> what's jack doing different? I'm out of the loop

To begin, Jack is a maximalist, and has been funding/supporting Lightening development really early on and has recently integrated it into CASH for no cost withdraws/txs. He has also paid for Bitcoin core development and made initiatives to lower Bitcoin's mining carbon footprint and will now be making miners.

He also has spent a great deal of time time and resources to bring Bitcoin awareness into Africa, prior to COVID he was going to live in Africa to try and pick up where Patrick Byrne left off and onboard the develope WOrld with financial services they have been denied. Unfortunately, this was when they tried a hostile take over at Twitter and tried to oust him.

Finally he has made it clear that his ambition is to make Bitcoin the currency of the Internet, and has had discussions about it's role with UBI.

Whereas Armstrong has proven himself to be an incredibly shady individual with a focus on short term gains and operates with little to no scruples.

> I'm sorry, but how is that any different from the entirety of the cryptocurrency space, or the YC startup space in fact? Plenty of scams in the former and cutthroats in the latter.

Despite what you may think, in the 10+ years I've been in the BTC ecosystem scammers are the exception not the rule; you just hear about this because it's what makes headlines. You'll never know or hear about a period of time when you could buy bitcoin by sending cash or precious metals in the mail, or the times when bitcoin that were sent to a wrong address were sent back in good faith. I can go on, but it is only in the last 5 years that this space has inundated with these kind of antics: sadly that's the cost of scaling up a project, and getting closer to critical mass.

I've been in the Corporate World, too and the two cultures never really mix well because we have different aims entirely; chiefly that monetary profit is a byproduct of our success, not the success itself.

Coinbase has it's roots in the SV VC World and Goldman Sachs, which is why I think they have conducted themselves as they have.

> They’re all toxic.
>>Having spent over a year in the industry there’s no way I’d go back.

I don't disagree about the space in the last 5-6 years, I haven't been to a meet up in around that time as it became a waste of time if you were around the early days where disrupting Industries with this tech was the biggest driver of our culture. Now it's all moonbois and memes.

There are a few places I could point you to make you see what still exists from that time, but it's pretty fringe.

But I must say that a single year doesn't really amount to much; Bitcoin moves at way too fast of a pace that I doubt you got much more than the ability to scratch the surface.

In my first year, when Satoshi was still around on BTF, the Community told they didn't care what he thought and would kick the hornet's next and help out Wikileaks. In the coming years we'd see the Snowden revelations and manhunt, and Julian's releases via Wikileaks that included things like all those cables to vault 7 etc... which were only possible because Bitcoin appreciation (50,000%) allowed them to survive. [0]

It took me 5 years before I was ready to undertake a startup, that was the first of it's kind in the space and upon reflection was needed but way too early, and only now has started to get wider traction.

0: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/16/wikileaks-julian-assange-bit...