If you spend enough time reading about Bitcoin, you start to notice something strange. The people who believe in it most deeply don’t look like each other at all.
They don’t share a political party, a tax bracket, a country of origin, or a professional background. They arrived from completely different directions — through economics, through grief, through a whitepaper, through a trip to Africa, through a hunch at a kitchen table in Wyoming at Christmas. Some of them disagree with each other loudly and publicly about almost everything.
And yet here they all are, on the same side of the same orange dot.
This article is an attempt to map some of those journeys — to ask not just who believes in Bitcoin, but why someone as different as a Lebanese economist and a Wu-Tang rapper and a cattle rancher and a game developer all ended up in the same place. The answer, when you trace it back, is usually the same: they looked honestly at how money works, and they couldn’t unsee what they saw.
What follows is not a comprehensive list of Bitcoin believers. It is a survey of the range. Names are included for informational purposes; OrangeTill does not necessarily endorse the views of individuals mentioned.
The originators
Before there were believers, there were builders. The people who created Bitcoin and handed it to the world did so without knowing whether it would survive. Two of them are gone. One was never known.
Satoshi Nakamoto — Unknown
On October 31, 2008, a person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a paper to a cryptography mailing list. It was titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System and was nine pages long. The first block of the Bitcoin network, mined on January 3, 2009, contained a message embedded in the code: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. It was both a timestamp and a statement.
Satoshi communicated with early developers by email and forum post for two years, then disappeared in April 2011 with a final message: “I’ve moved on to other things.” The identity remains unknown. The wallet believed to hold Satoshi’s approximately 1.1 million Bitcoin has never moved. Every candidate who has claimed to be Satoshi has been discredited. The mystery is, at this point, part of the design — a founder who cannot be arrested, pressured, or bought out, because no one knows who they are. Bitcoin’s decentralization began with its creator’s disappearance.
Hal Finney — Caltech engineer, cypherpunk, Atari game developer
Hal Finney graduated from Caltech with a degree in electrical engineering, then went to work developing Atari 2600 video games — titles like Astrosmash and Adventures of Tron. He later joined PGP Corporation and became one of the key contributors to Pretty Good Privacy, the encryption technology that protects private communications. For decades he was part of the cypherpunk movement, a loose network of cryptographers and programmers who believed privacy was a precondition of freedom.
When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list in January 2009, Hal downloaded the software immediately. He was the second person to ever run a Bitcoin node. On January 12, 2009, Satoshi sent him 10 BTC — the first Bitcoin transaction in history. Hal tweeted simply: “Running bitcoin.” In August 2009, he was diagnosed with ALS. He continued contributing to Bitcoin from his wheelchair, typing with an eye-tracker, until his death in 2014. He was 58. His family had him cryogenically preserved, consistent with his lifelong belief that the future was worth reaching.
Gavin Andresen — Princeton CS graduate, 3D graphics and virtual reality developer
Gavin Andresen graduated from Princeton in computer science, spent years developing 3D graphics and virtual reality software, and discovered Bitcoin in 2010 as a side project. He was immediately taken by its architecture. He began submitting code, Satoshi noticed the quality of his work, and by late 2010 Satoshi had handed him commit access to the entire codebase. When Satoshi disappeared in 2011, his final words were: “It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
Andresen became Bitcoin’s lead developer at a moment when the project was fragile and largely unknown. He built the Bitcoin Faucet, a website that gave away five free bitcoin to anyone who asked, distributing 19,700 BTC to strangers for free at a time when Bitcoin was worth cents. He testified before the Canadian Senate, met with the CIA to explain what Bitcoin was, and co-founded the Bitcoin Foundation in 2012. His tenure ended in controversy in 2016 when he publicly endorsed Craig Wright’s claim to be Satoshi — a claim the broader community rejected. He was removed from the project and now lives quietly in Amherst, Massachusetts. His contributions are permanently embedded in the protocol.
The economists and philosophers
Some people arrived at Bitcoin through the long tradition of thinking seriously about money — what it is, what it does to society, and what happens when it goes wrong. They came from different schools of thought and different parts of the world, but they each saw the same problem.
Saifedean Ammous — Lebanese-Palestinian academic economist
Saifedean Ammous grew up in Lebanon, a country whose currency has been destroyed multiple times by political instability and monetary mismanagement. He studied economics at the London School of Economics and Columbia University before writing The Bitcoin Standard in 2018, which became one of the most widely read books in the Bitcoin ecosystem. His argument is foundational and deliberately provocative: sound money — money that cannot be inflated at will — was the precondition for Western civilization’s greatest achievements in art, architecture, and science. Fiat money, he argues, raises what economists call time preference, pushing people toward short-term consumption and away from long-term investment. Art becomes content. Cathedrals become strip malls.
Ammous arrived at Bitcoin through Austrian economics and monetary theory, not through technology. He sees it as the first truly sound money in the digital age. His views are intensely debated. His book remains, for many people, the first serious engagement with the idea that Bitcoin is not a speculation but a monetary system.
Lawrence Lepard — Boston fund manager, gold advocate
Lawrence Lepard spent decades in traditional investment management, deeply skeptical of fiat money long before Bitcoin existed. He was already invested in gold mining companies as a hedge against what he saw as inevitable currency debasement when he encountered Bitcoin and recognized it as the digital version of the same argument. His 2025 book, The Big Print, traces the history of monetary expansion and its social consequences. He is a sound money advocate who found that Bitcoin made the case more cleanly than gold could.
Lepard represents a category of Bitcoin believers who came not from the technology world but from the financial world — people who had spent years watching central banks and who saw Bitcoin as the logical response.
Robert Kiyosaki — Japanese-American author, son of a schoolteacher
Robert Kiyosaki was born in Hawaii, the son of a schoolteacher father. His book Rich Dad Poor Dad, first published in 1997, introduced millions of readers to the distinction between assets and liabilities and the idea that financial literacy, not income, determines wealth. He came to Bitcoin through the same lens he applied to real estate and gold: it is an asset, not a currency, and in an era of endless money printing it is a form of protection. He calls Bitcoin “people’s money” and groups it alongside gold and silver as hard assets outside the control of central banks.
Kiyosaki is not a technologist. He is a financial educator with one of the largest popular audiences in personal finance. When he began publicly advocating for Bitcoin in 2018, it introduced the conversation to an enormous audience who had never heard a Bitcoin argument framed in those terms.
Andreas Antonopoulos — British-Greek educator, grew up under military dictatorship
Andreas Antonopoulos was born in London in 1972 and grew up in Athens, Greece, during and after the military junta. He watched a currency crisis destroy the savings of an entire generation as a child. He studied computer science and distributed systems at University College London, spent years in cybersecurity, and discovered Bitcoin in 2012. His immediate reaction was “nerd money” — and he dismissed it. Six months later he read the whitepaper and experienced what he describes as a complete reversal.
Antonopoulos quit a stable consulting career to become a Bitcoin educator at a time when nobody was paying for that. He spent two years working for free and accumulated significant debt before the community noticed. When they did, supporters spontaneously sent him more than 100 bitcoin unsolicited. His books — Mastering Bitcoin, The Internet of Money — became the standard references for understanding both the technical architecture and the human significance of the network. He coined the phrase “not your keys, not your coins.” More than perhaps anyone, he made Bitcoin understandable to people who were not cryptographers.
The macro analysts
Not everyone arrives through ideology. Some people simply follow the data — and the data keeps pointing to the same place.
Lyn Alden — Electrical engineer turned macro analyst
Lyn Alden trained as an electrical engineer and worked in aviation before becoming a macroeconomic analyst. She is not an ideologue. She approaches Bitcoin the way she approaches any other asset: through data, historical precedent, and monetary theory. Her work on Bitcoin focuses on its properties as a monetary network — its fixed supply, its resistance to seizure, its accessibility across borders — and on the structural conditions of the global financial system that make those properties valuable.
Alden’s significance in the Bitcoin world is that she is widely trusted precisely because she is not a maximalist. Her conclusions carry weight because she arrives at them through the same framework she applies to everything else. She follows the evidence.
Cathie Wood — Growth investor, ARK Invest founder
Cathie Wood built ARK Invest on the thesis that disruptive innovation is systematically undervalued by traditional markets. The same analytical framework that led her to Tesla, genomics, and artificial intelligence led her to Bitcoin. She sees it as the most disruptive monetary innovation in history — a technology that will reorganize the global financial system the way the internet reorganized information. ARK has maintained one of the highest Bitcoin price targets among mainstream institutional analysts.
Wood represents a category of Bitcoin believer who came not through libertarian politics or monetary theory but through growth investing. For her, Bitcoin is the apex disruptive asset.
The builders and executives
Some of the most influential Bitcoin believers are people who built companies — people who looked at Bitcoin not as a philosophy but as infrastructure, and decided to build on top of it or alongside it.
Michael Saylor — Aerospace engineer, MIT guitarist, MicroStrategy founder
Michael Saylor grew up on Air Force bases around the world, the son of a chief master sergeant. He attended MIT on a full ROTC scholarship, earned dual degrees in aeronautics and astronautics, and played guitar in a rock band in his spare time — an instrument he taught himself in six weeks at age 17 after not getting a role in his high school’s production of The Sound of Music. He sang in church and school choirs and was voted most likely to succeed. He is also credited with more than 40 patents and founded MicroStrategy at age 24.
Saylor came to Bitcoin in 2020 as a corporate treasury decision. COVID-era money printing convinced him that holding cash on MicroStrategy’s balance sheet was a form of slow wealth destruction. He converted the treasury to Bitcoin and has continued buying ever since. MicroStrategy now holds more Bitcoin than any public company. Whether or not one agrees with his approach, Saylor demonstrated that a public company could make Bitcoin a treasury asset — and survive. He became one of the loudest and most quotable voices in the ecosystem, appearing on Lil Bubble’s Bitcoin albums as a credited artist, and sharing the stage with heads of state.
Jack Dorsey — Working-class St. Louis, Twitter and Block founder
Jack Dorsey was born into a working-class Catholic family in St. Louis, Missouri. He co-founded Twitter and Square — later rebranded Block — and has been one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal Bitcoin advocates for years. His conviction deepened after a trip to Africa in 2019 where he saw the practical consequences of unreliable financial infrastructure. He came to believe Bitcoin was not just a store of value but the internet’s native currency — the thing that money should have been from the beginning, built for the network rather than bolted onto it.
Dorsey co-created the ₿trust endowment with Jay-Z in 2021, committing 500 BTC to fund Bitcoin developer training in Africa and India. Block has built significant Bitcoin infrastructure, including Lightning Network integration in the Cash App. Dorsey has publicly stated that if he were not running Block, he would work on Bitcoin full-time. He considers it the most important work of his lifetime.
Caitlin Long — Wyoming rancher’s daughter, 22 years on Wall Street
Caitlin Long grew up in Wyoming and attended Harvard Law School before spending 22 years at Salomon Brothers, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley. She first encountered Bitcoin in 2012 while still a managing director at Morgan Stanley and began attending cryptocurrency events on evenings and weekends. In 2017, she tried to donate appreciated Bitcoin to fund a scholarship for female engineers at the University of Wyoming — and discovered a flaw in Wyoming state law that made it impossible. She volunteered to fix the statute. That effort became a multi-year initiative that produced twenty blockchain-friendly laws and made Wyoming one of the most crypto-forward states in the country.
Long founded Custodia Bank in 2020 to bridge traditional finance and Bitcoin, applying the same full-reserve banking principles she had spent decades watching be ignored on Wall Street. She has fought a protracted legal battle with the Federal Reserve over Custodia’s application for a master account. She represents a strand of Bitcoin belief that comes not from ideology but from watching the existing system from the inside and concluding it is structurally broken.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — Harvard-educated Olympic rowers
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss studied economics at Harvard, competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics in men’s pairs rowing, and became famous for their lawsuit alleging Mark Zuckerberg stole the concept of Facebook. They settled in 2008 and used a portion of the proceeds to buy Bitcoin when it was trading under $10 per coin, eventually accumulating approximately 1% of all Bitcoin in circulation. They founded Gemini in 2014, one of the first regulated cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States, and have spent years building the institutional infrastructure around Bitcoin.
What is notable about the Winklevoss twins is not simply that they believed in Bitcoin early. It is that they came from a position of genuine privilege — Harvard, the Olympics, a multimillion-dollar settlement — looked at the financial system that had rewarded them, and concluded it was still broken. Their conviction has never wavered. The only Bitcoin they are known to have ever sold was the amount used to fund Gemini.
Jack Mallers — Youngest major voice, Chicago finance dynasty
Jack Mallers is the founder of Strike, a Lightning Network payments company, and one of the youngest major figures in the Bitcoin ecosystem. His grandfather was a former chair of the Chicago Board of Trade. He comes from finance. He built payments infrastructure. He helped architect the legal framework that made El Salvador the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 — a moment that demonstrated, for the first time, that a nation-state could make this decision and not immediately collapse.
Mallers represents the generation that did not arrive at Bitcoin through skepticism of the old system. He simply built on top of Bitcoin because it was the best foundation available.
Tim Draper — Silicon Valley venture capitalist
Tim Draper is the venture capitalist who backed Tesla, Skype, Hotmail, Twitter, and Coinbase. In 2014, the United States Marshals Service auctioned off Bitcoin seized from the Silk Road marketplace. Draper bought 29,656 BTC at approximately $632 per coin when almost no mainstream institution would touch the asset. He has held through multiple cycles. He represents old-guard Silicon Valley venture capital making a contrarian bet that proved prescient.
Mike Novogratz — Former Goldman Sachs partner, Galaxy Digital founder
Mike Novogratz played lacrosse at Princeton, became a partner at Goldman Sachs, and later ran a macro hedge fund at Fortress Investment Group. He discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2015 and eventually left traditional finance to found Galaxy Digital, a crypto merchant bank. He has described Bitcoin as a “systems change” moment and has connected his advocacy to broader social justice concerns, including pledging a majority of his crypto profits to charity. He is an unlikely addition to any list of Bitcoin believers — a Goldman partner in a sector that Goldman once dismissed entirely.
The journalists and educators
Some people find Bitcoin not through finance or technology but through asking questions. Journalists and educators who go looking for the truth about money often end up in the same place.
Natalie Brunell — Polish-born first-generation American, Emmy-winning journalist
Natalie Brunell was born in Poland and came to the United States at age five in pursuit of the American Dream. She became an Emmy-winning investigative television journalist, covering local and national news for more than a decade. She encountered Bitcoin in 2016 and dismissed it. Someone gave her a copy of The Bitcoin Standard. She describes what happened next as going down a rabbit hole she has never come back from.
Brunell realized, as she tells it, that she had spent years as a journalist investigating the symptoms of a broken monetary system without understanding the root cause. Inflation. The widening wealth gap. The dream becoming unaffordable. Fix the money, she came to believe, and you fix the world. Her book, Bitcoin Is for Everyone, and her podcast Coin Stories are explicitly aimed at people who have never owned a satoshi. She is one of the most effective communicators in the space, in part because she was once genuinely on the other side.
The advocates and broadcasters
A few people became Bitcoin advocates not because of their professional credentials but because of their willingness to say it loudly, early, and repeatedly before it was fashionable.
Max Keiser — New York stockbroker, broadcaster, El Salvador
Max Keiser worked as a stockbroker in New York before becoming a financial broadcaster. He began advocating for Bitcoin publicly as early as 2011 — among the earliest mainstream media voices to do so. He relocated to El Salvador and became a senior Bitcoin advisor to President Nayib Bukele, helping shape the legislation that made El Salvador the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. He and his wife Stacy Herbert have been central to El Salvador’s Bitcoin infrastructure and advisory apparatus. Keiser’s views on Bitcoin are maximalist and often provocative; his proximity to a government criticized by some observers for authoritarian tendencies has generated debate. He is included here as a matter of historical record — his role in El Salvador’s Bitcoin adoption was real and consequential, whatever one makes of the broader political context.
The legislators
Bitcoin eventually found its way into the halls of government. The path there ran through Wyoming.
Senator Cynthia Lummis — Wyoming cattle rancher, first female senator from Wyoming
Cynthia Lummis was born and raised on a cattle ranch in Laramie County, Wyoming. She holds degrees in animal science, biology, and law from the University of Wyoming. She was elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives at age 24 — the youngest woman ever to serve in the state legislature. She became Wyoming’s first female United States Senator in 2021.
She bought her first Bitcoin in 2013 — convinced by the young man sitting across her kitchen table at Christmas, who would later become her son-in-law. Looking at her cattle ranch and watching prices fall during COVID, she thought about stores of value that were decoupled from economic cycles. Bitcoin made sense to her before it made sense to most of Washington. She introduced the BITCOIN Act, proposing that the United States Treasury acquire up to one million Bitcoin over five years as a strategic reserve. She chairs the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets. A cattle rancher brought Bitcoin to the floor of the United States Senate.
The musicians and builders
Music arrived at Bitcoin from two directions simultaneously — artists who saw it as a way to reclaim control of their work, and builders who saw Lightning Network as the infrastructure the music industry always needed.
Michael Rhee and Sam Means — Musicians who built what they needed
Michael Rhee and Sam Means are musicians who founded Wavlake, a streaming platform built on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. The platform operates on a Value for Value model: fans send satoshis directly to artists as they listen, in real time, with no intermediary. Ninety percent of revenue goes directly to the artist. The platform takes ten percent. This is not a marginal improvement on streaming economics. It is a different model entirely. Rhee and Means built it because it did not exist, and because they were musicians who understood why it needed to.
Violetta Zironi — Italian singer-songwriter, Bitcoin Ordinals
Violetta Zironi inscribed her music directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain using Ordinals. The block space limitations forced her to record unpolished, authentic takes — no room for industry-standard overproduction. What went on chain had to be real. She found the constraint liberating. Her work sits permanently on Bitcoin: not on a server, not in a streaming catalog that can be pulled, not on a platform that can go bankrupt. On Bitcoin, where it will remain as long as the network runs.
Jay-Z — Brooklyn, ₿trust
Jay-Z — Shawn Carter — grew up in the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn and became one of the most successful artists and entrepreneurs in American history. In 2021 he and Jack Dorsey co-created the ₿trust endowment, committing 500 BTC — worth approximately $23.6 million at the time — to fund Bitcoin developer training in Africa and India. ₿trust has since acquired Qala, an organization focused on training African Bitcoin engineers, and has supported hundreds of developers entering the ecosystem. It is not a marketing gesture. It is infrastructure.
Ghostface Killah — Wu-Tang Clan, Bitcoin Ordinals
Dennis Coles — Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tang Clan — released music as Bitcoin Ordinals. The Wu-Tang Clan once famously released an album with only one copy, deliberately outside the commercial distribution system, as a statement about the nature of ownership and value. Ghostface arrived at Bitcoin Ordinals from a similar direction: permanence, scarcity, and control. The blockchain as the only release format that cannot be taken away.
Lil Bubble — Bitcoin musician
Lil Bubble released Bitcoin House Vol. 1 in 2024 and Bitcoin House Vol. 2 in 2025, both featuring Michael Saylor as a credited artist — his recordings, speeches, and quotes looped and layered into the tracks. Song titles include We Call Them Poor, The Orange Pill, There Is No Second Best, and Going Up. By mainstream measures he is a niche artist. Within Bitcoin circles the albums have developed a devoted following. Sound money has a soundtrack now. Apparently it needed one.
What this actually means
Put these people in a room together and they would argue. Saifedean Ammous and Jack Dorsey disagree about altcoins. Max Keiser and Michael Saylor have had public disputes. Caitlin Long built a bank precisely because she distrusts the existing banking infrastructure that other people on this list made their careers inside. Gavin Andresen was effectively exiled from the project he helped build.
And yet here they all are.
An Austrian economist who grew up watching Lebanon’s currency fail. A game developer who gave away millions in Bitcoin when it was worth cents. A Princeton computer scientist who handed Satoshi’s keys to the world. A ranch-raised Wyoming senator who bought Bitcoin at a kitchen table at Christmas. A Polish immigrant who became an Emmy-winning journalist and found the root of everything she had been investigating. A Harvard-educated Olympic rower who looked at the system that rewarded him and decided it was still broken. A Wall Street veteran who tried to fund a scholarship for female engineers and discovered a law she had to change herself. A Wu-Tang rapper who understood permanence and scarcity from a different direction entirely.
These people agree on almost nothing else.
What they agree on is this: money is the operating system of civilization, and the current one has a flaw. The flaw is that it can be debased at will by whoever controls it. And there is now, for the first time in history, an alternative that cannot.
Bitcoin didn’t find a type. It found a truth. And people keep arriving at it from every direction imaginable.
That is either the most remarkable thing about Bitcoin or the most important thing about it. Probably both.
Your business, your Bitcoin.
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