Former Bitcoin miner navigates the Wild West world of cryptocurrency in new memoir

You could say Ethan Lou is something of an early adopter. In Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West, he lays out his adventures in that sometimes-shadowy world, including the time he ginned-up several computers in his Calgary apartment to create his own makeshift home-based bitcoin mining operation.

“That, actually, wasn’t an enjoyable experience,” he admits. “Like, when I was doing it, that felt fun in a way, but I had a very small apartment, it was a studio apartment, and those mining machines, they make so much heat, I was shirtless all the time. And I had to get a dedicated facility in the end. But, yeah, those days are behind me.”

"This space is very new. The entire technology, everything, it only started in 2009." Today on @CityNewsVan: A conversation with journalist @Ethan_Lou, author of "Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West," new from @ecwpress. #CityNewsBookshelf pic.twitter.com/Ueh56cBDgZ

— John Ackermann ???? (@jackermann) October 24, 2021

Lou certainly fits the profile of a Bitcoin investor, saying he’s been described by friends as both adventurous and eccentric. However, he is also a journalist whose work has appeared in the Guardian and the Washington Post, among others.

In 2019, Lou served as a visiting journalist in Forestry at the University of British Columbia, sharing his experiences covering forest fires in B.C. and Alberta. He also writes a cryptocurrency column for the Financial Post. And while Once a Bitcoin Miner is technically his second book, it was largely written before Field Notes From A Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended, which came out first.

Read More: History in real time: Field Notes From A Pandemic logs COVID-19 as it happened 

“I thought about writing this book for years. I think the thought first came to me in 2014 and the deal for this was struck in 2019,” he explains. “And I am an early Bitcoin investor, so this is something dear to my heart.”

While Lou likes to describe crypto-world as something of a Wild West, one of his more notable adventures took him in the opposite direction: the Far East and North Korea.

“On the very first day, when we got there, we were told that the whole schedule of the conference hadn’t been set in stone yet and that, instead of hearing from North Koreans, we were supposed to give presentations to them. So, a lot of the presentations at the conference, people just made them up on the spot.”

Cryptocurrency has come a long way since then. Today, Bitcoin is hotter than ever, and Lou says the pandemic, or at least how governments have responded to it, is a big reason why.

“The result of that is inflation has never been higher. And, you know, Bitcoin traditionally is an inflation hedge. So, I think, against the backdrop of all of this, it’s not that surprising to see Bitcoin rising in this way.”

As for where cryptocurrency goes from here, Lou says mainstream acceptance, at least in places with a stable economy like ours, is still far off.

“This space is very new. The entire technology, everything, it only started in 2009,” he says. “Sometimes we forget that.”

Lou says the next step will be for Bitcoin to be used as an actual form of payment, not just as a store of value.

“There’s this new thing in Bitcoin called the Lightning Network,” he explains. “So, developers are trying to scale this up to have it so that you can send really small transactions with Bitcoin. That’s a game-changer. I think in the future we will see Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. More so than now.”

Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West is published by ECW Press.