Chapter 001
From the Fed to the Future: How Bitcoin Became the Honest Currency
Bitcoin for me is not an instrument for financial investment. Bitcoin for me is a declaration of our monetary independence.
This is not a slogan. It is a position I arrived at through decades of watching how money, power, and control operate in the real world — and what happens to those who challenge the system.
I did not come to Bitcoin through finance. I came to it through freedom.
Before I ever heard the word “blockchain,” I spent years working for liberty-minded political candidates who spoke out against the Federal Reserve Bank — not because it was fashionable, but because of its role in inflating the money supply, which devalued the life savings of hard-working people.
In 2008, I served as Director of Voter Contact for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, leading nationwide phone banking efforts and grassroots mobilization. We were fighting to audit the Fed, to make the central bank transparent, to show the American people that the institution printing their money was accountable to no one.
When Ron Paul lost the Iowa caucuses in 2012, I knew my fight wasn’t over. It had just changed form. I said to myself: “My candidate would be Bitcoin.”
Why? Because they can’t destroy Bitcoin on Election Day. Every day is Election Day for Bitcoin. Every block mined is a vote for monetary sovereignty.
I first encountered Bitcoin in 2010 when a colleague convinced me to accept it as payment for a website domain name. At the time, it was a curiosity. But the idea — a decentralized, permissionless monetary system with no central authority — aligned perfectly with everything I had been fighting for.
By late 2013, my conviction had become a mission. On New Year’s Eve, I threw a Bitcoin-themed Christmas party in a 6,000-square-foot space at 40 Broad Street — directly across from the New York Stock Exchange. The energy in that room was electric. Bitcoiners, traders, developers, and the simply curious packed the floor.
We decided to keep the doors open. On December 31, 2013, Bitcoin Center NYC was born — the world’s first live cryptocurrency trading floor. One hundred feet from the NYSE, we built the opposite of everything Wall Street represented: open, transparent, permissionless, and free.
People ask me what Bitcoin is. I tell them it’s the honest currency.
The Federal Reserve creates money from nothing. Every dollar they print dilutes the value of every dollar you’ve already earned. Your savings, your retirement, the hours of your life you traded for those dollars — all of it slowly evaporating through inflation.
Bitcoin is the opposite. There will only ever be 21 million. No one can print more. No committee decides to expand the supply during a crisis. No government can confiscate it with a keystroke.
This is not a technical argument. It is a moral one.
If time is money, and they are printing more money, they are stealing time from you. They are stealing your life.
At Bitcoin Center NYC, we attracted everyone — from Goldman Sachs analysts to college students, from journalists to libertarians, from developers building the next protocol to people who had never owned a computer. We hosted the first Bitcoin startup incubator on Wall Street. We connected 2.5 billion unbanked people to the possibility of participation in the global economy.
We did not ask permission. That’s the point.
The greatest innovations of the internet era came from people who built without asking. I registered 12,000 domain names in the 1990s. In 1996, I created NoMoreHotels and GetaRoom — the idea that people could stay in private homes instead of hotels. Twelve years before Airbnb existed.
In 2008, I registered LiveryCab — the concept of ride-sharing through your phone. Years before Uber.
Being early is the peril of the vanguard. But being early is also proof that the ideas were right.
Bitcoin Center NYC was the same. We were told we were crazy. We were told Bitcoin was a fad, a scam, a bubble. Thirteen years later, nations hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets.
This is not theoretical. Central Bank Digital Currencies — CBDCs — represent the exact opposite of what Bitcoin stands for. They are programmable money controlled by governments. Money that can be frozen, surveilled, restricted, or expired at will.
People suffer from what I call central bank Stockholm syndrome. They’ve been conditioned to trust lithographs of dead people as a store of value, even as those pieces of paper buy less every year. They’ve been told that only banks can be trusted with money, even as banks fail and get bailed out with the very inflation tax that robs ordinary people.
The new Web3 world is about taking back control — of your finances, your data, your privacy, your identity. It is about abundance, balance, and freedom.
I have been doing this since 1991, when I first began challenging the Federal Reserve’s influence on our economy. Through Ron Paul’s campaigns. Through the founding of Bitcoin Center NYC. Through VoteWatcher, the first blockchain voting platform. Through Zap, connecting smart contracts to the real world. Through EnergyLedger, bringing blockchain to oil and gas.
Every step of the way, the establishment said it couldn’t be done. Every step of the way, we did it anyway.
The future will not be defined by those who maintain the status quo. It will be defined by those who build the alternative — openly, transparently, and without permission.
The future belongs to those who understand that Bitcoin is more than technology. It is the foundation of a new economic paradigm. Every day, we are building that future.
Nick Spanos
Bitcoin Pioneer & Founder, Bitcoin Center NYC