Chasing the Bitcoin Boys in the Crypto Capital of the World
By: Drew Millard
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Money, Portsmouth, Bitcoin, Finance

But there is something else keeping me from stepping into this brave new world, and that something is the fact that I don’t have any reception on my phone and therefore can’t make the Litecoin in my phone become Litecoin in Fezziwig’s iPad. I whip out my credit card and pay with the dreaded fiat instead.

“I love using things of real value with people who are giving me real value.”

As the barista, who identifies herself as Brontë, is joined by a woman who calls herself Zinnia, I strike up a conversation with them about the world of crypto commerce. “We have a pretty solid pool of regulars who know we take [cryptocurrency] and come here many times a week because we take it,” says Brontë, adding that a few of the regulars have her wallet address saved on their phones and tip her in cryptocurrency. She occasionally spends her cryptocurrency while she’s in the neighborhood. “But mostly, I’m mainly hoarding it,” she says.

Fezziwig’s cryptocurrency commerce is aided, Brontë tells me, by the fact that it’s located next to the Blockchain Institute of Technology, a center that offers crypto certification classes online. Zinnia tells me it’s run by Freeman and Zeiler, of the Free State Bitcoin Shoppe. She refers to them as the “Bitcoin Boys.” “We’re their favorite restaurant,” Brontë says.

I head next to the Blockchain Institute of Technology in the hopes that Freeman and Zeiler will be there to let me into their Bitcoin store. On the door of the Institute, a sign reads:

Students and Faculty Only

Questions?

Answers found at the Bitcoin Shoppe

(1 block from here, toward the river)

Hoping this might mean that the Bitcoin Boys are back at the Bitcoin Shoppe, I return to the store to find it empty. There are a few boxes of literature attached to the shop’s door. One contains brochures listing the businesses in Portsmouth that accept cryptocurrency; the other holds a short children’s comic book about space pirates who don’t trust the Federal Reserve. (The back cover reads, “We’re Going to Space and Government is NOT invited!”) I help myself to copies of both.

Of all the stores listed on the brochure, one called Deadwick’s, described as a “Victorian psychic parlor,” piques my interest. When I arrive, the shop’s stereo is playing the score from The Nightmare Before Christmas. It sells wands, vintage doll parts, assorted bones, potions and oils and herbs, occult books, statuettes of the Knights Templar deity Baphomet, magical soaps, tarot cards, handmade poison spoons, crystals, intricate-looking brooms, incense, and T-shirts bearing the astrological charts of the serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy.

I still haven’t successfully bought anything using cryptocurrency, so when I find a small silver coin with a pentagram on it, it feels like an apt purchase. This time, the phone-to-iPad process works perfectly, and in no time, I’ve exchanged about .031 Dash — approximately $5 — for my witchy token.

“To my knowledge, we’re the only witchcraft shop in the world that accepts cryptocurrency,” the clerk tells me. When I ask his name, he tells me to call him Mr. Deadwick and says that he manages the place. We begin to chat about my coin; it turns out that it’s actually called an “altar tile.” The pentagram — or pentacle, as he calls it — is “representational of earth, air, water, fire, and spirit.”

Mr. Deadwick tells me he is a certified herbalist, as well as a practitioner of chaos magic, which involves the creation of sigils: symbol that one imbues with their will to accomplish what they desire. “A sigil is personally yours,” he tells me. “It comes from your own creative mind. Therefore, creation is magic.”

Under that line of thinking, I tell him, cryptocurrency networks — intricate jumbles of code whose contents store value because of belief and will — seem a lot like sigils themselves. “Exactly,” he says. “It’s hidden. It’s secret.”

By the end of the day, I’ve toured the town, popping into crypto-friendly shops and restaurants and conducting interviews. But I still have no idea how to get in touch with the Bitcoin Boys. The closest I get to a lead is when the manager of a crypto-friendly sunglasses store tells me that if they’re not at the store, they’re probably at the Blockchain Institute of Technology. When I ask if I should knock on the institute’s door, she shrugs. “I mean, it’s a free country,” she says.

Before leaving downtown, I go ahead and knock. No one answers.