I spent a decade reporting on crypto. I saw the epic runups, the catastrophic collapses, the FOMO, the rug-pulls, the winters, the summers, the NFT parties in Miami and all the ballroom messiahs. At CoinDesk, where I was managing editor, our newsroom broke the balance-sheet story that brought down FTX, then one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, got 25 years.
By 2023, after another market crash, I’d seen enough crypto drama to think about writing my own. The storylines of crypto seemed eminently dramatic: heroes, villains, power conflict, big themes in finance, tech and much more. I’d written a lot of headlines. I wanted to think about what it felt like to be a person in the room. Certain details from the FTX scandal intrigued me. For instance: What kind of family dynamics drove Sam to commit an $8 billion fraud?
Happenstance opened at the Kraine Theater in New York, in October 2024. It was the first Bitcoin play. Our hero, Charlie Schwagg, shared some characteristics with Charlie Shrem, the Bitcoin pioneer who spent time (2015-16) in federal prison for aiding unlicensed money transmission linked to Silk Road, the dark web drug marketplace. Shrem had lived not far from me in downtown New York and been involved in a nightclub nearby. Charlie’s mother (Barbara Schwagg) owed something to Barbara Fried, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother and a zealous philanthropist in her own right. The play followed Charlie through his last hours of freedom, with a family wanting him to escape and his girlfriend pushing him to a spiritual path.
At the time, the archetypal crypto story was the founder going to jail, or facing the possibility of it: Ross Ulbricht, who built the Silk Road marketplace. Arthur Hayes, co-founder of a major crypto exchange. CZ, who made Binance into the world’s largest crypto exchange. And many more.
Two weeks after we closed in October 2024, America elected Donald Trump as president. He pardoned Ulbricht, CZ and Hayes. He commuted sentences and wound down prosecutions, like the Justice Department’s tax case against Roger Ver, the early Bitcoin investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus.” He recruited a crypto czar for the White House. His family launched the Trump memecoin, a speculative digital token bearing his name and likeness, making $625 million in 2025.
Immediately, I felt my play had become a period piece. Crypto’s dramatic arc was no longer about a developer going to prison. It was about an anti-establishment movement making a deal with power.
During the first decade of crypto, the industry had always felt outsider-y. Conferences were full of people with ideas that didn’t quite fit the mainstream. Crypto politics was scattered across the spectrum, from hard libertarians to blockchain socialists. Crypto folk tended not to express themselves politically in terms of parties, candidates and tribe-coded language. Many crypto folks talked of creating a post-politics beyond the usual red-blue squabbling.
In July 2024, when Trump gave the keynote at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, those politics switched to more conventional rails. Crypto was inside the game for the first time. For years, politicians had scorned or ignored crypto. Now here was the most famous pol of all lavishing praise on charming people he’d just met, and vowing to make America the “crypto capital of the world.”
The room roared. And I understood. Even sympathized. I’d seen the Biden administration grind the industry down through a thousand acts (and non-acts) big and small. Gary Gensler’s SEC sued companies to make policy statements, offering no legal path for anyone who wanted to comply fairly. Banks arbitrarily shut down the accounts of crypto companies. Crypto felt an existential threat. It needed a friend in D.C. In Nashville, it found one.
The bargain came at a price. Trump Coin saw thousands of buyers lose their savings. And other Trump ventures—like World Liberty Financial, a Trump family crypto venture—have been vehicles for various people to influence Trump indirectly. Trump has handed out pardons to many founders who (in my opinion) deserved them, and to many donors who didn’t.
In Nashville that day, I marveled at the spectacle of a movement that had been built by Cypherpunks, the privacy activists whose ideas helped pave the way for Bitcoin to resist power now cheering on Trump. Some Bitcoiners even dressed as Trump.
I decided to write a new play.
Bitcoin Bad Boy picks up Charlie, the same crypto revolutionary from the first play, fresh out of prison on a pardon. Brought to Las Vegas for a crypto conference by his family, he steps into a world that changed while he was away. The people who locked him up are gone, retired somewhere. The new people say they love him. Charlie, no longer an outlaw, is a celebrity.
His brother, seeing an opportunity, wants him to launch a memecoin. Butch Pine, the crypto czar, offers him a job selling the administration’s initiatives. Butch makes his case. The war they both fought is won. Bitcoin sits in retirement accounts. Why does Charlie need to keep fighting from the outside?
Charlie has to decide. What is the crypto revolution for, and for whom?
Here is what I know.
After 12 years on this beat, I can say this: The coins were never the point. They drove the interest and funded the parties, but prices rise and crash, and companies soar and collapse. Crypto is a political and social technology as much as a real one. What endures the scams and the winters are ideas that resonate even more today than they did when Eric Hughes wrote the Cypherpunk Manifesto in 1993 and Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin Whitepaper in 2008.
The central question of Bitcoin is about self-sovereignty: Who owns your money, and, by extension, who owns your data? Who owns you? Your money, words, likeness, choices, opinions, your AI.
The Cypherpunks, the privacy activists whose ideas paved the way for Bitcoin, asked who owns you at a time when the question sounded paranoid. Thirty years later, in an age of surveillance and scraped data and machines trained on our faces, it sounds like the question of the era. Charlie Schwagg spends 90 minutes on stage trying to answer it. He’s ridiculous. But I think he gets further than most of us.
Ben Schiller is the writer and producer of Bitcoin Bad Boy, running October 15-25 at the Chain Theatre in New York. He spent six years as managing editor at CoinDesk and is head of communications at Miden, a privacy blockchain.
