S peaking of drinking near the West Fourth Street stop, the other night I walked into a bar on Washington Place, just off Sixth Avenue. Shrek 2 was on the TV and Green Day’s “American Idiot” was coursing through the air. I spotted a coaster from Miami’s Mac’s Club Deuce, hanging in front of a sign reading “Buy Bitcoin.” A ticker showed the value of the digital currency, then around $65,000. When the bartender told a couple of customers that her card reader’s tap function wasn’t working, one responded, “There’s a thing called Bitcoin. Have you heard of it?” The two guys started chatting. “You think Jeffrey Epstein is Satoshi?” the same guy joked. Nearby, another customer was looking at a photo of a fighter jet on his phone. I was at—where else?—PubKey, New York’s unofficial, decentralized, self-sovereign headquarters for the Bitcoin Faithful.

What no one at PubKey was talking about was Bitcoin’s big dip. Since October, the digital currency crashed from an all-time high of $126,210 to $60,000 on February 5th. Before that happened, there were euphoric predictions about Bitcoin’s value going up, up, up. In 2024, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya predicted it would hit $500,000 by late 2025. Samson Mow, the CEO of the bitcoin tech company JAN3, repeatedly wagered the price would keep climbing to a staggering $1 million. Donald Trump had positioned himself as the Crypto President, after all. Just a week before the crash, J.P. Morgan analysts predicted Bitcoin would end the year at $165,000. Then, on October 10th, Bitcoin lost nearly 10 percent of its value in a matter of minutes. Since that “Flash Crash,” it just kept falling. 

“For a lot of people, it’s binary. Bitcoin is either going to be everything or nothing,” said Thomas Pacchia, the dive bar appreciator who co-founded PubKey in 2022. Pacchia describes the bar as a media company with a hospitality wrapper, serving both buffalo chicken tenders and podcasts recorded in a studio upstairs. Like the guy making the Epstein joke, it was the night’s event, not the evening’s tenders, that I was there for: a fireside chat between Pacchia and fellow advocate Obi Nwosu called “Building the Bitcoin Community in a Privacy-First Digital Age.” Formerly the head of a bitcoin exchange in the U.K., Nwosu now runs a bitcoin wallet company called Fedi. “We have what we call the Fedi Order,” he said, consisting of “Fedi Knights” operating mostly in the global south. “They educate people on freedom technologies.”

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