laura bush, michelle obama and melanie a trump. watch first ladies in their own words saturday at 2 pm on american history tv on c-span2 or listen to the series as a podcast on the free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts . >> there are a lot of places to get political information. but only at c-span do youget sick straight from the source. no matter where you're from or where you stand on the issues , c-spanis america's network unfiltered , unbiased, word for word. if it happens here or here or here or anywhere that matters , america is watching. powered by cable. >> tonight we're thrilled to have laura shin with us for a

discussion of her book "the cryptopians: idealism, greed, lies, and the making of the first big cryptocurrency craze". laura shin is a crypto journalist and hosts the crypto podcast unchanged. formerly a senior editor at ht forbes she was the first mainstream journalists to cover crypto full-time and isra the author of tonight's featured book . joining laura in conversation is christine lee. christine lee anchors and produces first mover 9 am eastern standard time in nyc s every weekday live . f joining the flagship show first look at today's global crypto news headlines. she also was all about that point at first p.m. eastern standard time for markets and all things bpc. klein desk is the leading news event provider for the block chain and digital asset industry. previously christine worked

at reuters, bloomberg and pro-public. her research and writing on a nuanced statement lost contributed to an investigative series was awarded the 2017 point surprised in public service and led the new york city ci council sto enact sweeping changes to law. you can follow her on twitter at christine news. so without further ado please join me in welcoming laura and christine to the stage. [applause] >> high. this is such a pleasure and honor to be here with you all and to be a moderator for laura and your new book. i'm a fan of laura's, a

senior editor and you all had all the big scoops in the crypto scene. followed by your posting of the unchained podcast which is still going strong and yes, i know on my car ride to work i always listen to you and to get the latest updates and in-depth knowledge of books in that space so seeing this book come out, it was very highlyanticipated . and it's a fantastic read. it really goes into depth into ethereum and the egos, the struggles involved in making this historic crypto project so very incredible work. >> thanks, i had a lot of fun writing and recording it. >> maybe i'll start off getting a sense of our audience. how many people here are new to crypto? okay.

i'd say about half. how about intermediate level? okay. and advanced. you're working on a crypto project, you're adeveloper . i see half beginners, quarter new, a quarter advanced. interesting to know. >> the beginners are some of my personal friends. >> maybe i'll start off asking questions. what do you think folks new to crypto will get out of this book? >> i think there's a lot of people can see crypto as being technology or machines but i think when you read the book it becomes pretty obvious bthat actually people nowadays in politics do influence the development of these technologies in a major way though that is probably one of the takeaways and i'm guessing that you noticed that when you read the book the cause some of these long,

drawn out side as between different personalities corporation clashing and the egos just battling it out that can take up many pages of the book and it happens h multiple times over and over again with different people . >> i would say with a lot of projects they can be a little opaque. the coin is made by a pseudonym, you can represent a person, various people. we don't know what ethereum is a project where we know the founders are but it's still hard even for me to map out how it all works. the founders, the foundation. the for-profit, nonprofit entities. there was some serious fact-finding and investigative work there. >> one other thing i would say that i noticed in working on this and i actually think this is a trend that's been

happening overall. in the world is that the power centers are shifting from finance to developers to coders. so what you see happening in the founding of ethereum and these other conflicts and especially in the beginning there's sconflicts between the groups known as the biz guys in the other group known as the dance and what's happening is the evdevs prevail over and over again and that's a reflection of how previously wall street was the center of the universe that's where eyoung grads would want to go work and then it became silicon valley but now silicon valley executives are looking at crypto companies and even one of the cofounders of coin base started off as kind of like a programmer at goldman sachs when he told me he would treat it like an it

person. that the finance people, fred person. and the finance people would stand in front of his desk and barked orders at him and even have their feet on his desk while there ordering him about. and he iwould say they treated melike an it person . now he's one of the kings of crypto. and you know, i feel like kind of this transition that we're seeing is reflected on a small scale in the book and in these conflicts that play out. and it's very fascinating to watch. >> i'm wondering why did you decide to choose ethereum as the project you want to tackle n? >> for anyone who was around in crypto in 2017 that was a historic year. after i lived through that and early 2018 i realized this was something that was totally new in the world.

it was something that was historic and wanted to explain how that happened and i wanted people like 100 styears from now to understand what caused this and how did it occur? so since ethereum was the main platform on which it was happening or the initial coin operating which was the phenomenon where projects were like were going to d launch a coin and they would take ethereum as money to fund raise for the development of these projects that they were trying to launch. this was happening on such a grand scale that billions were being spent in crypto to launch these nepoints. that had really never happened before to have capital flowing like that around the globe for these branding projects just so people that were not accredited investors or pcs s. it was just unprecedented and i wanted to explain that and since ethereum was the main

platform in the book, mostly ethereum but at the end when the phase gets going. >> i would say there are already a couple of books on ethereum out there but laura's is the most detailed, comprehensive. really gets into the weeds of who these founders are. what makes them text, where they've gone onto since then. she even played a part role as a detective in breaking one of the biggest mysteries in ethereum which was finding who the dow hacker is and will go into that a bit later . but i guess tell us a bit about your fact-finding process and the process of writing the book because in approaching a project like this , again, crypto can be very opaque. so how did you go about even starting mapping out who these people were. finding out about how these foundations, nonprofits worked and getting into it?

>> i created a big timeline, massive timeline. i also had a very big document where i was collecting a lot of the information and i was just trying to kind of organize it in a timeline because it's just the easiest way to tell a story so i yeah, went by once i would find some information i would figure out where in the story that would go. i would put that in and i was trying to find the people also who could fill out the narratives around those moments . because it doesn't mean a lot of of things to say this entity was formed at this time or that time but a lot of this dactually when you're creating these different entities a lot of it is like power plays among tdifferent people. you then start to fill inthe story around each of these

events . another thing was that there were so many people which frankly made it quite a challenge . when people would say ng something to me i would then check it with the other people. that was very time-consuming but through that you sort of get a better sense of what happened because you might have one person represent something and you can't find any corroboration so there are moments in the book where you might see i've mentioned that i only got that from one source or often other times if they're presented as facts it's because when i say me, i say a fact checker and i we were able to corroborate with multiplepeople . >> did you have any interviews? >> i did more than 200. when you have these decentralized technologies, then for sure it's not going

to be like following a startup where there's going to be x number of cofounders and it's just those people that are mostly dealing with. ethereum alone had the cofounders and two got kicked out and twoadditional leadership people came . then the center moved to that taxing so they had to introduce all theseothers . i have a list of characters at the beginning of the book and that was after i trimmed it down. so yes, the story you're seeing doesn't even fully represent everything and yet it's still 50 people you have eto pay attention to. >> what's interesting is you are able to talk to each of the initial cofounders. and then also talk to a lot of their associates so that you have more of a balanced approach and take on what happened. i wonder what did you learn in your conversations with the talent and what if you like to the process?

>> for those of you who maybe are not so familiar with vitalik his the creation of ethereum. a lot of people have this sort of as being alien and he definitely can be socially awkward. often times when i interviewed him i found his answers would be very brief. they would be one word answers. one sentence answers. so frankly a lot of our conversations were me answering questions, him answering briefly at me basically asking the same question with slightly different words and in getting his brief answer and am trying to milk it more and asking some other variation so this went on and on. eventually there came a point

where a large portion of our interview was done on chat app's and that kind of worked a little bit better. it felt like you know, maybe usjust taking a personal interaction help it flow a little bit more but he was definitely a kind of challenging person to interview. i've interviewed other people and they will tell you about be things they've done and they'll give you their whole psychology i was thinking this and when that happened i was thinking maybe if i do it this way . no, there was not with him . so it was literally me asking every single angle and question etand trying to get extra information. >> it's interesting you say that because i spoke to vitalik about it., exploits, canadian truckers he was very fluid and eloquent and very well-rounded i would say answers but when i asked him about his experience with

your book, it was a one-word answer. >> can you tell me what the one word was? >> did you read it? >> no. >> what would you have to say about your experiences? apparently in the book i would say he came across as someone who was not privy to confrontation. i agree withthat . whereas all his other answers s were very ... a lot more in depth. i think he may not be ndcomfortable with talkingabout personal aspects of the creation of ethereum . >> he has a hard time expressing his feelings as well . >> he's very fluent when it comes to technical things and when it talks about personal things or his feelings is much more difficult.

>> you also had a chance to talk to the lesser found cofounders. i'm very curious about your impressions. >> a mere is somebody's is very confident of himself. but also very controlling. so he would only talk to me in certain ways. and then he was very controlling about what the messaging was going to be . and of course his messaging was very different from what all the other cofounders were saying so you'll read about him and it will be his response because what i can tell from my recording it seems like everybody agreed on one narrative and he didn't so i just included owwhat his version was. mihai is a good friend of vitalik's, he's a great

storyteller. just very physical. he's just romanian and an anarchist and was into bitcoins early. he's entertaining, coit's interesting he's such good lfriends with vitalik because vitalik is. >> so different. but i feel like maybe it makes sense because opposites attract. >> i'd say there were some very, nobody really looked good. when i think of reading about charles hopkinson and some of the tales alleged about him and gavin would and anthony fiorillo, and even joe lubin who's been in brooklyn, i wonder whattheir common thread in this .was there anyone that you felt

uncomfortable slowly speaking with? >> i definitely had tens conversations with i think with all of those people. maybe with gavin a little bit less. one thing that's interesting is so gavin would and joe lubin are two people that don't like each other in crypto. and what's happening is that they're both similar in the sense that people either love ee them or hate them. there is way in which their different which is everybody agrees on gavin's personality and just somepeople don't like it and some people do. and when it comes to joe , people i think either have a good experience with him or they have a really really bad experience. so it's more like doctor jekyll and mister hyde. the people that kind of get

heon his bad side as far as i can tell, they say it's because with joe is like a popularity contest and they say they used to be on his good side and part of the people and one a popularity contest and when it switched it switched dramatically. so it's kind of afascinating thing . and i don't know. for anthony and charles as you'll read in the book, i think a very large percentage of people don't have good recollections of them. >> is it a benefit or not to know who the founders are versus bitcoins where the community could createtheir own narrative of what the coin is all about compared to ethereum . >> i guess i just leave that to the crypto community to judge. clearly the bitcoins people just love that she was the ultimate cipher punk, created

that point and walked away foralmost no personal gain . and ethereum obviously was a very different story and now we've got my book that is kind of exposing all the messiness and frankly some of sothe somewhat shocking i guess this tasteful and uncomfortable facts about the personalities involved in creating it but my personal opinion it doesn't take away from ethereum itself. ethereum is clearly extremely successful. that and bitcoins my mind are nl the only two that are established and whether or not will succeed in the long term n, for now they are. and i personally don't think that that really would take away from ethereum that's my opinion . i think many sebitcoiners would

raise issues with that said stance. >> you get into the weeds about building a decentralized crypto currency protocol is like withholding those values and how messy it can get tthrough the process with the egos involved but what's incredible is that these founders went on to in some cases create their own crypto currencies that have become wildly successful in their own right. the top 10 currencies right now bymarket cap . so at least in your book, there have been a lot of tensions in terms of getting the project together. leading up to an incident where eventually, they were basically voted off the island if you will. they refer to that as the game of thrones day. put some want to ntcontext into that?

>> to give you the context, this probably was the first moment when a conflict between the death and business guys came head-to-head and essentially the business guys kind of wanted to follow this more traditional business model of doing a startup where they would get equity in the way the business model would work would be the way that a lot of the tech giants today work which is they take wthe user data and then they make a profit from that. they sell it or sell it for advertisements or whatever it might be. but as many of you probably know and in the crypto world the egos is to make things decentralized and in the decentralized world the users themselves retain their own data and the company the middle isn't the one that's extracting value but the users become the owners

through the tokens. so you have these user owners own these tokens and their sort of invested inthe network . at the same time in a different way than in a startup obviously because obviously we've seen these massive startups go from nothing and thus founders are billionaires but with these crypto networks a lot of the people that point in earlycan ride along to their own riches . so all of this came to an end i had around how to manage ethereum. at the same time, there were a lot of personal conflicts with the so-called ceo at that time, charles hopkinson. and people felt he was lying essentially. that was one of the things he had told several different people that you must keep motor. that's an interesting part of the story. there were some other conflicts s. this is the backdrop to this

day and one last thing i will say is that because they instructed so much they had someone in the internet that they had collected a lot of information about him that they considered damning tso there was a dossier on charles that they'd all been passing around and checking out before this big meeting. charles is the founder of the an crypto currency called cardano, it's a top 10 crypto point. he had something called the card on oh army so be careful. does this work? okay. can you hearing? okay. finally in the early afternoon, everyone began gathering on the top floor of the longtable . it was made of six long and wide bleached wood kitchen

countertops arranged three by two with thin gray streaks talaid on blonde wood, worker style table legs. since high-back mesh fabric office chair with lumbar support rand wheels that will almost too easily on the saloon smooth wood floors. others stood. vitalik who sat at the head of the table, his back to the smaller deck facing the kitchen at the other end of the room had a few words and asked everyone to goaround and see the same piece . jeff and so jeff is one of the main developers. the three developers are jeff, gavin and vitalik himself so they make the desk. jeff but he, evan and "the cryptopians: idealism, greed, lies, and the making of the first big cryptocurrency craze" had made a pact to say they didn't think charles could lead and had to leave. gavin and vitalik denied it

so jeff was surprised when vitalik did mention that and then it avwas gavin stern and again gavin didn't specifically say charles needed to go all the others would later claim he did say that if charles stayed he would go into a new project. he did however say something along the lines of a mere is contributingastoundingly little to the project . amir since he was on the business side and gavin was a dev, gavin was saying these things he could consolidate power under himself . but is not mentioning charles should be removed jeff about. jeff looked at him and gavin returned his gaze . just felt betrayed by gavin and vitalik. why didn't yousay anything ? so ever the honest dutchman, jeff told it like it was. charles, we feel you're

leading us in a wrong direction. we don't want to be at google. we want to me among zero and would like to see you leave. i don't want you to be ceo. to at least one person watching jeff seems absolutely livid. he was really letting charles had. charles looked shocked but jeff who had always found charles fake couldn't tell if it was sincere. then jeff invoked the nuclear option. prhe made it clear he would no longer be part of the project if charles stayed. charles objected, talking about allthe things he'd set up but jeff said it doesn't matter. i don't believe in becoming a google. we need to build something lofor people, not corporations . jeff also said amir, i'm sorry i gave you the benefit of the doubt but i don't think you you belong here because i've not seen much contribution from you. meantime what next, said he agreed with jeff in regard to charles . jeff was outraged.

don't just agree with me, say what's wrong. he added he couldn't trust what was real or not. basically it seemedcharles sometimes lied . joe said, and joe is one of the business guys. joe said he trusted charles, believe charles wanted the best for ethereum and supported him staying which would support any final decisions. if someone felt he seemed flabbergasted. joe denies this. stephan said charles had to leave so stephan who felt that the dossiers becoming publicwould be the end of ethereum to go into detail . he just said charles has got to go. the guy is a liability and he is more use morecolorful language like the word sociopath . taylor pushed for amir to go because amir was technically his boss but taylor considered him and i a. taylor did all the work that

was not allowed on decision-making calls. despite having compiled a a dossier, he didn't say much about charles . gavin who had spoken early was watching the proceedings. appalled by how vitalik had invited everyone to point fingers and name names . and everyone who happened to be in the house including joe's son was privyto this sensitive discussion . sitting through an hour of people proclaiming their enemies was excruciating. he felt charles didn't deserve a public bashing even if it was by the people who'd been living with them. and felt calling a meeting when he knew in advance that people were unhappy with charles was a poor decision. vitalik felt the meeting was spontaneous rather than organized and didn't see any smaller group with which the problems could havehibeen discussed . matteo's, one of the main orchestrator as of this moment was conflicted .

there were two staff that had kind of like plotted to oust charles. even though he knew this was the right thing to do, he always struggled with confrontation and the way everyone was wearing airing their grievances about charles made him feel awful. when his time came to speak he held back and only said a fraction of what he trulyfelt about charles . roxie was stressing about what to say. but when the moment came, she spoke her truth so roxie is roxanne, she's mihai's girlfriend. she said she didn't trust anthony because he he acted like he was superior to ooeveryone else plus he was pushing for a for-profit structure. then she looked him dead in the eye and said girls and anthony are not trustworthy. you can't trust them. and one of the most uncomfortable moments in their lives, she made the most directly negative remarks.

charles widened his eyes erat her as if he was surprised she hadn't believed all his stories. she never said to m his face that she thought he was lying. she thought it absurd he hadn't realized she had her own thoughts . gavin watching from the other endof the table knew then that cocharles could not recover . to him until then, it had been all boys condemning charles so the disagreement had felt like a fight amongst boys but for the only girl who lived in a house full-time to say she didn't trust charles felt decisive . hacharles would later say this meeting was an hour of the others brutalizing him. sorry, charles would later say this meeting was an hour of the others brutalizing him defended himself saying they could make things work and he promised things would be better. that they could do the nonprofit. he seemed to think the for-profit versus nonprofit issue was the crux of things.

no one brought up the dossier . plus so that's just a taste of some of the struggles in the early beginnings of ethereum. so that's one of the first challenges really y was the fight between i guess the for-profit folks, the business guys versus the developers who wanted to make it a for-profit foundation . and so on and so forth. >> for-profit corporation. >> for nonprofit foundation. >> and eventually vitalik and the dev's one out because they wanted open source. they wanted to have this decentralized network that wasn't going to profit from

the customers but have everybody share in the wealth creation with the users and even before that actually vitalik had these other ideas to make it more like that point where there wasn't going to be a primo line which is where the creators create some of the coins before they launched the network is sort of like creating equity for themselves beforehand but he was overruled by the business guys early on. one of them in particular, anthony. >> but eventually the dev's one out and there was a second phase i would say and this took everyone swifter to create a nonprofit organization but then a whole new set of characters were introduced and one of them was ming chen who became the executive director of the ethereum foundation and this was little well-known about how her processes work, how the foundation worked. maybe you can shed a little light into that.

>> ming chen was definitely probably the most i think po difficult person for me to write about. just because the way people spoke about her was pretty much very different from the way that i've ever had any people described somebody to me. and she seemed a little unbelievable basically in the extremity of what they were saying. the good thing is that in the course of writing the book i was able to get a lot of her own writings in texts and chat messages and things like that so thatwas good because then it sort of made sense what people were saying and her character became more believable . but i know probably not everybody has read the book so i will give too many spoilers but pretty much immediately therewere major red flags . and there was an incident very early on which only became known to a very small

number of people but it was, she basically accidentally send communications to somebody she didn't mean to and they definitely showed something concerning about her character, frankly . i was able to obtain those messages and so they're in the book and i think it's kind of raises questions about what her intentions were and whether or not they were frankly good for ethereum. then as time went on and she kind of data with the foundation quite a bit longer i think most people would have expected given kind of issues around performance and then kind of her own instability and things like that, yes. that ends up being a quite long part of the book and hopefully i was able to explain it . some of the explanations they

don't seem very rational but the fact that this person was kept for as long as she was does not seem irrational to the only explanations i have are ones that areirrational . >> what's interesting is the shadow folks at the ethereum grfoundation who controlled rings in the background but were never really named how did you even find these people and what is their power over the ethereum foundation ? >> this is towards the latter part of the book but a lot of people talk about what they called the shadow government of the ethereum foundation different people who wield a lot of influence or at least at that time . my book ends in early 2018 so kind of in probably the 20 17th era the shadow government started and there were a lot ofpeople wielding influence in ethereum in the foundation but were not people with official roles . so a lot of people wsaid to me you know, this is going on and we don't like it for these reasons. what's interesting is that people that were named as being the big power players

in the shadow government, it was fascinating. people would be scared to even mention their names to me. they would be scared to say that they had even just been at an event, not even that they been doing anything that they been there witnessing something you know, historic. so people were yeah, they seemed frightened of them which was fascinating. and even i mentioned this.i am giving maybe a few spoilers. but when i asked vitalik about them, he was old. like, he was just surprised i had mentioned the name or was uneasy about it, i don't know but that was his response . so clearly there's something. >> there was a lot of concern about is ethereum sufficiently decentralized if

vitalik had so much power over the foundation. >> my personal opinion is that it actually is but only because it's getting so big now that i do feel like if the foundation went away people would figure out some other way to organize to keep the development going. there's just too many people invested in it and there was this report that comes out about the number of developers working in crypto blockades and is very him far and away has the most developers. there's just no context for the next highest. and 20 percent of aiall new developers to crypto would do stuff in ethereum. it's attracting so much share. my personal belief is even if the foundation went away, even if vitalik went away i think ethereum would keep going. people wouldfind some other way to organize it . >> i don't know.

you have to read the book but there's a very interesting subplot . i believe let's just say somebody might have lied. vitalik himself may have been how should i put it? vitalik himself just may have been conned into thinking something about his status with the foundation by somebody who wanted to wield power over him. i wasn't able to resolve giit but i left that hanging. >> interesting. aside from the personal dramas within ethereum there were some mass technical dramas and a lot of it was the down which was the first half of ethereum, $150 million was raised for this down, decentralized autonomous organization.s

and represent the present of ethereum so try to put a dollar amount. >> the day of the hack the price of ethereum dropped from $21-$14. in the book i said if you take it by the high price it's 78 million and if it's low it's 59 or whatever. but yes, ythis dao had attracted almost 15 percent of all of either. and then to fund raise. f the hacker took 31 percent and suddenly the hacker has five percent of all ethereum it is more than a foundation or anything. >> but then you actually deduced who this person was. it's one of the greatest mysteries in crypto o. >> this is crazy. this all hopefully will be spoilers for anybody because

i wrote a long article about this and it was released before my book came out last week. but i called it crypto's greatest whodunit because to my mind, the biggest mystery in crypto's who is hitoshi but this is the second mystery, it wasn't really a climb or theft or whatever and this was . i call this crypto's biggest whodunit. and i've worked on this for a long time and i really didn't have any leads. the main one i had was from an investigation at that time and i followed the lead all the way through, i investigated everything about it. i interviewed the main suspects, a group of people and the way i was going to write it in the book was just here's the evidence for why they came undersuspicion . here is their response and i'm just going to leave it and people can do with what they wanted. i wasn't going to say

anything inclusive. and when you're writing a book on what are called the three final passes which are things like making it legal and basically the publisher will have it and go have fresh review after you check their changes and maybe make your own tweaksand they take it again and they would write about what you did . well, one of my sources in brazil reached out to me right before we were going to turn in the second roundck. he said oh, the brazilian federal police opened an investigation into the dao and by extension on me and so i want to exonerate myself so i'd like to commission this report and i thought youmight want the information to. these courts are kind of expensive . this company in exchange for giving the company credit in the book. what were looking at is

basically how the hacker was cashing out. so after the attacks, i'm going to give you some background if you're not familiar.it basically as i mentioned the dao raised all this money and it was the highest project in all history which was amazing because they were collecting crypto currency. that's how enthusiastic people were. and like i said eventually euwhen they acted they got five percent of all either as well. what the ethereum committee did was they made this change where they created a new blockchain that has the same history at the old one but at the moment of the change they erased the dao and took all the money that had been in the dao and all the related things and moved it to a place where everybody had been involved could get their money back. however since not everybody agreed with thisdecision , some small group kept the old chain, the original chain where this had occurred going

and that chain became called ethereum profit so the hackers that had five percent of all ethereum profit and they were trying to turn it into something useful because ethereum classic was only a few months old. it was really usable as money and everybody knew those were stolen coins nobody was going to be like, you can turn those into legitimate currency on myexchange . so they were trying to turn it into bitcoins because it's much more liquid and they were using an exchange that didn't take customer identifying information so they wouldn't have to give their name or anything like that . and we were looking at these transactions and kind of mapping them onto utc schedule to see what hours are they cashing out and it went from like zerohours to 1500 . so then for the rest of it looked like they were asleep orwhatever . i have actually gotten the

customer service email the hacker had sent before the hack when they were collecting the money and putting in all thesmart contracts to do the attack . and in the customer service asemail even though it was so brief with two sentences it was obvious with a fluent english language speaker. it wasn't just that the english were fluent but they use shorthand and that just shows another level of fluency. i was like, quite frankly the cash at times they map onto an asian morning tonight schedule. i know from their communication there fluent english speakers. the suspects i've written about already, they were all based in europe, not asia . i was trying to kind of figure this out and i have been working with this other company on allkinds of things for my book .i sent some of

the information and i wanted more time to look into this. we're literally at a moment where you're supposed to be presenting the final changes which are minimal changes and i did ask for a little bit of extra time and they're like what, this is not the time to be asking for extra time. the other company y gene analysis they did have information so even though i didn't get that from the publisher, later on when she announced it felt like they had something, i can go all into the details around every laststep . the key thing they were able to do was turn their money into bitcoins, they were using abitcoin mixer . the way it kind of mixes your coins with other people will anonymize the trail so it

makes it typical to follow. if all of us are doing a transaction at the same time, it will make our activity a bit more private. it's harder to follow the trail back to where the coins eventually came from. >> you just disclosed for the first time that they are able to bemixed these transactions . they can see the bitcoins went to four different exchanges . and then i did a lot of self reporting on this. one source was able to find out from one of the exchanges what happened to the money in exchange and was converted to a privacy coin and then withdrawn to a node which had a human readable address. my sources and i looked at the ip address for it and we

saw these other what are called bitcoin lightning notes which are another type of crypto thing related to bitcoins . and when we look at those bitcoin lightning notes meaning a website about lightning notes, we saw many of the nolightning notes connect. when you google connect, the ceo of connect, his alias is toby ai and i realized he's angelus on reddit and two weeks after that we were also able to get the email address on the account which was the name of the exchange at toby.i ai. so he controls that domain

and i later found out he used with another source that he used an email address and that person knew that at toby.ai. so i thought the evidence was good and the publisher definitely agree this is definitely a good one so we pushed the publication yet again. so yes, finally it came out last week on february 22, 2022 which somehow sums up how magical that will last bit of it happened. just i described as comments came out of nowhere.it was so last-minute but that's how we were able to break that. >> any chance that bringing this alleged hacker to justice. >> that is above my pay grade. i did have some people tweeting about that to me but i was like i have not been to law school.

>> there's a limit to what laura as a journalist by day, detective by night can do . but it's incredible work in finding the potential hacker. so from there, i think what is your biggest take away upon learning about utthe people and going through this journey. and learning about the technical aspects of it . what's the biggest take away from writing this book and learning so much in depth into yethereum, what are you going to take away. >> i do feel that one i mentioned about kind of like this represents this moment where coders are kind of overtaking business people. i feel there's something very significant about that which i don't want to understate

one of the things i feel like e i mentioned is also i feel like a lot of people feel that these technologies are sort of bloodless and sterile. no, the personalities involved make a difference. one thing that we talked about a lot like with the people that created the dow once i went to them and i said i think i have a good suspect. because here was the thing. not only when i got the name that i have that evidence just around the transaction but t later when i went back i realized at the time, he was really into the dow to the point where in the past i incould see where he was making a lot of comments about the technical difficulties. kind of vulnerabilities in the dow and then he had had emails with the creators sayingthese are the things i think are wrong with it, these are the things you need to fix . then after the hack he was tweeting things that were kind of against the side of a

racingback and sort of for the side of keeping it . so it's like once you have the name and you go back and fill the story the rest of the picture really fit . and what one of the creator said when they were talking with me about this person's identity is they said it's amazing. because so just one other technical aspect is the way that work is once he had the money he couldn't take it and run cause there were all these rules . about when you were ewithdrawing money there were like 28 days where it had to plbe locked in thisone area . it's a competent thing sort of like a big videogame or something but you know, you have basically a month when he could have said that the money back and made things right. he could have come forward and said i wanted to make a point that the friends are vulnerable in this way but now send the money back and let's make it better or one of them just expressed

surprise that he never tried to fix it. and the other one said this guy really messed up because reputation is so much more valuable than money and he was able all, if he e had rescued the money instead of taking it he would be ahero today . there were these people, the crypto people you know. sam's son is one of these famous hackers who often find abilities and rescue the money before anybody knows it's vulnerable. >> .. >> .. i would also say crypto there is a sense you can hide behind

anonymity but everything you do on a block chain is seen publicly and that's why we are seeing in recent weeks hacks coming to light and discovering what is potentially behind it. a month ago we learned hackers of one of the biggest acts 12016 hack -- >> we don't know they are the hackers though. >> sorry, there is a alleged money launderer. but the crypto from that pack has been seized worth $70 million, about four and a halfll billion dollars and you can see the transactions on the block chain and in this case you could trace back the transaction back to the person to be but.

after my story and the other one, i can't remember but i noticed a bunch of people mentioning these were now figured out and i'm feeling like if you're thinking about stealing from crypto, he better no forensics will catch up to you because that's how it feels like it's going. >> now we can open up the audience to q and a. you could come on up. come on up. >> congratulations on the book. >> following up the discussion big revelation of this person

behind a hack, were you able to confirm trying to get him to comment on your findings? also, what are you exploring next? >> i can't talk about that too much, i will have an announcement when ready but i will say about the attacker, i didn't mention this part so thee we were reporting book, i tried to get an interview with him, no response. i finally just mentioned what's called fact checking, all the statements i would put about him in the book and he wrote me and said yourte statement and conclusion is inaccurate, i can give you more details if you like so i wrote him back and said please give me extra detail, you want to talk on the phone?

no response. i gave him the deadline clearly five times, i literally said like by midnight on this day in this time zoneon but no response and when they did the fourth article because of the information is not giving him more fact checking-c again and t him know what would come out given the opportunity to respond but no response. i sent him e-mails about that multiple times as well, a few things i did expect that maybe leading to the social media so i saved everything before i reached out and he s did release some of it although he was leaving a decentralized kind of twitter. there was one tweet saying is gone to the better platform but yeah. a pdf. [laughter] if you want to ask a question -- oh, there. go ahead.

>> hi, my name is eric, i work in dope. whatig would you say is the biggest thing you learned about human nature and/or yourself in the process of writing this book? >> i'm going to, i feel like i've talked about human nature, people who listen to my show no i am into meditation and was meditating a lot while working on this book. when you meditate a lot, i live alone so i was like in meditation, trying to turn off my mind and when i'm by myself, i am in my head, meditation --on [inaudible] okay, i don't know what i'm doing, i'm going to turn a

little bit. it makes you aware of your mind. i suddenly realized when i'm working my book if i feel i've made a mistake even if it was very minor like i didn't raise that question to that source the exact perfect way, i'd make myself feel so bad about it wouldn't even be able to work on the book a few days. i suddenlyy realized i was doing this to myself and i highly advise if you have a bad habit you want to get rid of, just meditate for a little while because you start noticing things how your brain works and i just noticed that and when i did, i stopped and now i would never criticize myself in my head to where i can't evenbu function because it's highly unproductive. that was probably the most important thing i learned about

myself. >> nature. >> at least my own human naturer congratulations on the publication of your book. i just got back from east denver and foundnd it to be incredibly inspiring as a woman was hopefully going to be working on that but i also found it to be a measuring contest and i'm wondering what you think -- what the future space of queer and non- binary people? >> oh gosh, that's a hard question. i agree with you, sometimes again because i meditate a lot, i'm very aware of people's egos so sometimes when i'm on twitter, it's like people's egos fighting each other all day long and it's fascinating to watch. i'm totally well aware of that. if i were to engage in twitter,

i would probably have a bigger following. i do see people who employ that strategy which is sort of disheartening but whatever, it works for them but in terms of more women in the space, one thing, i've been covering this almost seven years and one thing that is heartening is is a lot more women now than there were in 2015. i definitely would say and fts have brought even more women which is great and one other thing, i don't know if you've heard of the investment club but as we mentioned, the autonomous organization, there are these now where there are groups of 99 people or less and the reason is because they would regulate you if it was more than 99 but there are groups of people getting

together and basically they have crypto wallet and they invest together so when companies indicate their clubs, they would launch an initialet set of the investment club and at the end of getting the group together they realized half of them are either all women were women led and that is very unusual and crypto but they realized the natural ideal we have with these t clubs is attracting more women were more women than you see traditionally and crypto. another part of me thinks well maybe, personally it does feel the ideals of crypto are probably something that would appeal to a lot of women but it is true there are a lot of

reasons in society why there's probably fewer women in finance and tech that's led to situation where we have a lot fewer women in the space than you would see in a different industry but i would hope naturally people would figure that out and it makes more sense to have women involved. i think we are wre getting the e is up think that we do have a few more questions, do we have time for this? >> congrats again on the book. i hope this isn't a spoiler but this is an interesting read. where you talk about how it seemed to prioritize competence and prioritize his echoes and echoing the right things back to him, i'm curious the things that

has changed the introduction or evolving of web three end. and whether it's an issue with ef, or the space overall. >> i don't know that i would necessarily say he's looking for only people to echo certain sentiments back to him. i do know and again, my book ends in 2018 and i didn't do that much investigating and what happened in the years since but i do know some of the people i interviewed that had prisons witticisms and etc. said things they felt still, probably likely after his early experience doesn't always trust himself when itt comes to judging people so that's why i think he uses these trusted advisors in 2018.

i don't know about necessarily means they've affected that but almost like he's looking to them for guidance in a way but he's also ath lot older then when the book starts, he's like 90 years older or something like that. he's just grown a lot, frankly. that is another part of my book i didn't expect when i went to write it but it's kind of a coming of age story, it wasn't until i did my reporting i realize that's what it was. i would just imagine he's continued to mature. >> [inaudible question] >> get money or get people who believed in the project and anyone interested in this support but then he realized it

takes more than just the focus of being nice and understand and after that he seemed to choose folks who had values and shared principles so i feel that's what he carries with him now and in that community could they are about rainbows and unicorns, vegan and. [laughter] it's very metallic. >> hey, laura. i was curious, it's anor interesting world to cover and you do a good job. i'm curious if you have personally, if you are an idealist in the crypto space, do you buy into this revolutionary technology for better or worse? >> yeah, probably. [laughter]

but one thing i would say is even though i do think that is likely to happen, that technology will develop and become world changing, at the same time, i am completely prepared to cover it if it goes crashing to the ground so i try not to have fixed views on what i think will happen because i never want to miss what the story will be, a journalist job is to trail the action a little bit so i don't ever want to come out and just be like i think this will happen and then have a vested interest in not being proven wrong so probably the reason i said yes is because so i graduated from college in 1987 and i went to stanford and i remember at the five year reunion ' showed up and i've been working for like whatever, like 50k at my journalism jobs,

i have classmates, like marissa mayer was in my class, i didn't know her but i had classmates and she had already launched startups and become millionaires and sold them like millions of dollars to these companies had gone backpacking around south america or something. [laughter] i had no idea this was going on because i was living in new york so if i think about how much technology has changed in the 20 whatever, five years since i had graduated, it seemed unlikely is crypto wouldn't develop and become something big so when i say yes, it's more just commonsensical that it will continue to develop and become something big. >> nom quieter? >> i'm not insecure in my company does own some things like and crypto you can have an address like an url and you

receive money so i own some just because i get imposters so i had to buy them to prevent people from scamming people in my reputation but me personally i don't. >> all right, we've got to wrap it there but thank you so much, laura shin. [applause] >> have some signed copies of the book so if you want to sign your book -- i think -- yeah. >> i can take this moment to leap in. if you have yet to purchase the book, you can purchase it at the registers in the back, my colleague sean will ring up in a second if you're staying to have your book signed, i'm going to ask thathe you remain seated foa minute while we set up the signing and we are going to call you up in rows.

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