Iconic Bitcoin Hackerspace Closes Downtown Location After 12 Years Due to Zoning Changes

DCTRL Vancouver: Iconic Bitcoin Hackerspace Closes Downtown Location After 12 Years Due to Zoning Changes

DCTRL, a Bitcoin hub and hacker space based in Canada’s fair-weather city of Vancouver, announced the sunset from its downtown basement, iconic among early adopters for its DIY mindset and hardware hacker culture. The community will migrate to a new location in the coming weeks and update the hub vision. Vancouver’s Bitcoin community is credited with creating the first Bitcoin ATM in history, with DCTRL specifically hosting a variety of renowned figures who, over the years, have given this industry much of its cultural and innovative flair.

Visited by some of the most influential people in the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry over its 12 years of existence, DCTRL is far from a hub of the Canadian Bitcoin and crypto scene. As active members prepare to relocate due to a change in zoning laws, plans to relaunch in a new location are underway, as active members consolidate historic moments, relationships, and lessons learned during the longest running Bitcoin hackspace experiment in the young industry’s history.

It all started at Waves Cafe on Howe Street in Vancouver. The Bitcoiniacs, a group of four OGs who operated a Bitcoin brokerage at the time – still active to this day – decided it was time to get the bots involved. So they installed an ATM to sell bitcoin to the public, rallied Vancouver’s burgeoning local tech, finance and crypto scene, and threw a historic launch party.

“The world’s first Bitcoin ATM was a major event,” said Freddie Heartline, Bitcoin enthusiast and co-founding member of hacker space DCTRL. In an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Heartline recalled the event saying, “Oh man, the vibe was amazing. It was literally like a really good rave. But it was smarter. Way smarter. That’s how it all happened, actually,” referring to the creation of DCTRL.

The timing for the Bitcoin ATM event was perfect, it was October 2013 and bitcoin had just gone from a few dollars to almost 150, consolidated for a few weeks around 100 and was about to take a chance at 1000 coin. Energy in the Bitcoin community in the form of electricity, it was the end of the longest bear market in Bitcoin history, in a way this price rise was proof that Bitcoin was here to stay.

As a result, the launch of the first Bitcoin ATM made national and international news. The idea of ​​a Bitcoin ATM being operational has been seen as a historic milestone in the adoption of Bitcoin as a currency.

Tens of thousands of Canadian dollars worth of bitcoin were sold that day and over the coming weeks, likely creating a few millionaires over the years, spawning ATM copycat projects and even a handful of Bitcoin ATM manufacturing companies. It also inspired the creation of the hacker space DCTRL, then called “Decentral Vancouver.”

Cameron Gray, another Bitcoin enthusiast who was volunteering for the Bitcoiniacs event and a friend of Heartline, was the one who came up with the idea. “Cam was absolutely a vital part of the creation of Decentral.” Heartline recalls: “He literally turned to me one day – while operating the Bitcoin ATM at Waves – after I complained about the lighting in the cafe – and said ‘we should open up a space’. And that was it. »

Soon they had found a basement in downtown Vancouver, filthy, damp, but comfortable. Over the years, this place has become a hub for engineers, founders, crypto enthusiasts, and ultimately Bitcoin legends. The decor improved, the leaks were plugged, and the walls were decorated with Bitcoin art. The empty spaces are filled with hardware of all kinds, modified to function or interact in some way with the orange piece.

Heartline and Gray were launching a lifestyle project of sorts, and although Bitcoin was doing well above $1,000, it would soon return to $300, another bear market, which had significant consequences for the industry. Meanwhile, DCTRL’s rent bills needed to be paid somehow, and so Heartline moved in. Not in the basement, but on the roof. In order to keep the lights on during this bear market, he literally set up a tent. It’s not a bad setup either if you look at it.

DCTRL started hosting meetups, the Vancouver Startup Weekend community caught wind of it, and a man known as Greg started visiting the hub. Soon, Startup Weekend events were also held at DCTRL, attracting the local tech startup scene. Soon after, even Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum and former editor of Bitcoin Magazine, showed up.

Greg had another important contribution to DCTRL; he made a donation that created a symbol for the local community. He donated $500 to the space on one condition: “It has to be used for something creative…” Heartline recalls, “So I found a Pepsi machine on Craigslist. Greg even helped us move the thing into a pickup truck. Him, me, Cam and Mike Olaff moved the incredibly heavy, awkward fucking thing up the stairs – lol, I almost killed Cam.” The Pepsi machine would soon be reverse engineered, hacked, and renamed Pepsi, for obvious Bitcoin reasons.

In the video above, you can see Greg making an on-chain transaction with the pop machine, milliseconds later leaving him a soda on Q. The satisfying sound of Bitcoin being used as money for life’s little pleasures has become a DCTRL staple. A digital version of the Bepsi was eventually made, which fans around the world used to make donations. There have been many iterations of the underlying software over time, built into the Cold War pop machine with a Raspberry Pi and some hacker ingenuity. A decade later, even Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim came to pay homage to this staple of Vancouver hacker culture, this time buying a soda from Bepsi with a flash payment.

Today, Bepsi supports virtually every Bitcoin protocol, a testing ground for the cutting edge of Bitcoin technology, including protocols such as Taproot Assets, Spark, and Arcade OS. “We even issued our own Bepsi token. One Bepsi is equal to one soda from the Bepsi machine… it’s like a stable coin… tied to the price of the can of pop.” Heartline said. The Bepsi, which is somewhat inspired by the Bitcoin ATM, has also inspired imitators, such as the 21up ATM housed in a nearby Blockchain lab known as MintGreen. To date, funds raised by the Bepsi machine have been used to support the operation of the hacker space and cover costs, thus forming the cornerstone of the community. Control Bepsi’s underlying wallets and technology stack to rank among the most active members and hosts.

Visited by legends

Over the years, big names in the industry have visited or interacted with DCTRL in one way or another. Vitalik Buterin personally visited the space and spent time there in the early days of Ethereum, as demonstrated by this photograph hanging on their wall, featuring Gray, Heartline, Vitalik, and another active member named Kyle.

The founders of CaVirtex, the first Canadian Bitcoin exchange, were also photographed there. This brand is little known now because it was acquired by Kraken years later, but it had a profound influence on the Canadian Bitcoin scene, selling the coin to Canadians before the first bull market, which peaked at $30 per coin. Without this exchange, many of the major Canadian Bitcoiners may not have profited.

Virtually, Bitcoin celebrities have also attended DCTRL events over the years, answering questions from the local crowd, such as Roger Ver, pre-fork wars, Andreas Antonopoulos and Willy Woo. Erik Vorhees, who rose to fame in Bitcoin for creating the first major instant crypto-to-crypto exchange called ShapeShift, is seen in this video having a fireside chat at DCTRL during a local meetup.

Even a famous scammer visited the hub, a man who was a regular on the Canadian Bitcoin scene back in 2014 and remains one of the unsolved mysteries of crypto crime to this day, Gerald Cotten of QuadrigaCX. Cotten, who I personally met several times in Toronto at the time, was a charming and talkative entrepreneur in the scene at the time, before his checkered business history came to light and the stock exchange collapsed, leaving millions of dollars of user funds unpaid. Cotten reportedly died suddenly and mysteriously in India just before the exchange collapsed, taking the cryptographic keys with him, but many who were personally affected by this collapse of the centralized exchange are skeptical of this story.

Further evidence of DCTRL as a microcosm of the industry as a whole was seen years later, during the fork wars, as Gray, the other main co-founder of the hub, took the “big block” side of the debate, leading to intense debates and ultimately a falling out with the local community and the broader Bitcoin scene. Gray, nonetheless, is highly respected and valued by active DCTRL members for his contributions to the DCTRL social scene, which would inevitably suffer from the same splits and tensions that the Bitcoin protocol went through back in the day.

During these trying times, DCTRL has served as a forum and space for debate on these topics, even hosting Peter Rizun of alternative implementation Bitcoin Unlimited – a big blocker – who debated Taylor, seen on the right in the photo below.

Overall, DCTRL has enjoyed over 12 years of continuous operation, has hundreds of events hosted, over 1,500 registered community members, and 69 recorded conferences posted on YouTube, which have touched many elements of the Bitcoin and crypto industry. Throughout this time the center has been run entirely by volunteers and supported by donations from the public and, of course, Bepsi.

As the DCTRL location is zoned by the city government and a new building will be constructed in its place, active DCTRL members and hosts have begun planning a transition to a new location, alongside an updated branding and

According to DJ, one of the active members who prefers to remain pseudonymous, the hub has seen record attendance in recent months. And even though the place will change, its future is more promising than ever. Those interested in being part of DCTRL’s future can learn more at www.DCTRL.wtf.

This article DCTRL Vancouver: Iconic Bitcoin Hackerspace Closes Downtown Location After 12 Years Due to Zoning Changes first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.