Episode Details

I’m in Buenos Aires this week, so I might be a little slow reporting on today’s budget, but I’ll come to it, don’t you worry.

Shortly before Covid hit, I became CEO of a Canadian company by the name of Cypherpunk Holdings (HODL.CN). I was very pleased with that ticker symbol—HODL. My idea. But I did not have a clue what would happen as a result …

I’m writing about the company today because, even though I stood down four years ago, I know a number of readers bought shares because I was the CEO. It’s quite a story.

Mining entrepreneur Marc Henderson controlled a shell company that had just received a large payout from the Mongolian government for some uranium assets it had seized illegally, as you do, and he wanted to use the opportunity to start a crypto business. We knew each other from way back, and he approached me because of my book.

He also brought in Canadian bitcoin entrepreneur Moe Adham, and Moe and I put together a proposal to become a privacy tech investment company.

We were both quite ideological about it. We had grave concerns about the increasing imposition on our privacy from both Big Brother and Big Tech. We felt it was only going to increase, and that therefore there would a need for privacy tech—anything from VPNs to private messaging apps such as Signal, to bitcoin and privacy coins. How right we were. Look at some of the stuff that went on during Covid.

Perhaps where we misjudged was that we thought there would be a large appetite for privacy tech amongst the general public as a result. It turns out most of the general public care more about convenience than they do about their privacy, at least online. In many cases, they don’t even realise what they are sacrificing.

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Once we were up and running—and, believe me, there was a lot of compliance—I brought in my mate, bitcoin OG Jon Matonis, and we began the process of acquiring bitcoin. We would hold large amounts of bitcoin. (This was before Michael Saylor’s Microstrategy, which has been a big winner for the portfolio since we tipped it last summer it around $30 - now $220 - especially as bitcoin closes in on all-time highs).

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One of our key investors was poker champion Tony Guoga, who bought an enormous stake in the company and eventually joined the board to become Chairman.