Brian Armstrong

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Tetragrammaton.

**Brian Armstrong** (0:24)
Growing up, I was kind of really shy, introverted, so I started to really get drawn to computers. We had a lot of early computers in the home. I studied computer science and economics in school. I wanted to learn about how that worked and how technology could improve the economy and business. I also, I spent a year living abroad in Argentina. None of this made sense to me at the time, by the way. In hindsight, this made sense. When I was living in Argentina, I saw this economy that was going through hyperinflation, and it destroyed the lives of the average poor people when they decided they could only hold cash, right? So that was an important piece of the puzzle.

**Rick Rubin** (0:56)
Had you not seen that, your life would be different?

**Brian Armstrong** (0:59)
I think so because I had only spent time growing up in the United States. You know, we have inflation issues once in a while here and there, but more or less our financial system works, right? People are really frustrated with overdraft fees, and there's all kinds of delays in payments. So there's things we can improve. But in a hyperinflation country, it's like an existential issue. It's like things get really dark, like in these places where the government is essentially stealing wealth from people by just printing money, right?

**Rick Rubin** (1:27)
So extreme that it's hard for us to even imagine.

**Brian Armstrong** (1:29)
Yeah, exactly. So that was a part of it. And then I also had worked at Airbnb as an early employee, and they were moving money into and out of about 180 countries around the world. And I got to see how difficult and broken that was. Like we were trying to send money into Cuba or Ecuador, or these places where people were renting their homes, and we were trying to pay them out. And we had no idea how much money was going to show up on the other side. It was like a cartel, almost like a black market, where these extraordinarily high fees were being charged, and no one could even tell us how much the fees were. And so I realized that through a couple of experiences like that, how broken the global financial system is, it's kind of this patchwork quilt of different proprietary technologies. There are usually a couple of monopolies in each, like an oligopoly in each country. And so it's just incredibly inefficient. Whereas if you compare it to the Internet, right, you can send a text message and it just shows up anywhere in the world instantly for free. Basically, it's not like there's a different Internet in each country unless you're in North Korea or something. And so now I guess fast forward to 2010, December, I was at home for the holidays with my parents, my parents' house. Sometimes I would kind of do a little introvert mode, go upstairs, read things on the Internet. And I happened to read the Bitcoin white paper.

**Rick Rubin** (2:43)
You just found it on your own?

**Brian Armstrong** (2:45)
Yeah, I found it on this website called Hacker News, which some technologists read, and Paul Gramit from Y Combinator had created this back in the day.

**Rick Rubin** (2:53)
Does it still exist? Yeah. Do you still read it?

**Brian Armstrong** (2:56)
Yeah, I do.

**Rick Rubin** (2:56)
Cool.

**Brian Armstrong** (2:57)
Yeah. And it was describing how the world could have something kind of like the Internet that's global and decentralized, but instead of from moving information around, it was from moving value around. And it immediately caught my attention. I said, that's a pretty interesting idea. I have no idea if it will work. Maybe the government will block it. Maybe there's some flaw that will be found in it.
But I couldn't stop thinking about it. And over the next six months, I reread the Bitcoin white paper a few times. I started going to these early Bitcoin meetups in San Francisco, which was a wild experience. The people who would show up to this were kind of like, half the people were these brilliant computer science PhDs. The other half were kind of like completely crazy people, like anarchists, like people starting their own religions, homeless people just wanting free beer. It was like a really interesting motley crew. And over this period of time, I started to tinker with prototypes and just think about like, is this real or not? And I started talking to a lot of my best friends about it, and they told me it was a terrible idea, you know, so I can go on and on. But that was really the initial moment where I started to think about Bitcoin as a protocol and then what would be some product that might be built around this that would make it trusted and easy to use.