Tim Draper, one of the most known Silicon Valley venture capitalists, has played a crucial role in the Draper VC dynasty. Not only because he was an early investor in tech firms like Tesla or Skype but also because he made a turning point in the Draper family’s path to Bitcoin (BTC).
In the latest episode of Cointelegraph’s Crypto Stories, Draper tells the story of how the Draper dynasty became bullish on Bitcoin, the broader crypto market and blockchain technology.
The Draper family crypto story started years ago when Tim Draper grew interested in ways to exchange virtual goods against fiat currency and vice versa.
“I met this great guy from Korea, and he said that he had to buy his son a sword, and it was for the son's birthday, and it was $40,” Draper reminisced about his early crypto thoughts. The sword turned out to be not a real sword but a virtual one, which made Draper think about virtual stores of value versus traditional money. He said:
After Bitcoin came along in 2009, Draper was already looking for something like BTC cryptocurrency and he started accumulating BTC soon. “It was the universal currency, it was the currency for our entire earth,” he said.
Even after losing 40,000 Bitcoin to the collapsed exchange Mt. Gox back in 2011, Draper didn’t lose faith in Satoshi Nakamoto’s cryptocurrency. He continued buying Bitcoin, bagging 30,000 BTC from a state auction of bitcoins seized from Silk Road in 2014.
Related: Tim Draper recommends founders hold ’at least’ two payrolls ‘worth of cash’ in crypto
Tim Draper’s passion about cryptocurrency was naturally passed on to his sons, Adam and Billy Draper. A fourth-generation venture capitalist, Adam Draper in 2012 founded Boost VC, an early stage venture capital firm
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