In the winter of 2013, executives from one of the largest banks in the United States, Wells Fargo, traveled from San Francisco to New York for a meeting at the headquarters of one of America's largest investment funds, Fortress Investment Group. The meeting was to be the beginning of a collaboration between the two institutions to create the country's first legally regulated bitcoin exchange. The meeting on the 47th floor of Fortress' Manhattan headquarters was initiated by its vice chairman, Pete Briger. His fascination with bitcoin began less than a year earlier, in January 2013, during one of the business and recreational ski trips to the Canadian Rockies organized by Fortress. Bridger invited several other financiers and entrepreneurs to a hotel owned by a New York fund. Among them was a well-known Argentine businessman, Wences Cesares - by then an expert and advocate of bitcoin technology, and since March 2014, the founder and CEO of the online bitcoin wallet, Xapo. While skiing, Cesares told Briger about his fascination with bitcoin. At the time, it was still a very niche technology, known primarily in computer fascination circles. On a relatively wider scale, it was recognized only as the currency of the black market online bazaar Silk Road. Cesares explained to Briger that Bitcoin is actually something much bigger - a technology with enormous potential and a wide range of applications, critically also for the banking sector. You can call someone living in Jakarta using Skype," Cesares recounted. "You can see and hear them - all through a synchronous Internet connection. Real magic, it's just amazing. But when you want to send them one cent in a similar way, it turns out to be impossible. It's ridiculous," he says. Sending one cent should be much simpler than exchanging audio-video messages." Briger's initial attitude was somewhat skeptical. His experience in the investment industry had developed a sense of distrust and inquisitiveness. But that same experience also taught him to see all sorts of dysfunctional systems, and the longer he thought about it, the more clearly he saw them in modern banking systems. Bitcoin, in turn, began to appear to him as a potential remedy for this type of situation. Back at the ski resort, Pete contacted one of his most trusted deputies at Fortress, Bill Tanona, by email, asking what he knew about Bitcoin. Upon returning to San Francisco, Pete opened his own account on the Mt.Gox exchange, and there he quickly cashed in the equivalent of $100,000 in his own bitcoins. Back at the company, meanwhile, he had regular conversations with Tanona and several other associates about how Fortress Investment Group could also get involved in this young, emerging market. Even before the summer of 2013, Briger had invited his old Princeton University colleague and associate from his time at Goldman Sachs, Dan Morehead, to join him. The man, given his own office in a skyscraper occupied by Fortress in downtown San Francisco, was to help the firm scout out potential investment opportunities related to cryptocurrency. He himself soon also recruited a professional team of traders whose job it was to buy up sizable sums of bitcoin for an investment fund he hoped to set up. It would make bitcoin much more accessible to significant investors as well. Briger quickly realized that gaining trust in such a controversial new asset was not going to be an easy task. He did manage to get the first meeting with Wells Fargo executives in the summer of 2013, but the timing of the meeting determined only one kind of reaction to the bank's suggested proposal for cooperation in this field - refusal. The fact was that less than a few months earlier federal agents had seized accounts managed by Wells Fargo and belonging to the largest bitcoin exchange at the time, Mt. Gox. A report by law enforcement officials to the U.S. Senate in the fall of the same year - in which they pointed out, among other things, that bitcoin can be both a valid and useful technology that can be successfully used for legitimate purposes - made the bank again decide to look at cryptocurrency with a slightly kinder eye. Its representatives once again contacted Briger expressing their willingness to resume talks about working with Fortress on Bitcoin. The talks took place this winter on the 47th floor of Fortress' Manhattan headquarters. Briger explained to the arriving delegation what
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