The Bitcoin Brotherhood

“This little thing is about to make a lot of people a lot of money.”

It's midnight in New York, and I am sitting in a dimly lit bar in the Lower East Side, staring at a plate of fries. My boyfriend is visiting me in the city for a week, and we are out for a drink with one of his friends, who brought along three of his friends. While my boyfriend gets us another drink at the bar, I am still at the table, sandwiched between four men, absently trying to decide which of their conversations to enter into. The two on my right chat together in Spanish; I don’t speak Spanish, so I turn to the two on my left. They are both in their early thirties and are visiting New York from Toronto. The one furthest from me has eager eyes and distractingly white teeth. The one closest to me compulsively touches his wrist, pushing back his shirt sleeve, to make sure his oversized watch face is still exposed. I ask for the time, and hope this is enough of a signal that I want to be initiated into whatever it is they are talking about. Watchface checks his phone, giving me the answer to an entirely different question.

“It's at Stage 4-A, and the presale price is $0.00008574, which is way beyond its launch price of $0.00000575, do you wanna see it?” He glances up at me as he asks this - I don’t think he heard me ask for the time. Before I can react, a cartoon turquoise baby dinosaur appears on his iPhone screen, winking. I have interrupted a pretty serious discussion about the rising value of a memecoin named BullZilla. “This little thing is about to make a lot of people a lot of money.” The two men continue to scroll through their own portfolios of memecoins with unrelenting enthusiasm, occasionally angling their phones toward me as they wait for my dependable murmur of approval. “I could press sell right now, and she would make me $5000,” says the whiter-toothed of the pair, as a cartoon Japanese schoolgirl twirls across his screen.

It turns out these two men don’t really know each other. They met for the first time tonight, after months of interacting on a Telegram channel that offers its members advice on cryptocurrency trading. They explain to me that there are thousands of these channels engaging thousands of people with the latest news and analysis of crypto. “There are a lot of freaks on there,” explains watchface, “and a lot of people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about,” whiteteeth adds. 

They each made enough money through cryptocurrency to retire a few years ago. Now they exclusively trade memecoins - “just for fun” -  and spend their weekends in New York City, eating steak frites and drinking martinis, while explaining to young women like me how they found both fortune and friendship online, through a digital, decentralised, and densely encrypted currency.

Men are more than twice as likely as women to say that they own or trade crypto, according to an NBC News poll done in 2025. When the same poll asked young men aged 18 to 29 what motivated them to use cryptocurrency, the third most common answer was that they wanted to “be part of the crypto community,” behind the first, a perceived ease of getting rich quickly, and the second, that crypto is "easier to get into than other ways to invest." 

Before meeting watchface and whiteteeth, this community was completely unknown to me. The circles I move in are made up almost exclusively of women, along with a handful of men whose heterosexuality is frequently questioned by those encountering them for the first time. My communities are formed around happy hours in Brooklyn, donation-based yoga classes, and a shared anxiety that AI is going to reduce the already dwindling demand for our freelance, creative jobs. Therefore, I thought that the odds of me crossing paths with two members of the crypto community, who I assumed rarely left Manhattan, were keen looksmaxxers, and probably had shares in OpenAI, were pretty low.

That week at university, I'd been absorbing a now-familiar narrative: that men are lonelier than ever, angrier than ever, and more susceptible than ever to radicalisation - see Louis Theroux's newest documentary on the manosphere. So when I found myself at a bar, chatting with two young men who seemed the exact demographic of the lonely, angry, radicalised man I had been reading about, I was genuinely curious about them. What I hadn't expected was for our conversation to turn to friendship. These men found a genuine human connection within an online community I had assumed was used only to get rich. 

My conversations that night had left me curious about an online network that I knew existed but had never thought to look at closely. I left the bar with more questions than answers. Were men lonely, or has the way men make friends simply changed? Why does male friendship so often need to justify itself through productivity? Is bonding over a market trend just a socially acceptable way to express emotion? Is it gay if your friendship doesn't turn a profit?

—  

"In crypto communities, you'll find the purest form of trust."

In an attempt to answer some of these questions, I began to interview other men involved in cryptocurrency communities. Myke is 39, from Southeast Asia, and one of four members of the Anti Shit Coin Club, a close-knit group of men who have never met in real life but have communicated every day on Telegram for two years, buying, selling, and creating meme coins together. 

I met Mark next. He joined the Telegram call a few moments after Myke, explaining that the other two couldn't make it - "Ghost is recovering from a cataract operation," and he wasn't sure about Andy. Mark is 56, originally from the US, now based in Mexico City, where he also works as a street photographer.

"The bottom line is I have two realities in my life," began Mark. "I have a degen reality, I play in this world, which is a very decentralised, crazy world. It's ruthless, but you can also make a lot of money very fast." Mark didn't tell me what degen meant; I had to Google it. Degen is short for degenerate, a slang term used in cryptocurrency to describe people who engage in highly speculative trading. He continued, "Then we have our - we say 'normie' - life. I'm a photographer, a very passionate photographer, actually."

Myke has been involved in cryptocurrency for almost a decade. "I actually didn't make money in the first few days that I was trading, but it made me really excited about it. Now and then, people are making like 100 or 500 million dollars." Maybe this was true in the early days of meme coins, when a lucky few turned hundreds of dollars into millions. But the odds have narrowed considerably since then. In 2025, 95% of newly launched memecoins were classified as scams or failures, and between 2023 and 2025, approximately 97% of memecoins lost more than 90% of their value within six months. "I say you can't be in another industry where that can happen, except for casinos," continued Myke. It was hard to tell whether this was a fact he was excited or scared by.

Myke and Mark met at the bottom of a 'rug pull' - a scam where the creator of a meme coin drives up its value through hype and manufactured demand within Telegram groups, then vanishes overnight, selling all at once, leaving the tokens worthless and the investors broke.

"They were getting all excited on a video call just like this, basically just trying to drive up the price of the meme coin," Mark explained. "I think it was called Sender, and on the call, everyone was just chanting 'SENDER, SENDER' - it was almost like performance art. It pumped to like $1 million, and people made a lot of money, but Myke and I never sold, and then we realised everyone had disappeared from the call. So that's how we met."

After falling victim to the same scam, Mark and Myke formed a close bond. "I don't know who reached out first," said Mark, "but one of us said, 'What the fuck happened?' And then we just started talking and getting to know each other. And that was the start of what I would say is a beautiful friendship, actually." 

It was hard to evaluate just how close the two men were. They had never met - although Mark was excited at the possibility - and had only seen each other's faces for the first time a few weeks before, on a video call with Andy and Ghost. "Did everyone look as you expected?" I asked. "Yes," Myke said, "except Andy - he's kind of chubby."

I thought back to the curiosity I had felt when watchface and whiteteeth first described their friendship, what had started online had grown into something in real life. Their lives were no longer split into two realities; they liked the normie versions of each other just as much as the degen personas they'd first encountered. Mark and Myke were different - their normie lives were still very much separate, a fact Myke saw as beneficial to the strength of their relationship. "Trust is distilled to its purest form," Myke explained, "when you remove the body and physical contact."

When I asked what they liked so much about each other, Mark said, “Myke is an amazing organiser, a very analytical person, cool-headed, and a great leader.” Myke said that he and Mark were friends because Mark hadn't fucked up yet. "That's the difference between this and other relationships in real life," Myke continued. "With crypto relationships, you can only fuck up once."

—

“You can lose money very easily together; that creates a trauma bond.”

Sam is from the US and is in his early forties. He started trading stocks online in 2016 and bought Ethereum - a kind of cryptocurrency - later that year. He has released multiple meme coins and made millions of dollars online, using Telegram every day to generate interest for potential buyers. “The maximum number of groups you can have on Telegram is 3000, and I’m always having to delete some to make room,” he explains. 

The way Sam understands it, friendship is not a byproduct of cryptocurrency, but part of a wider strategy.  “You have friends and family groups they’re called, full of high liquid people, like the two guys you were talking to,” explains Sam, referring to Mark and Myke. “They will get a consensus with each other over what they’re going to buy. That’s where I think the camaraderie or whatever comes from.” It seems that these friendships are all, at some level, part of a wider set of money-making tactics. Genuine or not, these communities are essential to the structure of cryptocurrency because they offer traders a form of insurance against losses or scams - the kind of insurance I receive from my bank. Within these intimate groups, members share their knowledge to maximise their investments, often pooling their funds. I’m not completely sure if belonging to a crypto community definitely increases your chances of making money, but I am sure that a community would provide the necessary reassurance if you lost money; at least you lost it together. 

In crypto communities, shared losses have a language of their own. Sam begins to get me up to speed with the unfamiliar terminology. "In the trenches with my brothers, my ancestors, or whatever," he tells me, is a phrase used to describe losing large sums of money, alongside your friends, through crypto. So, these friendships are not just tactical; they are also toxic, and reinforced with a lexicon more suited to soldiers at war than men exchanging monetised memes behind a screen. I’m sure I don’t sound particularly surprised when I ask Sam to expand on the harmfulness of this online space. “The manosphere, or like, the Andrew Tate and all that shit, that's made it pretty toxic,” he said. 

In 2018, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency called "Red Pill" was launched. The name comes from incel communities online, who believe they have uncovered hidden truths about society - among them, that feminists want all men castrated. “Red pill” was launched to generate support for the RedPill influencers who were banned from spreading hate on social media platforms like YouTube. In reaction to this ban, incel influencers created an internal economy using crypto, “that will reward those who spread the word about our mission and contribute to it.” 

Towards the end of our conversation, Sam revealed that not even he was immune, despite his cynicism, to the possibilities of finding friendship within cryptocurrency. “It's very bro-y, but then you spend a lot of time with these people and get closer, so you know all their personal stories, that's interesting and endearing.” He went on to tell me that he grew close with a man from the Netherlands who even visited him in New York. “I took him to my favourite spots. I think we went to the strip club.” 

No matter how endearing these friendships, the personal and the profitable are always entwined. “When the market's very good and more people are making money, it's like euphoria,” Sam explained, “people can buy their first homes, or buy their first Lambo or something.” I guess something was charming about this, but I couldn’t help thinking about what happens when the market is bad. Myke’s reminder popped into my head. “You can only fuck up once.”

—

“Guys sit side-by-side watching sports, or cars, or women. Women sit facing each other.” 

At least this is what Jane Fonda tells Alex Cooper on an episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast earlier this year. I don’t listen to this podcast often, despite being its target demographic. But when I do, I secretly lavish in the unnuanced approach Cooper and her guests take to analysing gender dynamics and the experience of young women today - Stopped having sex with your boyfriend? He’s gay. Can men and women be just friends? No. Want to spice things up in the bedroom? Pegging could be fun.

I have never taken any of Cooper’s analyses of modern life totally seriously, but, after spending the week interviewing men involved in cryptocurrency communities, Jane Fonda’s statement stuck with me. My interviews with Mark, Myke, and Sam confirmed what Fonda has known all along - that men build friendships with one another through shared activities - including, but not limited to, watching sports, cars, or women - whereas women feel connected to each other through emotionally vulnerable conversations. 

When my younger brother was 13, our mum would tolerate him spending hours playing Grand Theft Auto because, if he didn’t, he’d complain of being isolated from his high-school group of friends who all logged on to their Playstations after school and played together. When I was 13, I would go to my best friend's house, and we would read aloud selected portions of our journals to make sure we knew every inch of each other. My experience of friendship with other women has always relied on emotional vulnerability as a method of initiating closeness. For my brother, his chosen method of closeness was playing video games; emotional vulnerability was expressed most strongly in the shouts that echoed through our house as he fought alongside his friends in virtual worlds. Despite our differing methods, the outcome has remained the same: a large and loving network of friends.

When I began transcribing my interviews with Mark, Myke, and Sam, it became clear that their method of forming friendships is the same as my brother and his friends'. They participate in the same action, developing a closeness through the decisions they make together: what was once playing video games is now trading cryptocurrency. The kinds of friendships that are produced as part of this method are, however, radically different.

Anonymity used to be one of the biggest threats we thought we faced online, but for some in the crypto community, it is anonymity that gives their friendship strength. Their connection is not diluted through excess knowledge of each other’s lives, but rather, concentrated; trust is purified when you have one shared goal and equal responsibility to make it happen. But when trust is built on one source alone, these friendships are extremely fragile and impossible to rebuild once damaged. It is hard to imagine how a friendship built through cryptocurrency could provide support in bad times as well as good; however, these men have minimised the threat of anonymity and instead used it to their advantage.

Yet even Myke, who first explained to me the purity of trust in crypto communities, cannot proceed without a note of caution.“Kudos to anyone in a group right now,” Myke said at the end of our call, “they haven’t fucked up yet.”