Why Bitcoin, Not Crypto: Lessons from 2017 | BTC Prague 2025 Panel

On the BTC Prague stage, four Bitcoiners looked back at 2017 — the ICOs, the scams, the shitcoin detours — and asked the harder question: why did so many smart people get it wrong, and how do we make sure the next wave doesn’t repeat the same mistakes?

Where We All Started

My name is Kud Swan — international village idiot, podcaster, and rockstar according to some. My defining memory from 2017? I was at a blockchain conference party in Stockholm the night Richard Hart told me he wanted Lambos, wanted to scam people — and then he did. An honest scammer, I suppose. Bless his heart.

Prince Phillip, CSO at Jan3, working with Samson Mow on Bitcoin adoption at the nation-state level, had a different kind of 2017 story. He got into Bitcoin that year — but also got distracted by ICOs, fell for the traps, and yes, bought Bitconnect. His one defense: he never bought XRP. Ever.

Richard Bow, partner at CES Capital running BTC Alpha — a hedge fund denominated in Bitcoin targeting 5–10% returns — started 2017 as a trader at an investment bank. He actually told his graduate to buy everyone on the desk one Bitcoin at $1,000. He went on sabbatical. Came back in September. Bitcoin was at $3,000. “Herman, did you buy that Bitcoin?” “Oh, I thought you were joking.” He ended up buying Litecoin. And yes, at one point, XRP.

Neil Jacobs, co-founder of FOMO 21 and a Bitcoin marketer who’s shipped apparel to over 70 countries, quietly ran a paid trading group in 2017 — 0.1 Bitcoin per month. That would be $10,000 today. At the time, a couple hundred bucks. Embarrassing in hindsight, but he wouldn’t be here without going through those mistakes.

Why We Fell for It

What protected me from the shitcoin rabbit hole was that what caught my interest wasn’t the money — it was the puzzle. I grew up with a Commodore 64, wrote BASIC at age ten. Everything in computing was copyable. So when someone claimed there was a number on the internet that couldn’t be copied, that sounded as impossible as a time machine. That question obsessed me. I later figured out why it works: the sats aren’t on the computers. They’re in our heads. Bitcoin is just an agreement on a fixed set of rules — and those rules are what make scarcity real. Shitcoins are just the wheel, but hexagonal. They never made sense to me.

For Phillip, it was simpler at first: number go up. He was in traditional finance, drawn in by ICOs, distracted by the noise. It wasn’t until 2020–2021, when he read The Bitcoin Standard, that everything clicked. Bitcoin as the ultimate savings vehicle — reliable, secure, decentralized, absolutely scarce. That book was the psychological shift. Everything else is just fiat mindset with better marketing.

Richard came at it as a trader. He’d been sitting inside Nomura in Tokyo during the 2008 financial crisis, watching Lehman collapse, wondering what currency he could actually trust to preserve his savings. He’d been buying gold. Bitcoin looked like an interesting trade at first — but understanding that it’s 21 million only is what changed everything. That one fact leads you to hard money, which leads you to low time preference, which changes your life. He went from opening a spreadsheet every morning to count his net worth, to focusing entirely on what he actually wants to do.

Neil’s trap was viewing Bitcoin as technology rather than as a new monetary protocol. When you see it as tech, every new project looks like a potential 10x or 100x. And in 2017, there weren’t enough books, enough podcasts, enough clear thinking to push back against that. The “Bitcoin is MySpace” argument was everywhere. It falls on