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🤔 $50 nostalgia
Bitcoin is still rising, 11 years on from the Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
David Canellis & Pete Rizzo
April 24, 2025
“When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology — not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.”
Above all else, this newsletter is intended to entertain. We detail the most interesting aspects of Bitcoin lore — stuff you might’ve forgotten or otherwise buried in memory. But it’s likely that you already understand a lot about Bitcoin, its history and the politics.
So, if we’re lucky, we’ll tell you something you don’t already know about something you care deeply about.
Other times it may seem like pure nostalgia. As the above quote from author Nicole Krauss aptly states, today’s edition runs deeper than that.
The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
Eleven years ago this week, one of the first great Bitcoin documentaries, The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
The film is rare in that it was made by someone with real skin in the game.
It centers around Daniel Mross, a Pittsburgh-native computer programmer who began mining bitcoin in 2011 and went on to found Bitcoin-focused investment fund Maximalist Capital.
Filmed by brother Nicholas between 2013 and 2014 when bitcoin was headed to $100 for the first time, Dan travels the world to meet major figures in the space, as it was only four years into its lifespan.
They meet Charlie Shrem, then-CEO of bitcoin exchange service BitInstant, as it worked through sudden supply issues resulting from Mt Gox downtime; Eric Voorhees, when BitDice was still a big deal; and Mark Karpeles, who gave a secretive tour of Mt Gox’s office in Japan only months before it went down for good.
Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam also make cameos. Coinbase was timely: The global Bitcoin economy was actively reckoning with the growing need for more crypto exchanges in light of the Mt Gox debacle.
The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin has a 7.1 rating on IMDb
The Mross brothers even visit Gavin Andresen — still lead maintainer at the time — at his Massachusetts home. “Do your neighbors know that you’re at the center of one of the most disruptive technologies?” Daniel asked. “I think they know that I do this wacky Bitcoin project… I don’t think they know quite how big it is yet,” Andresen replied.
One electric scene shows Roger Ver — before the Block Size Wars, when he was Bitcoin Jesus — explain the benefits of Bitcoin (and BitPay, in which he was an early investor) to a Korean grocery store owner in the Bay Area.
Bitcoin and BitPay’s low fees compared to credit cards were a major selling point. “I guarantee over the next couple weeks you’ll have lots of computer nerds that love bitcoins will be coming in here specifically to shop at your supermarket so that they can pay with Bitcoin,” Ver said.
The store owner had the perfect follow-up: “And there’s no central office that they could raid or anything like that? … So who’s the owner of bitcoins: everybody that owns bitcoins?”
Ver replied: “Yeah! Just like, ‘who’s the owner of gold: whoever owns some gold.’ Short of shutting down the entire internet and the entire world, there’s no way to stop Bitcoin.”
When we speak of Bitcoin nostalgia, this type of scene comes to mind. What we all would do to return to a time when simply explaining the fundamentals of Bitcoin, as it is in the moment and not what it could be sometime in the future, brought real wonder into people’s lives.
Bitcoin’s magic affected all sorts. “Mr Bitcoin,” a drug dealer who did business via Silk Road out of an internet cafe in Los Angeles, told the filmmakers:
“I think of it as a global thing when I’m on the computer — I’m doing business with the world. When I first heard about it, I was laughing about it. It took me a week to just even think about this for real… I mean I'm not gonna lie I get booty off this. I kind of like talking about this stuff with girls, like girls be like, ‘that shit is hot’ and like, ‘you're not on your street and you got a little nerd knowledge, this is great.’”
But if nostalgia is really about severe homesickness, as Krauss suggests, then what is “home” in the Bitcoin context?
Watching The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, the answer is clear: our homes, literally.
The film starts with Daniel showing off his home mining setup — a handful of GPUs sprawled across a basic table in his basement.
Then, as the film progresses and the mining difficulty rises alongside bitcoin’s price, he upgrades to some of the first ever ASIC rigs, still in his basement.
By the end, though, Daniel is forced to give up mining altogether, having been actively priced out during filming. “When I started, Bitcoin mining was a hobby for geeks, now it’s a big business. In order to continue mining and continue playing the game and be competitive and profitable, I would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on gear.”
“The 18 miners I ordered from Avalon never arrived and the units from Butterfly Labs took over a year to ship. By the time I got them, Bitcoin mining was so competitive that I would never be able to mine back all the coins I used to buy them. As my new units are arriving, I’m selling them for bitcoins to try to recoup what I can.”
Obviously, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle when it comes to bitcoin mining. The odds are stacked even further against home miners these days, and it’s questionable whether bitcoin’s initial low-fee feature was ever going to be sustainable with widespread adoption.
But if you’re nostalgic about Bitcoin from the early-mid 2010s, I’d offer two potential cures: go and use bitcoin as money — not an investment — and start tinkering around with open source mining rigs.
Aside from bringing Bitcoin back home, literally and figuratively, I hear they can be incredibly lucky.
— David
On today’s Supply Shock podcast, Rizzo told roundup co-host Nolan Bauerle that Bitcoin’s newly-found systematic importance is the true theme of the cycle.
“The end result [of public companies buying bitcoin] kind of looks like the stock market being backed by bitcoin in this weird reverse proxy way,” Rizzo said.
“What's really interesting about Saylor's vision is that he's found a way to make Bitcoin systematically important to the stock market, which makes Bitcoin systematically important politically and if that really caught on, [I wonder] just how impactful that could be.”
What happens amid a price correction, in a world with a large number of major public companies holding bitcoin on their balance sheets?
“[Bitcoin is] systemically important by then,” Bauerle said. “In a bitcoin correction, net worths of countries are going down.”
