How Isaac Miller fought the central banks with Bitcoin and $20K

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We live in a world of billionaire Bitcoiners — where mega corporations and sovereign governments stack sats, and hyper-capitalized prop trading firms split the difference.

It’s easy, then, to feel small in the Bitcoin space. But for every story about Gigachads like Michael Saylor, there are countless untold stories about regular people who’ve reached out and touched the world through Bitcoin.

Today’s Legend, Isaac Miller, is the embodiment of the Bitcoin Everyman. A living reminder that Bitcoin is first and foremost for the individual; it all comes down to how you harness it.

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Bitcoin Legends – Isaac Miller

You probably best know Isaac from his famous video: Me reacting to Bitcoin breaking $100 in 2013.

“Right here, watching history be made. Bitcoin is now up to $111. It’s an all-time high, and it’s continuing to rise,” Miller said in April of that year, speaking directly to the camera in his hand.

“I’ve seen it break three times today, it went up to $110, and this is the highest that it’s been.” Miller spun around in his chair to fit his PC screen into the shot.

“It’s ridiculous. Last trade: 189 bitcoin for $111 apiece. That’s amazing to me. Just look at this graph, you see this graph, that’s the last three hours.”

Miller’s road to tech and Bitcoin started years earlier. He’d grown up on a small farm in Northern Michigan built by his great grandfather, where he learned to help out, even milking the goats.

Miller was homeschooled and channelled his extracurricular energy into entrepreneurship. At eight years old, he pulled a cart — “Isaac’s Lunch Wagon” — around town, selling lunches to local businesses, each one backed by mom’s cooking.

That drive morphed into learning to code as a teenager, leading Miller to launch digital media projects out of his bedroom.

His growing portfolio of web experience landed him a role as County Coordinator for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2008 — “building websites and designing graphics, organizing debates and directing television commercials, to live streaming from the campaign bus to having conversations on private jets!”

Suddenly, Miller had found himself deeply entrenched in libertarian circles and had formed connections in international tech. It was around then that a friend introduced him to Bitcoin, sometime before early 2011, when BTC had not yet reached dollar parity for the first time.

Miller apparently didn’t buy any bitcoin at that point. He showed up on Bitcointalk, two years later, ready to make a splash with a thread: “$20,000 in the bank, should I invest?”

“I have over $20,000 just sitting in an account. Would it be a good idea to invest some or all of it in bitcoin? I’m looking for any way I can to stick it to the central banking system, and if I can make a few bucks by doing it, all the better.”

In other threads, Miller expressed a desire to contribute to the Bitcoin ecosystem as best he could.

One user asked the sensible questions: How much would losing $20,000 affect you right now, and how much BTC do you own to begin with?

Miller replied: “I currently have no bitcoins, I just really started looking into bitcoin a few days ago. I’m not thinking $20,000 to start, but I’m willing to invest a chunk of it to see how it works out.”

“It looks to me like I’m already a tad too late if I was in it for the most profit, but I’m still optimistic about where bitcoin’s going. I’m only 21 so $20,0000 is quite a bit in my mind, I’m working on changing that though lol.”

Miller ended up opting to start with just $2,000 and made an account with Mt. Gox in March 2013 — about 10 months before it would collapse — when bitcoin changed hands for about $90.

He may have never spoken publicly about whether he was stung by the Mt. Gox debacle. But $2,000 worth of bitcoin bought around the time of that thread would’ve converted to 22.22 BTC — currently valued at nearly $2.5 million.

And that was just 10% of the fiat that Miller wanted to deploy as a central bank protest.

Last year, Miller recreated his famous 2013 video for an advertising campaign with Coinbase. Here they are side by side.

Over the following nine years, Miller wouldn’t post about Bitcoin. His YouTube feed mostly showcased his music — until February 2021, when bitcoin was in the midst of a monster rally to $60,000 for the first time.

In a video titled: “Did I HODL? The question on everyone’s minds,” Miller set the record straight:

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