WBD629 Audio Transcription
Building a Bitcoin Community with Thomas Pacchia
Release date: Friday 10th March
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Thomas Pacchia. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
Thomas Pacchia is a Bitcoin entrepreneur and the co-owner of Pubkey, a Bitcoin bar in New York City. In this interview, we discuss how a desire to revive a local bar after Covid inspired the establishment of Pubkey, its importance as a focal point for Bitcoin in New York City, and how its success could inspire more Pubkeys in more cities.
“It’s a special thing when somebody comes in and they pay in Bitcoin. And they go through sort of the ritual of getting out the separate POS and it’s the Zeus wallet, which has an awesome user interface. And you’ll have people a couple of barstools down just sort of looking over, like ‘What the fuck is that?’”
— Thomas Pacchia
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Don't look at me like that.
Thomas Pacchia: Sorry.
Peter McCormack: I did six weeks of no drinking and Pubkey broke me; I owe Michael Malice dinner.
Thomas Pacchia: It could be worse; it's a good place to break it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: Some would say the best.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I woke up this morning tired and hungover, I was like, "This is why I stopped drinking". It was so hard, I'd been pretty good, I was really good when we were away last time, didn't drink once, and then the first couple of nights I'm like, "No, you guys stay up partying, I'll go back to the hotel, have a good chill, I'll go watch some Happy Valley", and then it was too hard, man, everyone's drinking. My buddy, Cody, came in, I met Cody in Vegas -- this is a brilliant story, by the way.
Thomas Pacchia: Cody who?
Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I don't even know his surname, that's the funny thing.
Danny Knowles: Aren't you going to be his best man?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm now his best man, yeah. So, I go to Vegas, it was like 2019, World Crypto Con or some bullshit, 2018, and there are people all over Vegas, crypto people, and people keep coming up to me and saying, "Hey, Cody", and I'm like, "What? I'm Pete". They're like, "Hey, Cody, all right, Cody". I was like, "No, I'm Pete". And it was my birthday while I was there, it was my 40th, so it was 4 years ago, and Wendy, do you know Wendy?
Thomas Pacchia: Wendy?
Peter McCormack: CryptoWendy.
Thomas Pacchia: CryptoWendy? Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, she was like, "I'm going to organise a birthday party for you". I'm like, "All right, cool". So, I went to this birthday party and Wendy's with some guy and I go up to him and I was like, "Hi, how are you doing?" He's like, "Yeah, cool". I was like, "What's your name?" It's like, "Cody". I was like, "What?!" I was like, "Dude, everywhere I've been people keep saying, 'Hey, Cody'". He's like, "What's your name?" I was like, "Pete". He's like, "Everywhere I go people keep saying, 'Hi, Pete'". I've got a picture, I've got to dig this picture out; we're identical at the time, we were literally identical.
So, I hadn't seen him in a couple of years, and he came in and I'm sat at the bar and he's like, "What are you drinking?" He literally came up behind me and gave me a hug, he said, "I haven't seen you in ages, Pete. What are you drinking?" I couldn't have a fucking sparkling water, so I'm hungover; that's your fault.
Thomas Pacchia: I'm sorry, we do our best here; it's a hard bar to leave. You at least got out of there relatively early; it has that sort of casino mentality where you time warp, you're getting ready to go, wrap things up around 11.30pm and it's just like 3.00am.
Peter McCormack: What's the licence until?
Thomas Pacchia: Thursday, Friday, Saturday we have a 4.00am, and then it's 2.00am the rest of the way, and in the pre times, before COVID, this was a much later city, it hasn't quite come back yet with those 2.00am, 3.00am, 4.00am hours, which I think is a good thing. Luckily, I don't do the late shifts, I'm more of a day shift at Pubkey. I work on my other company in the back of the bar and take deliveries as they come in. But that late shift, it gets weird; it's a different scene.
Peter McCormack: Good staff as well, man.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, they're fantastic, the entire team that we've been able to pull together really makes all this something special. We throw a lot of different looks at people; we've got good food, I mean, you be the judge, I don't like bragging about any of this shit.
Peter McCormack: Dude, the food's epic; I've had a Smash Burger every day.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think I'll have one before we leave.
Danny Knowles: 100%.
Peter McCormack: They're so good. Actually, that chicken thing we had yesterday…
Danny Knowles: The chicken sandwich is my favourite.
Thomas Pacchia: Which one?
Danny Knowles: The one with the katsu.
Thomas Pacchia: The katsu? Yeah, that's really good.
Peter McCormack: And the waffle fries with the cheese dip.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It's so good.
Thomas Pacchia: Bar food, dive bar food.
Peter McCormack: It's not dive bar food, dude, that's no dive bar food, it's too good.
Thomas Pacchia: Everything is better than it should be.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: So, we can't really call ourselves a dive bar because it's a new bar and we're throwing a lot better quality than a dive bar would typically have, but at least have that feel and have everything be better than it ought to be, is sort of the ethos.
Peter McCormack: And Dave is from the same part of Ireland as my dad.
Thomas Pacchia: That was hysterical.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, Dave's great.
Peter McCormack: Did you hear that?
Danny Knowles: No.
Peter McCormack: So, whenever I hear an Irish accent, I'm like, "Oh, my dad lives in Ireland", and like, "Where is he?" I'm like, "He's in Donegal", and they're always from like Dublin or something, but my Dad's from Laois, it's where he grew up. He's like, "I'm from Laois". I was like, "Fucking hell, my dad grew up in Abbeyleix". He's like, "Shut the fuck up!" Yeah, obviously a good man.
Danny Knowles: You've got to have an Irish bartender in a New York bar.
Thomas Pacchia: And he's like a neighbourhood stalwart, he's been at a lot of other bars in the neighbourhood, he just knows West Village bar culture extremely well. He's --
Peter McCormack: A musician.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah. He's been with us since the beginning; he also bartends over at Arthur's Tavern. Arthur's Tavern was a COVID casualty, but it's like a blues, jazz bar that's been around forever, and then they cleaned it up, reopened and now it's sort of like slightly more elevated cocktails and stuff like that, but just nice to have it back and not lose all of these things to the last couple of years.
Peter McCormack: A lot of bars got lost here, right?
Thomas Pacchia: A ton, and mostly dive bars, mostly those family-owned places that have been around for 30, 40, 50 years, real institutions have fallen off, especially in the East Village where you had some of the them hanging on a little bit longer than maybe they were able to because of gentrification, things like that, neighbourhoods change. But yeah, COVID and a lot of the policies were the final nail in the coffin here for a lot of businesses.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. It's very cool, man.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you.
Peter McCormack: I told you I'm buying a bar?
Thomas Pacchia: Yes, that's fantastic.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: Don't do it!
Peter McCormack: No, I'm definitely doing it.
Thomas Pacchia: That's the hardest thing I've ever done by far!
Peter McCormack: I've done a lot of hard things, run a football team.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: The football team has a bar in it, but I'm actually buying a bar, so anyone listening, I'm literally buying a bar.
Thomas Pacchia: I compare it to Bitcoin mining, it's very rewarding if things go well; there are about a million different ways you can kill yourself or just something catches on fire, God forbid. It's extremely difficult, but when it works, it's very, very rewarding. Last night, for example, people coming out for your show, there were some real old-guard bitcoiners that had come in and saw it for the first time, and that was a very special moment, like the rip with Junseth was fantastic.
So, the highs are very high I would say, but then you also have to deal with all of the other shit with liquor licence and the neighbours and every little thing that can go wrong typically does, and it can be a lot.
Peter McCormack: Do you get a lot of shit from the neighbours?
Thomas Pacchia: No, on the whole, they really like us; we cleaned up the block. So, this is a bit of a shadier block post-COVID, we got people from the Park, so having a business that's open and open late has really changed, I think, the neighbourhood quite a bit for the positive, and I think most of the neighbours are very appreciative of that, which is also a good feeling. Not just the Bitcoin community in and having those conversations with folks I've been talking to for like a decade, having other bars, restaurants, hospitality industry come in, neighbours, West Village coming in, it's also like a very cool mix to throw together; hospitality plus Bitcoin has its own thing.
Peter McCormack: Okay, prepare me, what am I not ready for?
Thomas Pacchia: Oh my God! You have a pretty thick skin, right? Having a podcast, I feel like you are already prepared to receive criticism and feedback in a way that was far more advanced than what I had going into this.
Peter McCormack: Dude, it's like leather, this skin!
Thomas Pacchia: That's good, I don't have that yet, it's callousing at the moment I would say, but it's everything. A million different things can go wrong, it could be like the air conditioning, it could be the ice machine, we're on our fourth trash collection company; it's never-ending. Also, New York is going through a little bit of a labour shortage, so staffing has been quite difficult, it's people management, it's people management within the company, it's people management when they come into the bar, and you're always on.
I think it was Rocky Balboa, it's like Rocky VI, when he's a bit older and the kids in like finance or something and he's whining finance is hard, but he goes to the Italian American restaurant and he's like the maître d', puts on the red blazer and he's like, "Hey, how you are doing? How's your mother?" that's basically my role here.
Peter McCormack: I'll tell you, it's the same with the football club, everything goes wrong, the electrics break so we had to get the electrician in; the toilets flooded, we had to get somebody to fix the toilets; one of the fucking steps broke on the way in, like shit's always breaking.
Thomas Pacchia: Have you had one of the baby-wipe islands yet?
Peter McCormack: The what?!
Thomas Pacchia: Like the greasebergs or whatever?
Peter McCormack: Oh no.
Thomas Pacchia: I was listening to it was an economist or something talking about the plumbing woes of the UK.
Peter McCormack: It's a London problem that is, yeah; do you know about this?
Danny Knowles: No, I've never heard of this.
Peter McCormack: So basically, they get these, it's like a greaseberg; basically, all the shit that the sewers in London aren't designed for collects together and it's like nappies, diapers for Americans, wet wipes, grease, fat that gets poured down the sink, and it all ends up getting clogged up and built up and it becomes like an iceberg within the sewers, and somebody has to go out and --
Danny Knowles: I have seen people in scuba suits.
Peter McCormack: Fucking grim, absolutely grim!
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, be thankful at least you're not suiting up for that every day!
Peter McCormack: Even worse with the football club are things like you get ready for a game, you've got everyone lined up, you've got the programme made, printed, you've got all your stock in, and you wake up in the morning and it's cold and the pitch is frozen and the game's cancelled, it's like, "You what?!" and you have to deal with that. Dealing with people, dealing with the team, the manager, I'm used to it. The football club is the hardest thing I've ever done; I expect a bar to be easier.
Thomas Pacchia: It's not going to be, it's not. It think you should still do it because I think you'd be very good at it, it fits very well, like we were talking about it just in terms of having like that physical third place, and you did this already sort of with the football club, having Bitcoin not be the identity of something else but embedded in the DNA of a bar, a restaurant, a football club, you name it; these things are pretty important. So, Bitcoin Park has done a very good job with this, The Commons. I think the more relatable we make bitcoiners to people that otherwise would not engage in that conversation --
Peter McCormack: We're not freaks.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, exactly.
Peter McCormack: We are.
Thomas Pacchia: Exactly, no, "Come on in and have a beer". Yeah, we might be weird, but have you had conversations at 3.00am in New York? Everybody's weird.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: We're just more relatable than we are on like Twitter and Reddit when there's, I guess, a little bit of social lubricant involved.
Peter McCormack: Well, this bar I'm buying is already successful.
Thomas Pacchia: We've been very fortunate, and it's the team, it's Chef, it's the other partners, it's the staff, the whole crew has made this. So, when we were getting close to opening back in November, that was sort of like right after the real collapse, the last final one that we're still dealing with FTX fallout and everything, so a lot of the Bitcoin companies and everybody else tangential to the industry have gone into survival mode. So, we were thinking that this was going to be more content-forward, more sponsorship-forward, more marketing, that sort of thing, and the bar in the kitchen was going to be that vessel that houses everything.
So, we completely flipped the script and actually focused on operations for the bar and kitchen being more than just that loss leader or self-sustaining, and it's been great. We have gotten way more support as just a New York bar that does some Bitcoin stuff than the opposite. We still host Bitcoin events, and those are extremely well-attended, but it's really the combination of the two that has gone really well so far. So, hopefully, we can keep it up.
Peter McCormack: It's having that space, man. Like I say, this bar I'm buying is already very successful and it opens a couple of days a week, it's like Thursday, Friday and Saturday, but the main trade is Friday and Saturday night. But there are so many things I've got coming up where I think I can use it. I've got our event on the 15th, after that's done, it's like, "Hey, let's all go to my bar".
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I could do it on the Friday night, I can host meetups; there are so many things I can do where I need a space. Now I've got a space, and while the space is being used, it's going to generate money.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: But it's always a need, if people are coming through town, if people want to learn about Bitcoin --
Peter McCormack: People aren't coming through Bedford!
Thomas Pacchia: Well, not yet, we've got to get up a couple of leagues first and then it's going to get better.
Peter McCormack: True.
Thomas Pacchia: We're going to get there. I'm very proud of -- I'm a big Bedford supporter; it's very cool what you've done with the club.
Peter McCormack: Man, a fucking defeat the other day though.
Thomas Pacchia: It wasn't great; the Captain Morgan goof at the very end was suboptimal.
Peter McCormack: I feel so sorry for him. He's so young, our keeper.
Thomas Pacchia: He's great.
Peter McCormack: He's like 20-years-old, or 18, or whatever, I just felt sorry but him, but he'll bounce back.
Thomas Pacchia: Of course.
Peter McCormack: He's a good goalkeeper.
Thomas Pacchia: Of course.
Peter McCormack: Puts the pressure back on us though.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, I think it's going to be all right, I'm optimistic.
Peter McCormack: 6 points clear, 13 games to go.
Thomas Pacchia: I'm a Roma fan, so I'm used to things just being a catastrophic failure at the end.
Peter McCormack: How are you a Roma fan?
Thomas Pacchia: I have family in Pescara and I lived in Rome for a little bit, and that was just my de facto club. I never had a good enough link to a Premier League club. My brother-in-law is a big Tottenham, Spurs fan.
Peter McCormack: What a dick!
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, exactly, but it's basically the same club as Roma; I can't have two of those in my life, like you're set up to do something and then you find a really creative way to fuck it up.
Peter McCormack: Hold on, Roma win trophies though.
Thomas Pacchia: It's been rough.
Peter McCormack: Didn't they win one of the European trophies with Mourinho?
Thomas Pacchia: What, the Conference League or whatever?
Peter McCormack: I don't know.
Thomas Pacchia: It was the third one.
Peter McCormack: Tottenham would take it!
Thomas Pacchia: I think Tottenham was in that Conference League or whatever.
Peter McCormack: They'd probably take the Under-12s, they'll take any trophy. Yeah, they won it under Mourinho, didn't they?
Danny Knowles: I'm not sure, I'm having a look.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, they won one, and we dropped a game against, who was it in the Europa, Salzburg maybe, Red Bulls.
Peter McCormack: Would you consider the bar a hobby?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, it's a side project. So, I work mostly in mining, I'm on the board of Stronghold Digital Mining. My company, Hash Function, focuses on hash rate market infrastructure development so that we can design, I would say, risk management products for mining operations so they hedge volatility risks; that's been my life since Fidelity, since 2017, has been building that stuff out.
The bar was really a passion project. Early COVID, a lot of these bars were going under, I was reading a book about the importance of pubs and taverns, and alcohol more broadly, in the American Revolution, and that's really a thread throughout human history; alcohol has been quite important during paradigm shifts and revolutions.
This was our local dive bar, my wife and I used to live two blocks away, and we had been in this space for years and years, a lot of good nights out and memories and stuff. So, there was an opportunity and it started as a stupid idea late one night and then it was like, "Let me send an email, let me talk to the landlord and we'll see if I can rope some other people into this", and then starting to talk about it; it really took off. So, there's a great conference coming up actually in Jackson Hole, the Bitcoin Ski Summit.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Amanda's.
Thomas Pacchia: Amanda's, yeah, Amanda Cavaleri, she's fantastic. The first one last year, my wife and I went to and we started talking about Pubkey and this idea, and a very good friend of my mine who's also involved with Pubkey, Drew Armstrong, he's President at Cathedra Mining, was talking to him and his partner, AJ, another partner at Cathedra, President at Cathedra, and I thought Drew was going to light himself on fire, he started to levitate basically. He was like, "This is the best thing, we need this". He started talking about third places; I had never heard of third places before, and he just starts waxing philosophical about the importance of Pubkey coming to fruition, and that's really what kicked it off.
Megan, my wife, was like, "I guess we've got to do it, if that's the level of excitement that we're going to get from that core base, if we can marry that to the neighbourhood dive bar that already is successful and its location, then maybe we've got a stew going and can do something cool for Bitcoin".
Peter McCormack: When you tie something to Bitcoin you get an incremental shift in everything.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, football clubs, right, in non-league where we are, they struggle because their revenue comes from how many local people they can get through the door, how many pints they can sell on a day and how many local sponsors they can get.
Thomas Pacchia: Sure.
Peter McCormack: Whack a Bitcoin logo on it, you become the Bitcoin club, suddenly, you've got people all around the world buying shirts and jerseys, you've got people making -- we've got 12 people coming to our game against Holmer Green from Czechoslovakia.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, it's a cheat code, it's a total cheat code.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, a total cheat code, and then you get Bitcoin sponsors who spend more money.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Football is all about 70% the budget and 30% everything else. If you have the budget, you're in contention, if you don't have the budget, you're not in contention unless a massive fluke. So, we have the budget now, our cheat code gives us that incremental outperformance of all of the teams at our level, and the same hopefully for your bar, my bar, is that it's already a successful bar but maybe it gives me another 20%, 25% with various things, events, workshops I put on.
Thomas Pacchia: Sure. Bitcoiners, more broadly, are kind of like collectors, so just by putting something out that is relational to Bitcoin you'll have people pop up. So, we've got customed TAPSIGNERS from Coinkite, from Rodolfo and team, and they're fantastic and we slapped on the hotdog artwork that we have for Pubkey, and we have people in the chat and on Twitter just reaching out from God knows where saying, "Can you ship these?"
Somebody's trying to collect all of the TAPSIGNERs, all of the SATSCARDs, the COLDCARDs that they make, and when you have that baseline, going out and doing a thing and knowing that there's going to be a certain amount of it right off the top just as collectables for this fanbase effectively, it goes a long way to doing that thing, to getting it started and to taking the leap.
Peter McCormack: The other interesting thing about it is, again, I keep comparing it to the football club, but if you come to our football club and you just want to watch a game of football, you might not even know there's anything to do with Bitcoin.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You should come in, you buy a programme, you have a drink, maybe read something in the programme, "Oh, all these sponsors seem to say 'Bitcoin'", but we don't force it down people's throats. Come enjoy the football, and sometimes before a game we have a meetup so you can come to that, but we don't force it down people's throats, and the same going into Pubkey. You could go in there and not know this is a bunch of bitcoiners.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, most people do.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: It's the difference between identity and DNA, is how I've phrased it before because it's a special thing when somebody comes in, they pay in Bitcoin and they go through sort of the ritual of getting out the separate POS and it's the Zeus wallet which has an awesome user interface, and you'll have people like a couple of bar stalls down just sort looking over, like, "What the fuck is that?"
Peter McCormack: "What's going on there?"
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Do you get people asking and talking about it?
Thomas Pacchia: All the time, "What's with the Bitcoin stuff?"
Peter McCormack: Have you orange pilled people in the bar?
Thomas Pacchia: All the time.
Peter McCormack: Sweet, man.
Thomas Pacchia: All the time.
Peter McCormack: This is why we need more of this.
Thomas Pacchia: Look, the BitLicense, thanks to current NYDIG employee, Ben Lawsky --
Peter McCormack: Prick!
Thomas Pacchia: -- is not doing us any favours. We'd like to be able to do more but --
Peter McCormack: How does that hold you up?
Thomas Pacchia: Well, it would be nice to buy and sell Bitcoin in the bar.
Peter McCormack: True.
Thomas Pacchia: What if we had like a Western Union window or something like that? Even a Bitcoin ATM calls into question way more than I think we can handle right now because we're smashing together two of the most heavily-regulated businesses in New York City, a liquor licence plus Bitcoin; the liquor licence and the bar are by far the most important, that's the bedrock and that keeps this going, so we have to be cautious on the Bitcoin side. So, a lot of the articles that came out, like the Bloomberg article pulled some punches in terms of, "Bitcoin bar doesn't accept Bitcoin", and it's like, "Well, not yet, we just opened, we're figuring this out".
Peter McCormack: They always want to find a way to attack.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah. I'm still waiting for that update; they've got to revise aspects of that article.
Peter McCormack: They're not going to do that.
Thomas Pacchia: I don't think they are.
Peter McCormack: Fuckers, man!
Thomas Pacchia: It's okay.
Peter McCormack: Well, look, I love it, I think it's so cool.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you.
Peter McCormack: Do you think there'll be other Pubkeys open; would you franchise it out?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, we're expanding, probably Q3 of this year; we have a couple of locations that we're already starting to scout, a couple of different cities that we're already looking at.
Peter McCormack: I was going to say other cities, because if you do here, it would just cannibalise one to the other, right?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, for sure.
Peter McCormack: Because the incremental stuff is the event.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, for sure. We're sort of testing how much of the Bitcoin community can sort of withstand that. If we're doing events five days a week, we're not getting people five days a week coming out; once a week is already ambitious, and every Monday night we have something. So, we have a Mining Monthly, we have a Lightning Monthly starting up, we have a Shitcoin Chicanery where we're talk about other projects and use that as a way to show the differentiation with Bitcoin and then a Grab Bag.
So, Monday 20 February, we have the Bitcoin Policy Institute as the first mystery Grab Bag one, and that'll be like regulation, policy, arts and culture, whatever, but we'll see how it goes. So far, those have been exceptionally well attended, like we've gotten 50 to 60 just for updates, for network hashrate difficulty, current events, Q&A, a little bit of gossip, a little bit of shit talk, and they're fun events, there are a lot like last night; last night was incredible.
Peter McCormack: Last night was great.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing that.
Peter McCormack: It was just so weird sitting down there and it was almost like a little bit emotional seeing Rich Roll there, who's like my guy who got me into podcasting, Luke Martin, who was Episode 001, and Luke flew in for it, I was like, "It's so cool you're in the city", he's like, "No, I've come in for this", I was like, "What?"
Thomas Pacchia: That's special, that's very cool.
Peter McCormack: He was like, "Yeah, I saw it and I wanted to come in and I haven't seen you in a while", so he flew in from Indy and here we are, and there was a bunch of cool people there, some I won't name because they probably didn't want to be doxed, but it was a good crowd.
Thomas Pacchia: Very.
Peter McCormack: I think it speaks towards I'm starting to prefer these smaller kind of things than the big events.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, I agree, the same with conferences.
Peter McCormack: That's what I mean, yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: But even the smaller conferences, like Honeybadger in Riga, probably my favourite, Jackson Hole Ski Summit, phenomenal, and there are these more smaller, intimate events where you have some other things going on. I'm still like, "You've got to go to Bitcoin Magazine".
Peter McCormack: Of course, man.
Thomas Pacchia: Because it's a massive shitshow and it's cool to have that different look, but it's nice to have something that's a bit more permanent where people can pop in and out, like a pub.
Peter McCormack: What are going to be the additional challenges of having multiple bars; are you going to have to find someone per city to own it?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, definitely, quality control. So, one thing we've been toying with is making the content studio sort of what links each one of the locations but having each one of the locations be like hyperlocalised. So, in New York, it should look like a classic New York dive bar; if it were like London, it should look like a classic English pub; if it's in, I don't know, Montana, it should look like a roadhouse.
Peter McCormack: If it's in Bedford, it should look like a shithole!
Thomas Pacchia: I don't know, that place looks pretty awesome that you showed me.
Peter McCormack: Dude, honestly, it's the best; I cannot wait. If I get it, I think I get it on 6th April.
Thomas Pacchia: Very cool.
Peter McCormack: Which is very cool because we're running our end of season event 14th, 15th, 16th April; I wish you could come out, I'm sure you probably can't.
Thomas Pacchia: I could try, we'll see, it's a negotiation with my wife; we've got two little ones so it's a juggle.
Peter McCormack: Can't have a family trip?
Thomas Pacchia: We could do that; careful what you wish for, my youngest is an absolute wrecking machine!
Peter McCormack: How old?
Thomas Pacchia: Two.
Peter McCormack: Bring them to the football with your wife, "I'm talking you on a holiday to the UK". "Are we going to London?" "No, we're going to Bedford!"
Thomas Pacchia: "We're going through London!"
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Well, we'll land there!" But yeah, so, hopefully, I get it about eight days, nine days before then and I'm very excited about it.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, that's super cool.
Peter McCormack: I'll have Danny behind the bar.
Danny Knowles: As if you don't have enough to do!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, at least I've got a job for my fucking son now.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, true.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Come on, you can work now, Connor". Yeah, poor lad, so I love him but he's an artist.
Thomas Pacchia: Okay.
Peter McCormack: So, he comes with all the qualities of an artist, which is does what he wants when he wants. He came back for a week but wasn't working, and I've got building work being done in my garden, and so I've made him work the whole week with the builders; I'm paying him to work.
Thomas Pacchia: How's it going?
Peter McCormack: He's done all right.
Thomas Pacchia: Okay, good.
Peter McCormack: He's very tired.
Thomas Pacchia: There you go.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's picked up a shovel, he's very tired.
Thomas Pacchia: How old?
Peter McCormack: He's 18.
Thomas Pacchia: Nice.
Peter McCormack: He's such a nice human.
Thomas Pacchia: Nice, that's great; they're special.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's just got this like very good soul, he's a very good decisionmaker in terms of how he should be towards other people, and he's a great kid, he's just fucking lazy, but he's an artist. Do you know what he's been doing this week which is kind of interesting? I said to him, "You're in this lucky position, if you want to start a company I can help you. (1) I'll invest, (2) I've got experience, I can help you, and (3) why don't you just do like a T-shirt business because you're an artist and I've got 500,000 followers on Twitter so just do like a limited run of 10, we'll probably sell them, and do you know what he did? He's been designing T-shirts this week as well.
Thomas Pacchia: That's very cool. I was about to say, if you got that offer when you were 18, if I got that offer when I was 18, I'd probably just fumble it immediately.
Peter McCormack: Of course.
Thomas Pacchia: I'd even put that to 28, 29 if I had that offer, I'd still be like, "What do I do with this?!"
Peter McCormack: Yeah, probably, "Yeah, Dad, I want to get back to Leeds". Speaking of which, Danny, what day it is today?
Danny Knowles: Friday.
Peter McCormack: So, how do you exit a franchise, man, because that's one of the challenges? If you build this up, you don't really end up selling a chain of bars call Pubkey.
Thomas Pacchia: Well, we could. I don't think we'd ever want to sell the New York one but I think it comes down to the platform and the combination of the in-person live events, live streaming, and we're going to phase into it; we'll start broadcasting some of the meetups that we do and the Q&As and it's this middle ground. So, we have BitDevs in New York, which is fantastic, technical meetup; Jay who runs it is, I think, one of the most underappreciated Bitcoin heroes across the ecosystem.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: Then we have a lot of network events to business focus, a lot of blockchain and crypto shit we'll sneak into that stuff, and it'll be very business-card-y, and there was this middle that was sort of lacking, something that was informal, casual and just liked. The shitshow that was happening on Twitter, people want to talk about, "Did you see that thing that happened?" So, it's that middle ground that I think we're sort of focused on providing a solution for.
I think linking these things, maybe regionally, so in terms of quality control, it would be much easier if we focus on other great cities like Philadelphia or DC; I've had my fill of Boston at this point. But if we go to other big markets, like LA, then it has a different host of complications; how do we get the team to make sure that we're really ensuring the same level of quality that we've been really striving for here at the New York location? But that is in the mix. We're upstairs, above Pubkey, we have a coworking space that we're still in the midst of finishing; thanks for your patience on the current state of affairs up here.
Danny Knowles: This side of the room looks great.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, behind the cameras it's got some waste. But this will be sort of like a clubhouse, coworking space, and when folks are in from out of town, business trip, maybe like a European or a Chinese Bitcoin company comes to New York, rather than running around and having coffee, coffee, breakfast, coffee, coffee, lunch, coffee, coffee, happy hour, dinner, wasting all that time when you're already jetlagged, they can use this as a base of operations.
They can be in a friendly Bitcoin space, they can have office time up here, they could hold court at the bar, they could do a sponsored content or something like that in the attic downstairs, and we can provide a lot of those resources for when people are in town. I think if we can have these in a bunch of other cities, that would be pretty beneficial for those localised communities as well.
Peter McCormack: Are you going to keep the menu the same in all of them?
Thomas Pacchia: That's up for debate. This is the New York menu, we're probably going to bring the Chop Cheese and the Smash Burger and some of the hotdogs for sure.
Peter McCormack: Can I get the Smash Burger recipe?
Thomas Pacchia: You've got to ask Chef, I don't know.
Peter McCormack: All right, man.
Thomas Pacchia: That's a tall order.
Peter McCormack: I'm telling you, my favourite burger in this city, prior to this week, was the one at the burger joint in the Park Meridian; have you had that?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, a fucking great burger.
Thomas Pacchia: We shred that burger.
Peter McCormack: I say it competes. When I was in LA, I looked up -- how old are you?
Thomas Pacchia: I'm 38.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, you might know this. So whenever we travel, me and the kids, whatever city we're in, we google, "Best burger in the city", and in LA, it's a Smash Burger and it's at a place called Burger She Wrote, which I just think is the best; do you know Murder She Wrote?
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I know.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I just thought that the best name. I'm telling you, your burger kills theirs.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you.
Peter McCormack: Kills their burger.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you.
Peter McCormack: How many have we had?
Danny Knowles: One a day for five days.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: At least!
Thomas Pacchia: Have you had Chop Cheese?
Peter McCormack: You did.
Danny Knowles: I had a Chop Cheese, yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: Okay, good, all right.
Peter McCormack: What's the deal with the Chop Cheese?
Thomas Pacchia: Chop Cheese is like a bodega sandwich specific to New York.
Peter McCormack: What does that mean?
Thomas Pacchia: You know bodegas, like corner stores basically.
Peter McCormack: Oh, okay, yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: Like egg sandwiches in the morning. A Chop Cheese is basically like a New York version of a Philly cheese steak but far superior to a Philly cheese steak.
Peter McCormack: Far superior.
Thomas Pacchia: Far superior.
Peter McCormack: Look at that! This guy's going to challenge that; the guy's from Philly, man.
Thomas Pacchia: I know, I'm sorry, but it's true.
Peter McCormack: Right, I think I might have to have one of those before we leave because I need something to soak up this fucking alcohol, man, it's killing me. In terms of the kind of events and things you're doing here, and the people you're bringing in, you should definitely shill it right now.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You should just like, "Anyone listening, say if you're coming to New York, do this", because I think we end up building this network. You mentioned The Commons in Austin, Bitcoin Park, but actually El Salvador's one, the football club is one, Bitcoin Lake's one in Guatemala; they're like a network of nodes.
Thomas Pacchia: Reciprocity.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: We're building this network, it's like these nodes almost. Bitcoin Jawn in Philly also coming along really nicely, a great meetup there.
Peter McCormack: Bitcoin John?
Thomas Pacchia: Bitcoin Jawn; I don't know, it's a Philly thing.
Peter McCormack: I was going to say, because a john is a toilet.
Thomas Pacchia: I think it's J-A-W-N.
Peter McCormack: Jawn.
Thomas Pacchia: And you can use that word as filler, like it can represent anything; Philly's weird.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's weird.
Thomas Pacchia: It's a little weird.
Peter McCormack: Fuck the cowboys, for all my Philly fans. But this network works; firstly, we come in, we cross over with you guys, we're here, but shill it. Who do you want to hear from; who should be coming into town; who should be contacting you?
Thomas Pacchia: Bitcoiners, famous ones, non-famous ones, anons on Twitter, really whoever, and we also want to open this up, we want to make it accessible for non-bitcoiners. I think that I agree with Junseth, you have to go through your shitcoin phase to get to Bitcoin. We get a lot of shitcoiners coming in and talking about, "We want to do special events for this and that"; we keep it pretty specific to Bitcoin, and we are hopefully going to be a mechanism for them to progress along that journey that Junseth was talking about last night.
Every Monday we do something here, we have special guests. So, the first Mining Meetup we had Edward and Daniel, formerly of Braiins; they have a new project together they're working on, I don't think it's public quite yet, but two of the best possible first guests that we could have had from the mining industry.
The second one was Amanda Fabiano and Brendan from Galaxy's mining team, also fantastic, and these are packed houses and we're going to roll out, like I said, the Lightning Meetup and the other ones, and we're just going to continue to methodically build that base as we go. Tonight, we have the NYC bitcoiners meetup, just a very casual --
Peter McCormack: What time's that start?
Thomas Pacchia: That starts at 4.30pm, so Awayslice is coming in, he now runs that meetup; love Awayslice, does the Bitcoin beefsteaks. And we have an exclusive "Dog of the Day" just for the New York City bitcoiner meetup.
Peter McCormack: What have you got; what's the dog of the day?
Thomas Pacchia: I think it's a Cuban dog or something, I don't know, maybe the El Perro, I don't know; it's going to be good whatever it is.
Peter McCormack: It's also restored my faith in Bitcoin in New York. We were having less and less reason to come here because there were less people to talk to, less going on. I felt like the Bitcoin scene in New York was dying.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I felt like people were leaving, they were going to other cities, well, they were, I know.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I can think of at least three or four people who have left.
Thomas Pacchia: Marty went to Austin, Matt went to Nashville, there was definitely a bit of significant loss going into COVID.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and the last trip we did we went to Brooklyn, we didn't leave Brooklyn, we didn't even come to Manhattan. We did a few days of shows, we were struggling to get guests, and when I was coming in for this, I was excited because of Pubkey, right, but I'm still like, "The Bitcoin scene's dying here". I think you guys have singlehandedly turned that around.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you.
Peter McCormack: You've made it easier, it's a reason to come back now.
Thomas Pacchia: It's not us, we just provided the space; the community hasn't left.
Peter McCormack: It's more than just providing a space. Look, you've got to put graft into this, you've got to market it.
Thomas Pacchia: It's not in my DNA, the shitcoining, it's foreign to me, I'm uncomfortable talking about --
Peter McCormack: I will say it for you, I know the hard work's gone in, but I'm saying that you've restored it, I think.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you. That means a lot. Look, it never really left, there was a good base, again, to credit Jay and his work with BitDevs in New York and the Socratic Seminar and the Whitepaper Wednesdays, Uncle Zack kept that alive; Uncle Zack is a mainstay fixture at Pubkey and part of the original team as well in many ways. He hosted BitDevs when COVID knocked out any place, in his apartment he opened it up, and those New Yorkers never left. The only thing that's been proclaimed dead more than Bitcoin is New York City, and bitcoiners are definitely still here.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well, it's turned a corner. I'd been ragging on New York the last few times.
Thomas Pacchia: That's okay.
Peter McCormack: "It's not the same, there aren't as many places to eat", worried I'm either going to get shot or stand in a shit; everything smells of weed, the entire fucking city. You get off the plane, you get in the Uber, you go to Manhattan, you get out and you spend your entire week, all you can smell is weed.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I can't believe how a city can just smell of weed.
Thomas Pacchia: Well, they just cracked down. So, we're a block away from Washington Square Park, and until they opened up the dispensaries a couple of weeks ago, that was just lined with tables, each their own sort of like, I don't know, grey market, black market, cannabis dealer effectively. So, the whole of Washington Square Park was just a plume for a while, and that just got cleaned up because obviously they want to funnel some of the tax revenue through the dispensaries and they're cracking down on the vape shops and the others throughout the city, but yes, it's present.
Peter McCormack: You can't get flavoured vapes here, I know you can but you can't, so I discovered that because I came here, I was asking like, "I want weird flavours like strawberry milkshake", or some pathetic flavour. Look at this one, fucking check this one I've got, I think this is like doughnut candy; this is advertising for kids, man.
Thomas Pacchia: Men have gone from Marlboro Reds to, "Give me a cranberry custard, please".
Peter McCormack: I'll tell you a Marlboro Red story, have you met Kurt who does the films with us?
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You've met Kurt, right? So, Kurt's the DP who works on our films, really fit healthy guy, he does jujitsu and he's built, he's just a fucking cool guy but looks after his fitness.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: All right!
Peter McCormack: All right, cut that bit! No, no, he does, I'm trying to set the scene, this is a guy who looks after himself. Anyway, we go to make this last film in Texas about Bitcoin mining, anyway he's like, "Oh, I'm going for a cigarette". I was like, "You what?!" He's like, "Oh yeah, I've started smoking". I said, "You're like 30; what do you mean you've started smoking?" He's like, "Well, I used to smoke weed and I don't want to smoke weed anymore so I just have the odd cigarette instead". I was like, "Okay". Anyway, he gets out a pack of Marlboro Reds, and I was like, "You've just started smoking and you're straight on the Marlboro Reds?" Yeah, straight out, off the bat.
Thomas Pacchia: Commitment.
Danny Knowles: Fair play.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Kurt, if you're listening, sorry to dox you on that.
Thomas Pacchia: Don't do it halfway.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but anyway, I prefer my cotton doughnut candy. Anyway, so I went in, I was like, "Oh, have you got strawberry fucking milkshakes or something", and this dude was like, "No, we only have tobacco flavoured". I said, "What do you mean?" He's like, "Well, we're not allowed to sell flavoured vapes in the cities". I was like, "Oh shit!" He's like, "Are you a cop?" I was like, "No, I'm not a cop". He's like, "Are you sure?" I was like, "Yeah, I'm not a cop". He's like, "Okay, I've got a secret stake of flavours", and he brings out a box and so you can still get them, obviously.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You can still get them; "Are you a cop?"
Thomas Pacchia: New York's not dead.
Peter McCormack: New York is not dead.
Thomas Pacchia: It's just changing, it's a hard place to stay if you want what New York was whatever decade or whatever because it's just a brutal pace of change in this city.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. What do you think of Eric Adams? He came in, I think he grifted the Bitcoin thing.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, a little bit. We haven't heard from him yet: we've done some outreach. There are a lot of problems in New York. I think there was also like a push towards this stuff; SBF was deploying a lot of capital for politicians, so maybe a lot of politicians were signally that they would be interested in some of that as well, either from SBF or others in the crypto space that were going to be deploying into political donations; maybe that has fallen by the wayside with the collapse of the crypto market.
I don't think bitcoiners were really doing that much, we got some activity, well obviously El Salvador and Samson's thing, but I don't think it's been terribly localised in the US beyond the great work of Coin Center and Bitcoin Policy Institute and those guys. But we've got a bigger rat problem, we have a rat tsar in New York City.
Peter McCormack: A rat tsar?
Thomas Pacchia: A rat tsar.
Peter McCormack: It sounds like a name of a cool band.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: "Hey, do you want to go and see Rat Tsar, they're playing Pubkey tonight?" "Yeah, fuck".
Thomas Pacchia: So maybe it's a product of both of those things, maybe there's a little bit less value in pursuing Bitcoin and crypto right now. Look, the NYDFS leads the charge for tightening the screws on any Bitcoin or crypto intermediary.
Peter McCormack: DFS?
Thomas Pacchia: The New York Department of Financial Services.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Thomas Pacchia: So, that's where Ben Lawsky was the Superintendent or Commissioner of.
Peter McCormack: Prick!
Thomas Pacchia: And they rolled out the BitLicense back in 2014, 2015, like that.
Peter McCormack: Fuck you, Ben.
Thomas Pacchia: It was a truly suboptimal piece of legislation and it was duplicative; we already had Money Service and Money Transmitter and then to layer on that third one was another reason why I think a lot of bitcoiners and Bitcoin companies have shied away from New York City.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but dude, it was a layout for himself.
Thomas Pacchia: Very much so.
Peter McCormack: It was a literal layout for himself.
Thomas Pacchia: He went to Ripple after that.
Peter McCormack: Well, no, didn't he, in between, set up a consultancy to help people navigate the BitLicense?
Thomas Pacchia: It's true.
Peter McCormack: It's like he literally creates a licence and then the company to help you complete the licence.
Thomas Pacchia: Correct.
Peter McCormack: It was a layout for himself; go fuck yourself, Ben Lawsky.
Thomas Pacchia: Then he worked for Ripple for quite a bit. Look, it's not great, and one thing that I am disappointed to see is Bitcoin companies that go through the process to get the BitLicense quite enjoy having it because it creates this regulatory mode and this level of protection. There's the banking playbook with the legal risk compliance stuff; it keeps innovation at bay.
Peter McCormack: What else needs to be sorted out here in New York; what else would you fix?
Danny Knowles: You said there was a rat tsar and then just moved on like that's not a thing we need to know; what is that?
Thomas Pacchia: We have a real rat problem, I don't know why, but it's something that has been in the news quite a bit lately.
Peter McCormack: Not in your kitchen?
Thomas Pacchia: No, we have zero in Pubkey and also in my personal kitchen.
Peter McCormack: I bet you would murder them if you did.
Thomas Pacchia: Of course.
Peter McCormack: We discovered we had a mouse problem at the football club because the electrics went and it turned out the mouse was chewing through the wire. And we had a mole problem.
Thomas Pacchia: Moles?
Peter McCormack: Moles in the football pitch, coming up and just creating holes and we had to kill them; I felt really bad.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Catch them and kill them.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, that's like Caddyshack.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. How big is this rat problem, you say you have a rat problem?
Thomas Pacchia: Pubkey does not have a rat problem!
Peter McCormack: I know Pubkey doesn't have a rat problem.
Thomas Pacchia: We have no rats whatsoever!
Peter McCormack: But very tasty burgers.
Thomas Pacchia: What, rat burgers?!
Peter McCormack: The Rat Burger, the Smashed Rat Burger!
Thomas Pacchia: So, we have the wheat paste in the bathrooms and one of them is the Dirty Dogs, and at the end, it's like, "No, rat", and then apostrophe, "Okay, maybe a little rat problem".
Peter McCormack: People have been drawing all over those, haven't they?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, which is exactly what we wanted. So, we'll refresh those maybe like once a quarter or once every six months with a completely new style. So, we'll probably have the same three but either a completely new style or sort of like a reimagining of those and then we'll just paste them right up.
Peter McCormack: Have you not see the videos of the rats on the subway?
Thomas Pacchia: No, Pizza Rat? Pizza Rat's a celebrity.
Peter McCormack: They're fucking big!
Thomas Pacchia: They are quite large.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: The Norwegian brown rat I think we have, they're Norwegian.
Peter McCormack: Is it like a citywide problem?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, very much so.
Peter McCormack: How do they deal with it?
Thomas Pacchia: I think the tsar needs to get to work.
Peter McCormack: Come on rat tsar.
Thomas Pacchia: Come on rat tsar.
Peter McCormack: Who's the rat tsar? I hope they have a really cool name; you need a cool name to be a rat tsar.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, for sure.
Peter McCormack: It's going to be Kevin, Kevin the Rat Tsar. What else is going on in the city?
Thomas Pacchia: Well, I don't know. I think it's coming out of COVID still; hospitality is still struggling a little bit. January and February are supposed to be historically slow, just a really hard grind for all bars and restaurants and hotels to get through. We had a good pop, so we had the Bloomberg article, the Eater article, we opened at the right time, we were a bit of like a service hospitality industry bar after hours and we had a lot of these events that have really clicked for us during what was supposed to be a really rough stretch. So, we were very, very fortunate, but I think it can't be understated how difficult it is for a lot of other businesses in hospitality throughout the city still.
Tourism definitely has not come back yet, and the holiday season wasn't what it used to be in the pre-times. Some of it was self-inflicted, like New York got hit very hard very early, but I think that we held on to some of the COVID policies a little bit longer than needed.
Peter McCormack: I was meant to come out here for my daughter's birthday a year ago, she was going to turn 12, so it was just before her birthday we booked to come out. I was taking her to see Billie Eilish at Madison Square Garden, her and her best friend, booked the flights, the accommodation, the tickets, which weren't fucking cheap. Anyway, it turns out that Madison Square Garden would not let you in unless you were vaccinated, and it was any age.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I'm vaccinated, I didn't want my daughter to get vaccinated, even if I wanted to, you couldn't get vaccinated in the UK if you were under 12. So, anyway, it got to about a week, two weeks before and it was like, "We can't fucking go. We can get to New York but we get there and we're not allowed in the venue". I was like, "What the fuck are you doing?" So, that's one example of a group of five people who were coming who could not come.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah. It was panic; it hit New York pretty hard, we had just shipping containers as makeshift mortuaries for a period of time.
Peter McCormack: They brought in a hospital ship, didn't they?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah. So, it was panic, and that was in the really early days where we didn't know if kids were getting infected and we didn't know what was coming out of other countries. Before Hash Function, I ran a fund, a small fund, myself and two other partners, called HODL Capital, and one of them was Eric Voskuil who does Libbitcoin.
Peter McCormack: I love Eric.
Thomas Pacchia: Eric is a very dear friend.
Peter McCormack: Underrated bitcoiner; I wish we heard more from him.
Thomas Pacchia: He's great, he's cranking away on the Bitcoin, major, major progress and I do what I can to help the Libbitcoin Bitcoin project as well, I think alternative implementations and diversity of core development teams is really important, and it's really Eric. It's Libbitcoin and Bitcoin Knots, Luke Dashjr, and I think Libbitcoin is making real progress thanks to Eric and his team. Anyway, we had a conference scheduled, it was really Eric's conference that I was helping with.
Peter McCormack: Was that the Vietnam one?
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, the CryptoEcon one in Vietnam.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I really wanted to go.
Thomas Pacchia: Oh my God, it looked amazing.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: Eric was there weeks earlier, and another partner in Singapore was like, "It's fine, you can come, this is not a big deal, you're not going to get corona but you might get the flu. You can't get the flu, if you get the flu, they're going to throw you in quarantine and it's going to fuck the entire trip", and it's like, "Okay". Then he calls back like three days later and it's like, "Cancel everything, you should not come", and we lost most of the speakers, but it was still very well attended.
I think the capacity was like 100 people, we still had 80 local, and I called in from 3.00am to do my little presentation as part of the conference and it was still good, but thinking back to that level of panic and how it ramped, and how it ramped here, I can understand where some of the misguided policies that I think we hung onto way too long in New York City, where it came from, but we're still working through some elements of that.
Peter McCormack: I had a bad initial reaction, I was like, "Yeah, lock us down, fucking sort it out". I did an interview with a doctor, a friend of my mine I went to school with, he said to me, "It was weird, Pete". He cried during the interview actually, I always remember that, he said, "We had a couple of people walk in and then, within a few hours, it was a trickle, and within 24 hours", I think it was 24 hours, 48, I can't remember what he said, "But we had to declare an emergency".
He said people were coming in and they couldn't breathe and people where dying, and I think I understand the strong reaction to begin with. It was when we started to learn what this was really about that people refused to walk it back. America was a great lens for this because we come over to make the show and we would go to New York and see all the restrictions, and then we'll go to Texas and see no restrictions and nobody with a mask, and Texas was flourishing. So you could identify -- I think that's the problem of politicisation of things here in the US, you could see that Texas understood very early on and changed its policies in the right way, other people didn't.
Thomas Pacchia: It could have been accidental, it could be cultural the reasons why Texas and Florida approached it in what I think was probably a better way than some other ones, might have been somewhat accidental, but I think letting go of a lot of this stuff is difficult for people.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: You still some kids, recess outside, masked up.
Peter McCormack: I know.
Thomas Pacchia: Working through the anxiety, it's very difficult. I think this is a global problem, there's not a lot of mental health support, and when I see stuff like that it's very sad to see, it's letting go of that fear and anxiety and those nerves. There's a reason to do it, look, maybe some people are very high risk and that is something that makes them feel better that there's a layer of protection, but I think that there is probably of segment of the population that's still holding on to that fight for anxiety around COVID.
Peter McCormack: There is that, also it's hard to admit you were wrong.
Thomas Pacchia: Very much so.
Peter McCormack: Which I have personally had to walk back on a few things over the years, but it's very hard. It's hard at first, and when you do it, it's actually very cathartic.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I encourage people to do it, if you've got something wrong, come out and be public and say it, you'll be surprised how much support you get from people and what a weight it lifts off your shoulders.
Thomas Pacchia: True.
Peter McCormack: What can we do to help you, man?
Thomas Pacchia: Pubkey, look, we loved having you all week, it was really special, the people that you had come in to interview, sticking around, being at the bar. I also love this stuff. My wife and friends are tired of hearing me talk about Bitcoin and this is really a vessel for me to make new friends and connect with old friends in the industry. It's special to have people coming through, and if they're presenting or just having a beer and a hotdog at the bar, it's pretty cool. But yeah, we'd love to collab on anything in the future, how we can help your bar, how we can help Bedford; we need a supporters' club here.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so that's one of the things that would be great to have a supporters' club here.
Thomas Pacchia: Oh yeah.
Peter McCormack: We can support that. I've got something for you; do you want a live on-set present?
Thomas Pacchia: Sure.
Peter McCormack: I've got two things for you for your bar; give me one second.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you.
Peter McCormack: I'm glad I've just remembered that.
Danny Knowles: Your wife's sick of you talking about Bitcoin and then you came on a Bitcoin podcast and didn't talk about Bitcoin!
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah, I'd like to come back on and talk about Hash Function at some point, we'll do a hashrate market podcast. This also happened on Crypto Voices, we were having a great conversation and it ended up being more about some of -- it's a macro podcast, but we got into Pubkey, we got into hashrate markets and it's like, "We don't have enough time here".
Peter McCormack: So, this isn't me leaving Bedford thinking, "Oh, I should bring something for Thomas", this was me packing up this morning thinking, "Oh, I should give these to Thomas", here we go. So, you might want to put an iron over that, but you can hang that up behind the bar.
Thomas Pacchia: That's excellent.
Peter McCormack: But this is for your match days.
Thomas Pacchia: Excellent.
Peter McCormack: So, you've now got a Real Bedford flag. The thing about this flag is, this is the one that has travelled around with me, so it's not special but it is dirty!
Thomas Pacchia: That makes it special.
Peter McCormack: But that's for the bar.
Thomas Pacchia: It's been travelling, this is great, thank you.
Peter McCormack: So, this is what I need to get out to the supporters' club; there's one in I think it's Minneapolis, there are about ten of them who get together every day.
Thomas Pacchia: Really?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: The time zone is a little hard because we don't open until 1.00pm, but as we open up upstairs, we want to have a little bit more coworking space downstairs, coffee, pastries, things like that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Thomas Pacchia: We'll be open for the games at that point.
Peter McCormack: I think if it became a regular thing, people would come regularly and they're get behind it. I thought it would help when we were in the city.
Thomas Pacchia: Was it Tuesday?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I guess, if we're in a city, it's 10.00am on Saturday, people will come out.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: They'll come out.
Thomas Pacchia: For sure.
Peter McCormack: Well, listen, I will definitely be picking your brain on the bar. If you become the supporters' club in New York for this, that would be great.
Thomas Pacchia: Sure.
Peter McCormack: Anything we can do for you, give us a shout. We've loved being here; your team are amazing.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you, brother.
Peter McCormack: It's going to sound really kind of pathetic but it kind of felt like home straightaway.
Thomas Pacchia: Awesome, I'm happy to hear that.
Peter McCormack: It's like that Cheers thing, obviously you know Cheers.
Thomas Pacchia: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It just felt like home straightaway going in there. Everyone was cool, everyone was great, and so thank you so much for your hospitality, we will be back.
Thomas Pacchia: That's awesome.
Peter McCormack: And we will do something again when we're here.
Thomas Pacchia: That sounds great. It was great having you guys here, thank you so much.
Peter McCormack: Do we want to pimp anything else?
Thomas Pacchia: Just Pubkey for now.
Peter McCormack: Pubkey, man. All right, man, thank you, good luck, congratulations.
Thomas Pacchia: Thank you.
