The story of Bitcoin starts to get a lot spicier! After looking last time at some of the unsung heroes who were so pivotal in Bitcoin’s early days, it’s time to gauge the impact of some rather more controversial characters. 

To many, Bitcoin is still synonymous with hacking, scandal and crime - perceptions that are hard to shift. Much of this bad press is down to two ill-fated projects that wereinspired by Bitcoin but ultimately ended up staining its reputation. 

So, in this episode, we take a look at the sorry tale of the Mt Gox exchange and the even darker story of the Silk Road marketplace. For a long time, Mt Gox was the place to buy bitcoins and Silk Road was the place to spend them. The rise and fall of both are stories that still haunt the crypto space to this day. Understanding the role both played in the story of Bitcoin - and vice versa - helps make sense of a lot of today’s cryptocurrency landscape. 

The stories of Mt Gox and Silk Road are rich in detail, so if you want to dig further into what happened in both cases, the following resources may be of use:

Books:

American Kingpin (2017) by Nick Bilton (all about Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road)

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? (2014) by Dominic Frisby

Digital Gold (2015) by Nathaniel Popper

A great documentary about Mt Gox by Vincent Gonon and Xavier Sayanoff can be found on YouTube at: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E-8-oVXV9A

There’s also a short piece from The Guardian on Silk Road here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FknwWMzc96A 

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

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