Sunny Ray sits down with married couple Keegan and Murugaki, hosts of the Go Full Crypto podcast and founders of Atlantic Blockchain Company, to trace their winding path into bitcoin. Keegan recounts mining Dogecoin in 2013 through what turned out to be a ponzi scheme, thinking bitcoin was already too late at fifty dollars, before finally buying in 2015 and later shifting fully into bitcoin maximalism. Murugaki describes getting hooked by Keegan's excitement during the 2017 bull run, buying her first bitcoin from him after struggling to find reliable on ramps in Halifax, and losing nothing when Quadriga collapsed. The two explain how repeated bad experiences with Canadian banks, including being denied a business account and mortgage, pushed them to convert their savings fully into bitcoin in 2020. They dig into the six properties of money, bitcoin's evolving fungibility and privacy tradeoffs, the recent Wasabi wallet fork, and why they believe rising financial repression will ultimately drive broader bitcoin adoption.
From a Dogecoin mining ponzi scheme to full bitcoin conviction, a married couple's real, unfiltered crypto origin story.
Let's start with you Keegan, mining Dogecoin, how did that begin?
I got into Dogecoin early around 2013 after someone offered me a chance to build a website for a mining operation, which turned out to be a ponzi scheme paying out Dogecoin based on investor profits. I sold my holdings before really getting into bitcoin. I thought bitcoin was too late at fifty dollars. I didn't actually buy bitcoin until 2015, and I say I came for the gains but stayed for the philosophy.
What was it about Dogecoin specifically that caught your interest?
When I built a matrix comparing coins on the six properties of money, Dogecoin actually rated higher than something like Ethereum for me. Ten thousand Dogecoin get mined every block, a fixed number that never changes, so relative to existing supply the inflation rate keeps decreasing over time, making it harder money the longer it's active, even though decentralization is quite low.
What about you Murugaki, did you come in through Dogecoin too?
No, by then Keegan wasn't shitcoining as much and bitcoin had risen to the top for him. I wanted the excitement he had when he'd call me freaking out about prices swinging twenty or twenty five percent. After the 2018 bubble popped I wanted in, but it was hard to find a place to buy bitcoin in Halifax, so I actually bought my first thousand dollars of bitcoin directly from Keegan.
Where were you sourcing bitcoin from at the time?
Quadriga was still around and I used it since I was getting paid in bitcoin from a blockchain job. It worked fine until withdrawals started taking longer and longer, three days, then seven, then sixteen, then twenty five. When I learned the transfer was coming from a company run by the founder's wife, that was a red flag, so I pulled everything out and lost exactly zero dollars when it turned out to be a ponzi scheme.
With so much noise in crypto, how did you both settle specifically on bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a consistently strong signal, and a lot of credit goes to bitcoin maximalists who amplify that signal. For us it came down to money. Bad experiences at banks, like being denied a business account and a mortgage even with proof of funds, made us question how much control we really had over our money and pushed us to look for the alternative, which was always bitcoin.
What first principles led you to bitcoin as the optimal form of money?
Neither of us are economists or bankers, we're computer scientists, so we worked it out from first principles using the six properties of money from Robert Breedlove: durability, divisibility, portability, fungibility, acceptability, and limited supply. As far as we can tell, bitcoin has optimized all of these except acceptability, and that's simply because not enough time has passed yet.
What do you mean when you say your money isn't really your money?
People see the numbers in their banking app and assume that money is truly theirs, but it's actually an IOU from the authority that stamps the currency. A dollar bill isn't backed by anything, it's only worth a dollar because the issuer says so. Our experiences with banks refusing transfers and accounts made that lack of real ownership very clear to us.
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