“Let’s make a country,” my friend Rich said. He was serious. He and I were talking outside of a bitcoin conference in New York. It was April, 2014 and we were inside the Javits Center, the glass abomination on the Hudson that event goers hated. It was raining wildly and the crypto-folks were bumping into each other as they milled about talking about the future of money. I was thinking about the future of getting out of the Javits Center.
“What does it take to make a country? Why can’t we create a digital country?” he asked again.
He wrote down a few ideas. He was always writing things down. I never did.
“We need a passport,” I said. “A cryptographic ID. That’s the start.”
Rich is tall and imposing. He’s got black hair and a voice like gravel. He talks a lot and when he talked I liked to listen. He had a lot of great ideas and he was tired of working as a consultant for big pharma. He always had a philosophical bent, hence the question about a cryptocountry. We’re both about 40. This is important information because neither of us had any business thinking about cryptocountries and startups but here we were.
I’d known Rich since college. We both went to Carnegie Mellon. I studied Information Systems and he studied History & Policy. We both double-majored in Creative Writing. We ran mostly in the same circles – the arty writer crowd – but he was always hanging with the cool kids while I was futzing around with the school paper. We talked quite a bit during school but didn’t talk much after graduation. He spent a week at my apartment in Fairfax, VA after I graduated writing a history paper but that was the extent of our interaction for about […]
