Bitcoiners from New Orleans, Virginia, Chicago and California joined locals in Hillsboro Village this month for one of the country’s biggest meetups. It was one in a series of monthly gatherings that have turned into weeklong junkets featuring workshops, social hours, celebrity speakers and panels. Attendees typically number in the hundreds and have made Nashville a leading international destination for a tightly knit, fiercely loyal and mostly digital community.
“Nashville is competing for the title of best bitcoin city,” a man named Rockstar told me at a happy hour during the August meetup. “It is doing a very good job.”
Rockstar was in town from Chicago, where he’s a VP at Strike, the payment platform company led by bitcoin wunderkind Jack Mallers. Rockstar uses a “nym” (a pseudonym), a common measure among bitcoiners, who claim privacy and sovereignty as fundamental values.
The foundational cryptocurrency — so called because it’s issued and secured by cryptography rather than a government or central bank — just entered its second decade of existence. Last year, bitcoin peaked just shy of $70,000 per “coin,” an arbitrary denomination. (Physical coins do not exist.) Other cryptocurrencies have accompanied bitcoin’s rise, each with its own form of underlying cryptography. Many are outright scams (called “shitcoins” within the industry). All have been incredibly volatile, unpredictably transferring large amounts of wealth in short periods of time based on inscrutable market dynamics.
Bitcoin’s relevance in Nashville has grown steadily in the past few years. Bitcoin Park, the site of August’s Nashville meetup, is one of a few physical community spaces in the country dedicated to bitcoin. In June, a partnership that includes prominent bitcoin podcaster Matt Odell took over the space formerly owned by Florida Georgia Line. Bitcoin Park is currently developing into a full-service community space complete with a gallery (bitcoin-themed art), cafe (pay in bitcoin), patios and tables for co-working, and private meeting rooms across two spacious bungalows. Odell’s podcasting studios have replaced FGL’s recording space. Bitcoin Park is in its early stages but aspires to be a national destination for the bitcoin community, inclusive of anyone interested in connecting around the currency, from software developers to small-time investors.
The mononymous Mills is another regular at Bitcoin Park, where she’s been involved since its inception. She moved to Nashville from New York City a year ago, promptly organizing Nashville Bitcoin Meetup, which has since absorbed several smaller bitcoin-related social groups. Her first event was at Jackalope with a couple dozen people in August 2021. Now Mills estimates between 200 and 300 regular attendees every month. There are three rules: no photos or videos, no side conversations, and stay focused on bitcoin — no other cryptocurrencies.
“We are hoping to build relationships,” Mills tells the Scene upstairs at Bitcoin Park. “A long-term goal of just being integrated in the community. We value privacy, and I think that adds an air of mystery. But we want people to feel like they can come and ask questions.”
In April Mills went “face-public” — the act of publicly associating one’s face with one’s nym — in part to show others that the community isn’t entirely dominated by men. (A three-day cryptocurrency event hosted by Bitcoin Inc. this year in Miami was met with various cases of harassment against women.)
Casey Carrillo, an editor at Bitcoin Magazine, moved from Los Angeles just a few weeks ago. The magazine prints a glossy quarterly and publishes daily online articles, touting itself as bitcoin’s “most established” source of news and information. Nashville-based BTC Inc. acquired the media property in 2015, gradually building up its Houston Station office over the past few years. The magazine has 2.6 million Twitter followers and a 67-person masthead. BTC Inc. CEO David Bailey is listed at the top. Bailey’s LinkedIn profile suggests he has been invested in bitcoin since 2012, when a single coin traded for $5.
Nashville has also become a hub for the Bitcoin Policy Institute, formed in 2021 and led by executive directors David Zell and Grant McCarty. Both are local (Zell moved here recently), and both are former policy directors at Bitcoin Magazine. The city has a concentration of bitcoin-fluent asset managers, like Valkyrie in Brentwood and UTXO. Nashville is dotted with Bitcoin ATMs, sleek machines that allow a user to trade cash for crypto. In April, the Titans became the first NFL team to accept bitcoin, and the team has an ongoing relationship with Bitcoin Magazine and BTC Inc. CEO Bailey.
Bitcoin splashed into the mainstream when trading shot up last year. That was before a protracted tumble to $20,000, where it’s been since June. Discussing one’s “stack size” — the amount of bitcoin any individual is (digitally) holding — violates community etiquette, Mills explains when we first meet. “You wouldn’t talk about how much is in your bank account, right? It’s the same thing.”
Many bitcoiners insist that their interest isn’t tied to the price. Some bitcoin investors (especially early adopters like Bailey) have gotten very rich; others have lost huge sums. Bitcoiners’ evangelism often stems from its decentralization — transactions are publicly verified and governed by math, and its value is pure supply (which is fixed near 21 million coins) and demand, immune to the top-down control that can inflate or deflate fiat currency like the U.S. dollar.
Just like with gold, a common comparison, “mining” can be resource-intensive and lucrative. Miners earn bitcoin by using computing power to verify transactions in real time. Large-scale mining operations have popped up across the country, including a cluster in East Tennessee where electricity, water and land are readily accessible. Bitcoin mining consumes an enormous amount of energy — “more than the entire country of Argentina,” according to a recent Columbia University study. In a Bloomberg interview, Mallers, visibly upset, dismissed the criticisms as a shortsighted double standard. Of course it will take energy to bring money into the future, he argues — where are the people trying to ground all airplanes? (Many environmental activists want to do precisely that.)
These costs, bitcoiners argue, are a small price to pay for freeing wealth from the clutches of transaction duopoly Visa and Mastercard, and the whims of self-interested politicians.
