I just was getting to the point where I really wanted it do something else because I need to have that challenge and I need to be learning. If something becomes too easy for me, I literally have zero desire to do it. So my editors said, "Well, we have this idea to do a Forbes Fin-tech 50 list. How about you head up the list with another reporter?"
So she and divided the list into subcategories and I took the subcategory of digital currencies, and I just became completely obsessed. I wrote a big feature about it for the magazine, and hilariously, people are going to laugh because it was so wrong. It was about how Wall Street and traditional financial services companies would use blockchain technology to make their offerings faster and more efficient.
Anyway, all I have to say is I got in in the 2015 era, and that's what people were saying. So if my sources are saying that and they know more about this world than I do supposedly, then that's what I was reporting. So I just truly fell down the rabbit hole and pretty much really didn't want to cover anything else but that.
Crypto Texan: Yeah, that's awesome. That was the idea way back then was the permission blockchains or enterprise blockchains, and that just, I don't know, just didn't really pan out, I guess. Do you have any idea why?
Laura Shin: No.
Crypto Texan: Why do you think that didn't pan out?
Laura Shin: I mean, there's so many reasons sense. I think people, well, a couple things. So people just really didn't understand the benefit of crypto assets and what benefits they provide and how beneficial they are. So there was dismissive attitude toward them, but the thing is that these legacy institutions, they just have a lot of inertia that keeps them from really disrupting themselves and really innovating, and they don't really have an incentive because to use blockchain technology, they would need to do it in this cooperative fashion, right? A blockchain is about numerous actors coming together and cooperating.
When you have these financial institutions that are used to competing with each other, I think it's just obviously a really difficult shift. Frankly, they already have thousands of workers who do things a totally different way. So I just feel like the incentives weren't there.
Then also, what we have seen time and again in these decentralized communities is that things move very fast in a decentralized space. I mean, well, they move fast and slow, which is a funny irony. Obviously, it's like how China can be top down and move very quickly, but then the US is just going to be better even if it takes a little bit longer because it's messier, but what we have seen with the crypto spaces that when things take off, they can take off very, very fast.
We saw this with the ICO craze. We've seen it with DeFi. We saw it with NFTs. We're seeing it with DAOs. It just happens over and over again. So yeah, I just feel like, frankly, so having intermediaries in a system that frankly was designed to remove intermediaries, it's just an oxymoron, and that's why these financial institutions trying to adopt blockchain technology just didn't work.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. That's an interesting way to put it, and that makes a lot of sense when you put it that way, putting those intermediaries there where the whole idea was to remove those in the first place. That actually helps make sense of that to me. So yeah, we'll get in the book here in a little bit, and I really love the journalistic approach that you took, very in-depth journalistic research, and part of that is the fact that you don't own any crypto or at least that has been the case historically. You've mentioned it on your podcast a few times.
Every once in a while, I'll see people on Twitter. I think Marty Bent said this a couple months ago that it's like, "How can you report on this space when you don't even hold or use the assets? So is that true that you don't own any crypto right now, and how would you respond to that criticism?
Laura Shin: So my business owns a little bit of Ether and Solana at the moment. My company bought the Ether to secure my ENS domain names, my .eth domain names. For anybody who knows anything about the crypto space, I have a ton of imposters that try to scam people out of money all the time on every single platform. So I felt the need to own those domain names and just keep anybody from scamming people with them.
Then I had Ether leftover. So obviously, I bought this, I forget, a year or two ago or whatever, but I had Ether leftover, and because of my book, I am going to be doing NFTs. So I will use the leftover ETH to create those NFTs. Then when I was thinking about doing this NFT, I did not know whether I would want to do it on a cheaper chain as well. So I just bought a few Solana at the time thinking that I might want to have that to create that NFTs there. Basically, that's it, but none of these are for personal investment.
When I was at Forbes, Forbes allows you to hold what you, sorry, to cover what you own as long as you disclose it. So at that time, they did own some Bitcoin in Ether, but then when I quit, it's so much more important to me to be able to write for any publication that I would want to write for. So I just decided, "Okay. So I'm not going to own anything now because I want to be able to write for any publication about crypto." That's so much more fun to me. I would so much rather do that than just get rich off of crypto doing nothing. It just would not be fulfilling to me in any way.
I've had people tweet at me about that. Some people say to me, "Have fun staying poor." It was like, "Wow! Do you really not understand? I am having the time of my life covering crypto. You cannot pay me enough money to not do it." You know what I mean? So I don't know. I just find it funny. I mean, granted, of course, I wish that a number of these publications I'd like to write for would say, "Oh, you can cover what you own. You would just need to disclose," like that Forbes policy, but if that's not going to happen, then fine. I'm not going to own it because I would rather write for them.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
Laura Shin: Oh, no. I was going to answer the other part of your question. So you can-
Crypto Texan: I was going to say, yeah, it just seems ironic in the sense that owning crypto is supposed to give people this personal freedom, but you're finding it with the publications that you write for that not owning crypto gives you more freedom to do what you want.
Laura Shin: Exactly. I mean, obviously, it's just me and my situation, but yeah, pretty much. Then for the other part about I can't write about it if I haven't used it, I mean, you've read my book. What's your opinion of that? Can I write about it if I haven't used it-
Crypto Texan: I mean, I listen-
Laura Shin: ... or if I don't use it on a regular basis?
Crypto Texan: I listen to your podcasts all the time, and I've read the book. Yeah. I mean, I obviously feel like those criticisms don't make any sense to me, but I'm just interested to see your response to those.
Laura Shin: Yeah. I mean, obviously, I could definitely do work where I would use it, and if that were the case, I would just use my company money to do it, and then not be trying to personally profit or anything. It would be just for the experiment, use whatever, $100,000 or whatever it might be or even, obviously, for some DeFi things I would need to use more than that to make it work out just financially because of the fees, but then I would just do it to write about it and not to be like, "Oh, I'm going to try to make 10,000 bucks doing this," or whatever. It's just going to be me doing it as an experiment to write about it, and then if there's any profit, I might donate it because I've noticed some other publications that have done experiments. They do things like that.
I can't remember which one this one's, but anyway, one of the journalistic publications that did something with NFTs did a donation to one of the big journalism groups that promotes freedom of speech and stuff like that. So that's a good idea. I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. Frankly, I definitely actually do want to do more experiments with crypto and write about it or make videos about it or whatever, but I've been so busy with the book and just doing my shows and just everything going on. So even though that is in the back of my head as something that it I'd like to do at some point, I just haven't had time yet.
So stay tuned. Maybe at some point you guys will find out about my experiments using crypto, and it might be highly entertaining for you all to realize like, "Oh, Laura's very knowledgeable about this, but use crypto because she has so not really been using it very much. She's at a much lower level than most of you." So you might find that entertaining.
Crypto Texan: I don't know, Laura. After reading the book, I feel like maybe you have a lot more, I guess, just street smarts in the crypto space than maybe some other people. I think you might be less likely to get rug pulled than most others. So yeah. Let's talk about the book. Is this your first book and why did you decide to write this book and was the anthology of Ethereum always intended to be the main idea for this book or did it start off as something else? You just said, "No, this is the real story here."
Laura Shin: Yes. So I have not written a book like this before. I've written a couple eBooks that were just published with Forbes, but this is my first real book that is coming out in stores with a traditional publisher and everything like that. Actually, my idea originally, and that is what the book became, but the scope of what I was thinking was very different.
So I started working on the proposal for the book in early 2018, and my idea was to explain how the 2017 ICO craze happened. I actually had a much bigger scope in mind that included how Coinbase was the major on-ramp to the crypto world from fiat because just getting money into the system I think was also part of it. So I actually did a ton of interviews with Coinbase people, and I even wrote a few chapters on Coinbase, but ultimately, I realized I had to just ditch all that stuff because I had too much material.
The book is 400 pages, and this is after I cut the Coinbase part out. So at a certain point, I was like, "Okay. The Ethereum part is really where it's at and it's more important and it's a story." So ultimately, I ended up just focusing on that half of it. So the book ends up being a three quarters of a history, three quarters of it is a history of Ethereum, and then at the end when the ICO craze is really going, then it branches out into some other areas, but yeah.
It's funny because I really wanted to describe how the ICO craze happened, but in order to do that, you have to give so much backstory that a huge percentage of the book is all the things that happened before the ICO craze happens at the very end.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. One of the things I noticed while reading the book is that you really don't pull any punches on this and there's not a lot of people who really come away looking great in this book from a Charles Hoskinson standpoint, Gavin Wood consensus, Ming. I guess Vitalik does come out somewhat unscathed. Although he-
Laura Shin: Yeah. He's the only one.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. He might be only one.
Laura Shin: Not literally the only one. Taylor Monahan I think looks pretty good, too.
Crypto Texan: Oh, yeah. I'm a big fan of hers and just hearing her parts in the book was really exciting. So I don't know. Were you ever worried about burning any bridges when you're just doing this tell all about these very key prominent figures in the crypto space?
Laura Shin: It was something I just felt that I couldn't let myself worry about because I was trying to write a document for the ages, a historical document, something that people 100 years from now would use to understand what Ethereum was and how crypto got started. I just felt like I can't write this in a way where I'm trying to protect my own access or I have any concerns about my own ability to do whatever because even if people stop talking to me, it's not like I can't cover what it is that they're doing. I may not be able to have them on my show, but I can have other people comment on them. I can still write about them as you know from the book, and just remind me, did you finish until the very end including the epilogue and everything?
Crypto Texan: Okay. So I have to admit, I'm on chapter 12. I didn't get to finish the whole thing.
Laura Shin: Okay. Okay. So you'll find out at the very end who didn't talk to me, but there are some people who they're all over the book, but they didn't talk to me. I obviously was still able to tell the story and obviously with the podcast, people like it when I can have a guest on that they want to hear from, but like I said, my primary goal really was to just write the best book I could write, and if I ever let my own concerns about getting access to people for the podcast interfere with that, I would've not been able to write as good a book as I believe that I did or that I hope that I did.
Frankly, also, that goal would interfered with what I said earlier about how I was trying to write a historical document, and I really wanted people 100 years from now to understand what it was that happened at this time. So just finding out the truth and presenting as accurate a picture as I could, that was my number one goal at all times, and I did not ever falter in that. I just always, always pursued that.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. I think you did a great job of doing that, and just still on the subject of Vitalik, he's such an interesting specimen, and he was so young when he founded Ethereum and it feels like the social network in a sense, but for crypto, and I'm just wondering, what are your personal opinions about Vitalik's leadership in the beginning and what he's grown into today? Do you see him as a crypto version of Mark Zuckerberg or just what are your thoughts on that?
Laura Shin: So Vitalik was 19 when he came up with the idea for Ethereum, and at that time, the Bitcoin price had just shot past $1,000 for the first time. A lot of people were feeling very flush. I think they suddenly were aware or really, actually, I mean, so this was before they knew that the price was going to deflate, right? They felt like, "Oh, we've made it. Now, we're ultra wealthy," whatever. These are people who probably owned Bitcoin when it was in the single digits or low two digits or whatever, and that meant that when he had this idea that seemed quite promising, he attracted a lot of opportunists and people who probably had pretty self-serving intentions right from the start. He was not the kind of person that was going to be well-equipped to deal with that.
He talked to me about how when he was young, he struggled with loneliness. There was a very, very, very long stretch of his childhood where he really did not have any friends. I mean, he told me that in junior high, he was shocked to find out that his schoolmates were going over to each other's houses on weekends and after school. I mean, it was a total shock to him. He didn't know that they were doing that, which think about it. I mean, he made it to junior high and somehow didn't realize that kids have play dates with each other and get together and hang out.
I mean, when he found that out, he not only was shocked, but he didn't even know how to enter that world. So at 19, I mean, granted he had a slightly different experience in high school. He finally found people who were more similar to him, but that environment, I visited that school, I saw those classes. I talked with the teacher there, the principal, and it really felt like a preschool that was for older kids. I think I said it had a preschool sense of, I forget, comfort and safety or whatever, and then a graduate school seminar sense of intellectual rigor. I can't remember the exact words I use, but it just had this feeling of, I can't remember how many students there were per class, but I think it was 50 students across all four grades or something. It was less than 20, I guess, per grade or I forget the exact numbers.
If anybody's read it more recently, maybe you can tell me, but again, that very cocoon-like atmosphere, it was not something that prepared him for the real world. So he did start college, but he dropped out after or not dropped out, I forget what this is called, but something at his school. They allow you to do work in the real world and alternate that with schooling, and he did that and used the time to travel the world and visit these Bitcoin communities.
Again, he's more in this one-on-one relationship with people and they were just Bitcoin nerds geeking out on Bitcoin and having fun with crypto. So once he had this idea for Ethereum, the kinds of people he was attracting were just different kinds of people that he really had never dealt with before.
So his "leadership skills" at the time were pretty much zero. A few different times, people did mention to me that his conception really was to not do a pre-mine and to just launch Ethereum like Satoshi, and he got talked out of it by one of the other co-founders, who many people would definitely that that person was very self-interested.
That definitely, I think, has affected the trajectory of Ethereum, obviously. We have a lot of people who definitely have a lot more Ether than they probably would deserve in any kind of rational system. It took a while for Vitalik to be able to assert himself, and even once that started happening years later, that only really started happening in a very roundabout way, which people will read about. I don't want to give too many spoilers, but let's just say I think sometimes when Vitalik started asserting himself and finally making decisions, it wasn't always necessarily that it was him even doing it.
I think he, again, was influenced by other people, but it was just people that he trusted better. So you'll read about that, and there are people who take issue with how he had structured his life by that point. So whether or not it really is better is probably up to question. I should also mention that my book ends in early 2018, in January 2018.
So I don't know about right now, obviously. Now, it's four years later. He might be quite different, but I do know some of the people who were talking to me when I was doing this reporting in 2019-2020. I think some of their comments also did apply to the period beyond 2018.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. I know who you're alluding to when you're talking about who may have been thinking-
Laura Shin: Because you're probably reading that part right now.
Crypto Texan: It's pretty great, but yeah. On that same subject, in this book, there is just so much in the sense of, just like you said, power hungry founders, lies, greed, something like authoritarianism, manipulation, both emotional manipulation as well as market manipulation, which ironically, all of this is just contrary to the initial idealism in which crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum is trying to break away from. I just want to know about your revelations that you had about that just interesting contrast between this almost toxic nature of human power struggles versus the objective code that those same humans were writing. I don't know. Does this research that you've done change your views on just human nature in general, if at all?
Laura Shin: Yeah. I guess it does paint a slightly darker picture of things because obviously, most of the people that I deal with in my everyday life I would say of higher integrity. So yeah, learning about a lot of the stuff was pretty eye-opening.
One thing I would say was that I, frankly, I mean, I obviously was surprised by so many things. Let's just put it this way. The book proposal and the final book do not resemble each other because I did not know even 10% of what is in the book when I went to write it. One of the probably big things that I took away from the book that surprised me was the influence of whales. They're just there behind the scenes. They have a lot of power and it is disheartening given the way that blockchain technology is described in terms of its potential to democratize things.
At the same time that I was shocked by all this and a little bit disappointed, I also wouldn't say necessarily that it makes me think that it's impossible to use this technology to make things better. I just think things are so early. We need to still develop the technology further and hopefully make it even better and reduce the influence of whales, et cetera, because I personally think it's possible, but in the early days when things were new and there weren't a lot of systems put in place to prevent these kinds of situations, definitely we saw a lot of shenanigans and a lot of people throwing their weight around, but overall, I really would say that it actually hasn't necessarily made me less optimistic about crypto in general, which might be surprising to people, but it is the truth.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. I think when you look at Twitter and you listen to podcasts, the people in this space that we interact with on a daily basis do paint this just very beautiful picture of idealistically what crypto could do. I think it's important to take a step back and see that what your book revealed is that, yeah, greed and human nature are still there. We're just trying to code that greed out of the system if we can.
Laura Shin: Yeah. Keep working on it. Definitely needs improvement.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. It definitely, definitely does. So let's say if you were to hypothetically come out with a book about the beginning of Bitcoin similar to how you did with the beginning of Ethereum, which is basically what this book is about, and let's just say through your research you were to discover who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Would you publish that information or do you think the lines blur there between being a journalist and maybe protecting someone's identity?
Laura Shin: No, no, no, no. I would definitely, of course, publish their name. There's no question. I mean, if I had really, really strong evidence and felt confident in it, I would do so.
Crypto Texan: Similar to how you did the DAO attacker, right? Yeah. Let's talk about that. Did you just go into this saying, "I want to find out who the DAO attacker is," or did you just through your research just accidentally stumble upon some breadcrumbs and you just decided to see where they went? How did all this come about?
Laura Shin: Oh, no. I mean, of course, I was trying to figure it out. I spent so long on that. Oh, my gosh, you guys. I spent so much time on that and then hilariously. the way it all happened. So after I'd spent all this time, so what I did was at the time, there was an investigation that named some suspects. So what I did was I followed that lead out fully and I did all my homework and I researched all the ways in which what was really going on, why did these clues come together, et cetera, et cetera.
Then I interviewed and I wrote up that portion of the book just presenting all the reasons why they came under suspicion and then all their responses to me essentially, and that was basically what it was. So I didn't say anything conclusive. I just basically presented that I did the homework, I finished everything out, and here's what I found, and never said either way what I thought because I frankly just didn't even really know. I didn't have anything conclusive, but I just wanted to show these are the main suspects, but I researched it all and here's what I thought.
That was what was going to be in the book. So when you're finishing a book, it goes through what are called three final passes. The final passes are just meant to do all the last minute little changes. It's copy, editing, proofreading, and legal. Then the publisher will do all those things and they'll send it back to you. I had hired my own fact checker. So my fact checker and I would get the changes back and then be like, "oh, they made things slightly inaccurate with that change. We have to fix it," whatever, just making our tweaks, and then you do this in three rounds. With each round, it's supposed to be few and fewer changes.
Well, between the first and the second pass, Alex Van de Sande, who is of the people that was involved in rescuing the money, the remaining money in the DAO after the hack, reached out to me and he's Brazilian and he said, "Hey, back at the time of the DAO, the Brazilian Federal Police opened an investigation into the DAO and the DAO hack and also into me because I'm Brazilian and they don't know if I'm the hacker or not." He said, "I was thinking about commissioning a report to exonerate myself, and I know you're also looking into this. So would you want to look at that information?"
I said, "Yes."
So we shared the report and the company Coinfirm also gave them a discount and I credited them in the book. So Alex and I started looking at the information that we had and we mapped the cash-outs onto a schedule, and when I say cash-outs, what I mean is that because Ethereum had a hard forked, the attacker had Ethereum classic at this point. They did not have any ETH, and Ethereum classic just being a few months old was not something that they could easily use and actually turn into money. So they were using ShapeShift to try to convert it to Bitcoin.
The reason they wanted to convert it to Bitcoin was because Bitcoin is the most liquid of all the cryptos. It's the easiest to actually use and turn into money. So the reason they were using ShapeShift was because ShapeShift was an exchange, but it did not take customer identifying information. Since everybody knew whose coins those were, meaning they were the hackers, this person didn't want their name attached, right?
So they were using ShapeShift to convert to Bitcoin, and we saw that the cash-outs mapped onto an Asian morning to nighttime schedule. I was like, "Oh, hmm," because I had obtained a customer service email that they had sent to ShapeShift when they were preparing the attack, when they were getting all their ETH and DAO tokens into place in order to perform this attack on the DAO.
They'd actually sent three customer service emails, but some of them were super short like "Check order, please." Actually, I'm going to pull up the text of the slightly longer one. Okay. So this was their last message, which just was a little bit longer. From this, I definitely knew they were a fluent English speaker. So they wrote, "DAO tokens still missing. Should be this TX. Please send refund TX hash or DAO token. Thank you."
It's so hard to explain, but just reading that, "DAO tokens still missing," they didn't even ... So obviously, fluent, just normal fluent English would be, "My DAO tokens are still missing," but if you're going to put that in a shorthand, of course, you do it the way they did it, "DAO tokens still missing." You remove my, you remove are, right? So it's just another level of fluency. They're so fluent. They can even do shorthand in a perfectly good English way. Do you know what I'm saying?
Crypto Texan: Wow. Yeah.
Laura Shin: Yeah. So I just knew. I was like, "This is a fluent English speaker." Then when I saw the cash out tends were on this Asian morning to nighttime schedule. I was confused and also, the people I'd been investigating, they're all in Europe. There was one other suspect that Alex and I identified and they were in Russia. Also, we checked their social media posts and all their social media posts mapped onto a European morning to nighttime schedule.
So it was just like, "Okay. If they're tweeting at the time that this DAO attacker is it looks like they're sleeping for the cash outs, then it doesn't look like it's the same person."
So another company I worked with very extensively on a whole number of things was Chainalysis. So I sent some things to Chainalysis and I was like, "Oh, this was their main wallet they used on Bitcoin. Can you just look into this or that?" Oh, by the way, by the way, meanwhile, I'm supposed to turn in a second pass to this book. We had already delayed the publication date once because just all these little things were taking a little bit longer than we thought, and then on top of that, there's supply chain issues hitting book stuff.
So we're like, "You know what? Things would be just a little bit more comfortable if we could just push it." So we'd already pushed it from a November publication date to January. When I realized I had this new data that I really wanted to pursue, I thought, "Okay."
So the way I've written it so far where I named these people, but I do not say that they hacked it, I just say I finished out the one investigation that had any suspects and I interviewed them all and here's what they said, I mean, that's a perfectly fine way to do journalism. It's like I didn't accuse them anything, but at the same time, people know I did my homework and I checked everything out, but of course, I wanted to be able to look at this new information that I had.
So I did decide to ask the publisher if I could have more time and they were like, "No. We can't." They were like, "Are you crazy?" Then of course, a couple weeks later when Chainalysis told me they were able to de-mix and identify where those coins had been sent, and then I was able to, through another source, get more information on what happened to those coins and it led me to Toby Honish's identity, then, of course, when I went to my publisher, then they were like, "Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Well, we'll push it again."
Anyway, so I'll just explain that part. So hopefully you saw the Forbes article, but I'll just explain this in case you haven't. So Shane also said these are the four exchanges, and I got a source to get information from one of those exchanges where the exchange that, "Okay. Those Bitcoins that were deposited were converted to Grin and then withdrawn to a Grin node called grin.toby.ai."
When we looked at the IP address hosting that, we saw these Bitcoin Lightning nodes, and we looked at a Bitcoin Lightning node explorer to find out out more about those nodes, and we saw one of the notes was named TenX. Of course, you Google TenX, you see that Toby is the CEO and co-founder.
By the way, so then through the fact checking, I was emailing him a lot. I initially asked for interviews, he didn't respond, and then I sent a bunch of fact checking, which was just I sent a Google Doc with all the things that were going to be said about him in the book. Then he wrote me back, "Your statement and conclusion is factually inaccurate," and then he offered to give me more details if I wanted, but when I immediately wrote him back and said, "Yes, I would like more details. Would you actually want to get on the phone?" he did not respond. I gave him the deadline multiple times, five different times, no response.
One other thing I was going to say about that was that what I sent to him was a Google Doc with the fact checking, and I'm pretty sure he's in Singapore. So it's roughly exactly half a day opposite of where I am. I remember that I had the Google Doc open after I sent it and I saw him open it, and he was in the document at the same time.
So I was like, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" It was the middle of the night here and I literally could not sleep for another hour and a half after that because my adrenaline was just pumping, but anyway, so what I did see was that he used Toby AI as his alias on multiple, more. I think I counted 16 of them. It AngelList and BetaList, and Medium, and GitHub, and Reddit. I mean, just on and on and on.
Then later on, a week or two later, we got the email address that was used on that account, and it was the name of the exchange, @toby.ai, and then ultimately later on after that, I was able to also confirm with somebody who used to work with him that he used an email address that ended in @toby.ai.
So I felt the evidence was so strong. So a couple of other things. So I knew you haven't gotten to this part in the book so I'm going to spoil a tiny, tiny something for you, but it's not that big.
Crypto Texan: That's okay. That's okay. I can handle it.
Laura Shin: Okay. You'll see that the Forbes article just has so much more information and there's funny reasons for that because it was so late in the process with the book and because, well, mainly that. Also, book publishers, they're not used to breaking this kind of news and it's very difficult because you finish a book and then the book doesn't come out for months, right? So there were just numerous reasons why.
There's just a much smaller amount of information about it, but one of the reasons was that they said to me, "Look, we cannot make huge changes. So what we're going to do is just we're going to remove the part that you wrote before and you're going to have to insert a new section with this, and it has to be roughly the same number of words." They were like, "You cannot go over X amount of words."
It was funny reasons like even the fact that if I added pages to the book, then the size of the book jacket would change and they just couldn't have things like that happening because it was just too late. So that's why when you read the Forbes article there's just so much more in it, but also, I interviewed his co-founder at TenX, Julian Hosp, for the article in Forbes, but I did not interview him for the book.
The reason was I had looked and I saw that they had been working together already in June 2016 when the DAO attack happened, and even though they've had a falling out now, I was like, "If they had been accomplices at the time, then it just creates too many wild cards," because already, I was worried that what Toby publicly comes out and announces something before my book comes out, just ruining the news in my book or what if somebody else gets a hold of the book and ... There were just too many things that could go wrong because it was, I forget, four months or whatever in between when we finished and when the book was going to come out.
So ultimately, I decided to reach out before the Forbes article. So because they'd had this falling out, I had a pretty good feeling it's not going to be ... Even if they were accomplices, there's just something about, because I saw these videos that Julian Hosp made about Toby, and I just thought they're clearly not friends anymore, but still, I want to be careful.
So I literally bent. So the whole interview was three hours total, which by the way, that's just an insanely long interview, but the whole first two hours was me trying to figure out if he had been an accomplice or not, but I couldn't be too obvious about what I really was interested in. So I had to ask a whole bunch of questions, some of them related to what I was actually interested in, and then others that were not related to just throw him off the trail if he actually was hiding something in that regard.
Anyway, after the two hours, I satisfied myself that he probably wasn't an accomplice because it was just clear he was not a technical person. It was just very obvious. There were other things just when he told a story about how he got into crypto. He really wasn't into it until the latter half of 2016.
So anyway, there were just numerous things, but anyway, he was completely shocked ultimately when I realized why I actually had been reaching out. He did not believe me about Toby at all, actually, but then as he started to remember more things, then he was like, "Oh, yeah. Actually, I do remember that when I asked him about it. I remember he gave me better information that I'd been able to find anywhere else online," and then he sent me some emails that Toby had sent him around that time and different things.
So anyway, yeah, the whole thing, but again, it took me a long time to get comfortable because even though I only interviewed him a few days before the Forbes article came out, I also thought, "Oh, my gosh! If this goes bad, he could announce something before my article comes out and before my book comes out," and he has a big following. Anyway, so I was very cautious, but yeah, in the end, everything worked out really well. I feel like the evidence is so strong. People haven't really pressed back in any way. So I feel really good about it.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. That's been what I noticed about that, that news break is that I haven't seen anybody in the crypto space or anywhere at all really just push back and say, "No, you're wrong. Here's why," with the exception of the alleged DAO attacker who just told you, "No, that's wrong." What is the protocol? You send this fact check document to somebody and they say, "No, your conclusions are wrong." Are you just giving them opportunity to retort with other contradicting facts or what's the protocol there?
Laura Shin: Yeah. I mean, well, just getting that part, his denial, was really important, to let him say, let him have his say. I mean, you'll notice in my book. So I'm sure you're very well-aware there's many negative things that people said about other people, and you'll always see I have a response, at least if somebody gave me one, I'll have a response or I'll say, "Oh, they didn't talk to me," or whatever it might be.
So that's what we wanted. It's like you have to always give somebody an opportunity. You should never blindside somebody. I would've never published this without reaching out to him first. I mean, what if he had some really good explanation for why the money was sent to his Grin node or whatever. He didn't, but I should definitely give him his opportunity to give that denial, which I have published everywhere and also, yeah, to see everything.
What if there was just anything else that he wanted to dispute or make a comment on? Yeah. So we had to send him the fact checking for the Forbes article again because there was a lot more in that article, including the comments from his former co-founder, and then there was no response that time. It's just part the protocol. You always have to give a person the opportunity to respond and you have to do your best. Just sending one request for response is not, I mean, it's better than nothing, obviously, but I was using multiple email addresses. I mean, I was just trying so many ways.
Right now, he has this DeFi thing called Mimo Capital, and I went into the Mimo Discord and I messaged every single or maybe not every single, but multiple of the admins, and I was like, "Hey, can you put me in touch with him?" and then once they started responding, I was hounding them like, "Oh, when do you think I'll be able to talk to him?" or "Can you get me his email address?" or I was just, yeah, hounding them for a way to get in touch with him. So yeah, I mean, you just want to make your best effort. Like I said, you don't want to blindside people and you want to give them every opportunity to respond.
Crypto Texan: Yeah. So keep in mind, everyone, if Laura Shin comes into the Index Coop Discord saying, "Where's Crypto Texan? I really need to talk to him," I have left the country at that point.
Laura Shin: Well, leaving the country won't help you very much because there's this thing called the internet, but anyway.
Crypto Texan: Right. Yeah. That's true. That's true. So what other reactions have you received or I guess what are some of the more shocking reactions to you that you've received thus far from the personalities that you've portrayed in this book or of some of the details that you've uncovered? Because I know this industry people can be thin-skinned sometimes, but I'm just wondering. What are some of the more shocking reactions you've received?
Laura Shin: Well, most of them probably happened during the fact checking phase last summer. So at that time, definitely some of the people who had more negative things said about them, they were not happy with me. They weirdly thought that it was me saying these things and I'm like, "No, no, no, I got these from other people."
Somebody at, well, they're not at consensus anymore, but they must have talked to somebody who is, and they forwarded a message saying that in the consensus town hall, Joe told people that I have a gripe with him, which I was like, "Wait. Whoa! Did you read the book because it's all your employees and former employees who are saying these things not me?"
Some of the people during the fact checking phase got very testy with me. One of them in particular, and I know this, well, two. So two people did this and I know this is going to sound very weird, but I just felt like this is what they're doing. At the point when it got to a conversation where they were unhappy and really upset with what they were finding out, we were doing a video call and both of these people were walking around so that the video was very discombobulating for me to look at. For some reason, it's so hard to explain. I know this might sound silly, but I just thought, "Oh, they're trying to do that to intimidate me and just throw me off." I know that sounds weird, but it's just the sense that I got.
Anyway, yeah, it's hard. I get it. It's not nice to find out nasty things that other people said about you. One thing I will say is one of them was like, "Oh, you're just a Jerry Springer journalist, blah, blah, blah," and I was like, "Oh," and they acted like this is me and this is the kind of journalist I am, but there are multiple people in the book where nobody said anything negative about them.
So beyond Vitalik, I just remembered also Jeff or Kristof or Griff. I mean, there's actually multiple people where nobody said, "Oh, I had a bad experience with that person." Oh, by the way, so I'm going to have to go very, very shortly, but anyway. So I was a little bit like, "I don't think it's that I'm a Jerry Springer journalist. I think it's that you maybe lived a somewhat Jerry Springer-ish life, and this is what people are saying about you, but there are plenty people in the book where I actually didn't have to run a single negative thing that was said about them, by them because nobody had anything negative to say about them."
Crypto Texan: Right, and I think Hudson Jameson might be one of those people as well.
Laura Shin: Oh, yeah, yeah. There's multiple. There's multiple.
Crypto Texan: Well, and he's a Texas guy, so I got to do a shout out there to Hudson. All good remarks in the book, but yeah. Like you said, we are running up on time. So Laura, thanks for being on the show. I think the book is just an incredible asset to the crypto community as a whole and obviously, very well done. I highly recommend anyone who has not purchased the book, purchase it and read it because it's a great foundation to where we are today. Yeah. Laura, where can people will go to find out more about you, the book, and your podcast?
Laura Shin: So you can follow me on Twitter, @LauraShin. You can also check out laurashin.com. Go to unchainedpodcast.com. You can also follow the Unchained_Pod Twitter count. I have a couple different newsletters. There's one that comes out Monday through Friday, and that is on the unchainedpodcast.com website. I have another newsletter via Bulletin, and that comes out just a few times a month, but I've started a premium offering on it. I release videos that I do in preparation for Unchained ahead of time, essentially.
So you'll get to learn about a lot more up and coming projects if you join that because I have long done these kinds of interviews where I'm vetting things to go on the show, but I've just never actually released them until now. So that's it, the laurashin.bulletin.com email address.
Crypto Texan: Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing. Thanks for coming on the show. Everyone who's listening live, thank you for listening live. This is being recorded and we will get this podcast out in about a week. Have a great weekend, everyone. Laura, thanks again for being on this show. Really appreciate it.
Laura Shin: Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Crypto Texan: Absolutely.
Laura Shin: Bye, everyone.
Crypto Texan: Bye.
Host: @Crypto_Texan
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Transcript: @0xMitzy / @Crypto_Texan
Conversations with the Coop - Laura Shin - The Cryptopians / Unchained