On October 18, 2013, a small panel of Bitcoin enthusiasts sat down in front of their webcams, pressed record, and — without quite knowing it — inaugurated what would become the longest-running program in the history of cryptocurrency. There was no studio, no sponsor, no sense of occasion. There was only a host named Thomas Hunt, known online as Mad Bitcoins, a handful of guests, and three "issues" pulled from a week's worth of headlines. The Bitcoin Group #1 was crude, earnest, and improvised. It was also the seed of an institution. More than 490 episodes and thirteen years later, it is worth returning to the very first broadcast — to hear, in the flat audio of an early transcript, a movement in the act of describing itself.
The Birth of the Show
The Bitcoin Group launched under the banner of the World Crypto Network, a scrappy YouTube-native project built on a simple, then-radical premise: that Bitcoin deserved its own weekly news show, produced by the people who actually used it rather than by financial television's baffled anchors. The format was the format of a hundred tech podcasts and public-affairs roundtables — a host, a rotating panel of "regulars," and a short list of stories to argue over — but pointed at a subject that mainstream media still treated as a novelty or a scam.
Thomas Hunt anchored it, and the show wore its homemade quality as a badge. The World Crypto Network's early roster drew from the community of evangelists, developers, and traders who had found each other on forums and at the first sparse conferences. Among the figures most associated with those founding panels is Andreas Antonopoulos, who in this same period was emerging as Bitcoin's most gifted public explainer and who became a recurring voice on the network's programming. A word of caution belongs here, in the spirit of an honest encyclopedia: the earliest surviving transcript of Episode #1 is imperfect, and its speaker attribution is uncertain. We can be confident about the show's founding and the cast of characters who orbited it; we should be careful about putting specific sentences in specific mouths on this specific night.
October 2013
To understand why the first episode feels the way it does — hopeful, defensive, philosophical, a little underdog — you have to remember what Bitcoin was in the autumn of 2013. The price hovered around the mid-hundreds of dollars; the month's average sat near $158, climbing toward $200 as October wore on. That number looks quaint now and looked reckless then. Bitcoin had already survived one bubble-and-crash in the spring, and to most of the public it was either a punchline, a drug-market curiosity, or something they had genuinely never heard of.
Crucially, this was a moment of calm before two storms. Mt. Gox, the Tokyo exchange that handled a huge share of global Bitcoin trading, was still standing; its catastrophic collapse was months away, in early 2014. And the explosive rally that would carry Bitcoin toward $1,000 by year's end had not yet begun. The panel of Episode #1 was speaking from the quiet valley between crises, when Bitcoin was cheap, obscure, and still arguing its case for existing at all.
Issue One: Bitcoin at the Checkout
The first issue the show tackled was the one ordinary people actually asked: can you buy anything with this? Framed around Walmart and Amazon — the twin cathedrals of American retail — the segment posed the challenge bluntly.
"If your Bitcoin is so great, why can't it be accepted in the real world? Is Bitcoin ready for the rigors of checkout?"— The Bitcoin Group #1, Oct 18 2013
It is a wonderful, slightly wounded question, and it captures the anxiety of the era perfectly. In 2013 the honest answer was: not really, not yet. Neither Walmart nor Amazon accepted Bitcoin, and the practical friction was severe. Confirmations took minutes, wallets were intimidating, and volatility meant a coffee could cost a different number of satoshis by the time the barista handed it over. The panel wrestled with whether Bitcoin was fit for the mundane, high-volume, low-margin grind of everyday commerce — or whether it was still a hobbyist's instrument dressed up as money.
In Cryptography We Trust
If the checkout debate was practical, the second issue was philosophical, and it is the part of Episode #1 that has aged into something close to poetry. The question was the oldest one in monetary economics dressed in new clothes: what actually backs money?
"Hard currency exists because of trust in precious metals. Fiat currencies exist because of trust in economic systems. Virtual currencies exist because of faith in mathematics — in cryptography we trust. Or is this just another case of faith, like fiat?"— The Bitcoin Group #1, Oct 18 2013
That final clause is what elevates the exchange above cheerleading. It would have been easy, in a show made by believers, to declare cryptography categorically superior to central banking and move on. Instead the panel left the door open to its own doubt. Bitcoin's pitch was that it replaced trust in fallible institutions with trust in verifiable, incorruptible math — proof instead of promises. But the honest thinkers on the early panels understood that trust never fully disappears; it only relocates. "In cryptography we trust" was both a boast and a confession, and the show was clear-eyed enough to hold both.
Mining and Decentralization
The third issue turned to the machinery underneath it all: mining, and whether ordinary people could still take part. The hobbyist era of mining on a home computer's graphics card was ending; purpose-built ASIC hardware was arriving, and with it the fear that mining would concentrate into the hands of a few well-capitalized operators.
"I have a small mining rig here myself… I don't feel like individuals can be completely blocked out from participating in Bitcoin mining. It's something that anyone can participate in, and that fact makes it more secure."— The Bitcoin Group #1, Oct 18 2013
Read today, this is the most touchingly optimistic — and most wrong — passage in the episode. The intuition was right in principle: broad participation strengthens the network. But the specific hope, that a small rig on a desk could remain a meaningful participant, did not survive the decade. Still, notice the reasoning: participation as security, decentralization not as ideology but as engineering. That instinct was sound even where the forecast failed.
How It Aged
- Retail at the checkout. The dream of buying groceries with Bitcoin largely did not happen — and, more importantly, stopped being the point. Overstock began accepting Bitcoin in early 2014, and payment processors eased merchant integration, but volatility, fees, and the later rise of the Lightning Network meant "Bitcoin at Walmart" never became the norm.
- The store-of-value turn. Bitcoin was reframed from "digital cash" to "digital gold" — a scarce, censorship-resistant store of value. The philosophical debate about trust and faith turned out to matter far more than the checkout debate.
- Mining's industrialization. Mining professionalized into warehouse-scale operations and ASIC arms races. The individual with "a small mining rig" was, economically, blocked out — yet the deeper claim, that broad open participation keeps the network secure, endured: Bitcoin weathered China's mining ban and stayed decentralized enough that no single actor could capture it.
What the panel got right was the framing. They asked whether Bitcoin could serve commerce, what ultimately backs money, and whether decentralization could survive scale. Those are still the three questions. What they got wrong were the specifics of the answers — understandably, from inside a $158 world that had not yet seen a single mania or a single collapse.
Why This Episode Matters
The Bitcoin Group #1 matters less for what it concluded than for what it started. It established a ritual — gather weekly, pick the stories that matter, argue them out in public, on the record — and that ritual outlasted exchanges, cycles, and most of the projects the show once covered. To watch a panel in October 2013 puzzle over checkout lines and the nature of trust is to watch a subculture teach itself to think out loud, before anyone was sure the subject would still exist in a year.
It is fitting that the episode is imperfectly preserved, its audio thin and its speaker labels uncertain. Foundational documents usually are. What survives intact is the tone: reverent about the technology, but never blind to its unfinished state. That combination of conviction and doubt is the show's real inheritance. Everything that follows in the TBG-o-pedia — hundreds of episodes across thirteen years — begins here, in a small room, with three questions and the confidence to leave them open.