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Ep. 38 — A father’s gift and a brother’s illness sets a young boy on track to becoming a cryptocurrency pioneer / Joey Krug, Co-CIO, Pantera Capital, Core Dev, Augur. When Joey Krug was 10 years old, his dad bought him an old Apple computer on eBay. Although neither realized it at the time, it would prove to be a timely gift. Around that same time, Krug's brother became really sick with a rare disease affecting only 600 people in the world. Krug quit school to be there for his brother during his year-long hospitalization, homeschooled himself and learned programming to help him cope with the family crisis. Krug’s brother thankfully recovered and Krug pretty much forgot about programming till five years later when he discovered Bitcoin. His exploration of bitcoin and cryptocurrency eventually led Joey Krug to pioneer Augur, a cryptocurrency online gaming platform. The so-called "prediction markets" running on Augur have ranged from betting on benign future events — such as sports, weather, and political outcomes to a few shock-value ones — including so-called “assassination markets,” where people could in theory bet on celebrity killings of politicians and other famous people or predict the number of people killed in a terrorist attack. Krug, who is also the Co-CIO of Pantera Capital, a blockchain and crypto investment fund, believes the decentralized, peer-to-peer betting exchanges like Augur will reduce many of the problems associated with traditional online gambling platforms and bring efficiency, transparency, and integrity to the opaque gaming industry. Kruger is placing a big bet on the future of global online gambling, expected by some estimates to be worth more than $100 billion by 2025. In this in-depth interview, Krug also looks at the roadblocks in cryptocurrency going mainstream and how the industry is likely to evolve in the next few years. Read the Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: When Joey Krug was 10 years old, his dad bought him an old Apple computer on eBay. Although neither realized it at the time, it would prove to be a timely gift. Krug's brother did recover, and Krug pretty much forgot about programming until he was 15 years old when he discovered Bitcoin. Hello, everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. His exploration of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency led Joey Krug to develop Augur, a decentralized cryptocurrency gaming platform. Prediction markets like Auger can range from the benign, such as betting on sports, weather, and politics, to the sinister, including so-called assassination markets where people bet on celebrity killings of politicians and other famous people or predict the number of people killed in a terrorist attack. Joining me now to discuss how prediction markets work and where the cryptocurrency industry and markets are headed is Joey Krug. He's the co-CIO at Pantera Capital, one of the largest blockchain-focused investment firms. Krug also is co-founder of the Forecast Foundation, which developed Augur. Joey, welcome to the podcast. Joey Krug: Thanks for having me. Chitra Ragavan: Describe the computer that your dad gave you when you were 10 and what it was like to first start using it and to learn to program with it. Joey Krug: Yeah. My dad bought me an old Apple IIGS. I think it was one of the nicer models of the Apple II, but of course he bought it decades later, so it was pretty cheap on eBay. There were kind of a few things you could do. You could sort of program in the command line using an Applesoft BASIC, which is sort of a language that I think initially Wozniak did a lot of work on. Steve Wozniak built that. There wasn't a whole lot you could do with it. You could write fairly simple programs, you could write programs that would make small games like tech space games,