00:00The story of Brian Armstrong. In 2010, an American web developer and entrepreneur named Brian Armstrong
00:07and his friend got on a plane and flew from San Francisco to Tokyo for the first time.
00:12He was curious about the city and also had a business meeting with a guy who runs one of the
00:17largest Bitcoin exchanges in Japan. At the time, there were only about 10 or 20 quality Bitcoin
00:23exchanges worldwide, and it was nearly impossible to transfer money between them. You couldn't even
00:29do it within the same country. Let's say you bought Bitcoin in America and wanted to sell it in
00:34Europe. It was just not possible. And that's what Brian saw when he arrived in Tokyo. There was a
00:39huge exchange, but they weren't connected to any other exchanges in any other countries. That's why
00:45he decided to develop a website that would allow users to trade their cryptocurrencies from anywhere
00:51in the world to anyone else in the world instantly. When he got back to the US, he started working
00:56on
00:56the idea. In less than three months, he had built the entire platform and then launched it in June of
01:022012 under the name Coinbase. The company didn't charge fees for trades. Instead, they made money by
01:09charging a small spread on each transaction, which is basically the difference between the buying price
01:14and the selling price. Within the first few hours of launch, they facilitated about $1 million worth of
01:20transactions, and they kept around $100,000 in Bitcoin for themselves. By the end of the month,
01:27they processed over $100,000 worth of transactions and took around $40,000 worth of Bitcoin for
01:34themselves. So it seemed like a great start. But this was not the case at all. It turns out that
01:39there
01:40was another startup called Coinbase that was established a year earlier in New York, and they
01:44also operated a Bitcoin exchange. They had chosen the name before Brian did, and now they were both
01:50fighting over the domain.
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