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Bitcoin culture, by nature, is anarchical and chaotic. It has to be, given the nature of Bitcoin itself and the people who adopted it: free-market libertarians who’ve gone all in on turning computer code into a form of money divorced from central banks, government intervention, and traceability. In short, it’s the exact opposite culture of Washington, DC, home of the federal government, where everyone agrees that the American dollar exists and is worth X amount because the government says so.
So it was a bizarre shock to K Street, the corporate lobbying heart of the nation’s capital, when it was announced that Pubkey, a Bitcoin-themed dive bar from New York City, would open its second location in downtown DC — smack dab in expense-card restaurant territory. And that’s to say nothing of the local city news sites. “Raise your hand if you plan to never set foot in there,” wrote a commenter on PoPville, a popular Washington blog that chronicles local news and had broken the news of Pubkey’s opening.
“Our top priority is trying to figure out how to soften that [hostility],” Thomas Pacchia, the founder of Pubkey’s New York City location, told me. To hear Pacchia put it, Pubkey DC — located strategically in the heart of DC’s lobbying neighborhood and close enough to Capitol Hill — was going to be a vessel for the Bitcoin community’s political aspirations and influence. But rather than dump money into endless lobbying against the interests of much larger crypto behemoths (and to say nothing of traditional financial institutions), Pubkey was going to do it through soft power. Instead of policy white papers and government affairs work, they were going to invite people — Republican, Democrat, important people, not-important people — into their quirky, very nice, superchill world, full of Bitcoiners who wanted to work with the government rather than evade them at all costs.
Image: Chris Bryan
First things first: hide the wonky policy stuff behind the bar — literally.
I’d heard through the lobbyist grapevine that Pubkey would also share a lease with the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank researching the social impact of the coin. I have never seen a Washington think tank whose entrance was behind a bar. In fact, when I attended Pubkey’s VIP preview in November, I couldn’t tell that this massive bar and event space, filled with old Chesterfield sofas and layered with Armenian rugs the size of studio apartments, contained an honest-to-goodness think tank, unless you saw the glowing neon sign that said BITCOIN POLICY INSTITUTE at the very, very back of the venue.
Between me and the entrance to BPI were a hundred-plus VIP guests — elected officials, Washington power players, and staffers galore. I initially planned on taking notes of who was in attendance. I soon gave up, because there was so much other stuff to look at.
In the two hours I was at the event, I saw the following:
Two white Santas and one Black Santa
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