- Dave Portnoy met with the Winklevoss twins following his invitation last week
- The pair tried to help the Barstool Sports founder understand Bitcoin and buy it
- Portnoy ended by saying that he still has “no idea what Bitcoin is”
Dave Portnoy met with the Winklevoss twins this week following an invitation thrown down by the Barstool Sports founder, who asked for their assistance in buying Bitcoin and trying to understand it. Edited highlights of the half hour encounter have since been published on Twitter, and we present the most important things we learned from the encounter.
I Am Now the Baron of Bitcoin Featuring The Winklevoss Twins @tylerwinklevoss @winklevoss pic.twitter.com/0cGxEGZCs5
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) August 13, 2020
Dave Portnoy has a nice house
The Barstool Sports founder’s net worth is $200 million, so yeah, he is going to have a nice house.
The Winklevoss twins did an…okay job of explaining Bitcoin
Dave Portnoy has gone on record to say that he doesn’t understand Bitcoin, and the Winklevoss twins did a reasonable job of explaining it. Fittingly they used a sports example, saying that Bitcoin miners were the referees of the Bitcoin blockchain to make sure that things were being done correctly and according to the rules.
They also compared Bitcoin mining to solving a Rubik’s cube puzzle which was a nice analogy, but Portnoy still seemed a little lost when they tried to explain Bitcoin as “internet gold”.
A Dave Portnoy coin might be upon us soon
Portnoy explained how he had been told that he could “make a Dave Portnoy coin, pump it, dump it…and I could make a shit ton.” The Winklevoss twins tried to discourage the pumping and dumping of the coin, but they did promise to put Portnoy in touch with someone who could make a coin for him. So there’s that to look forward to.
Elon Musk is going to mine gold on asteroids in space
This was a theory introduced by the Winklevoss twins during their meeting, which left Portnoy naturally bemused, saying that he felt like he was “losing my mind talking about this.” Portnoy has since challenged the Tesla founder on Twitter to explain if he plans to do this:
Hey @elonmusk any comment on your plans to harvest gold from outer space and make it rain down on earth and make it as plentiful as sand? I’ll hang up and listen. #Bitcoin
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) August 13, 2020
Dave Portnoy is pretty free with his money
Anyone who has watched clips of him trading on Twitter knows that Dave Portnoy bets big, so when he casually announced he had $250,000 to spend on Bitcoin it didn’t come as much of a surprise to those who know of his antics. To put this in perspective though, the average U.S. house price is just shy of that figure at $247,000. So Dave just bet your house on crypto.
Portnoy bought BTC and LINK
Portnoy seemed to know about Chainlink and ended up buying $50k worth after spending the other $200k on Bitcoin. As we don’t know when the video was recorded we can’t be sure what price he bought in at, but the news will be a boost for LINK – as if it needed it.
The $3,725 exchange fees were glossed over
Gemini’s fees are pretty high, with a 0.5% “convenience fee” plus a variable transaction fee depending on the value of the trade. So for his $250,000 trades, Portnoy incurred fees of $3,725, meaning he actually received $246,275 worth of crypto. Plus he will incur similar fees, or perhaps much more, when it comes time to sell. The Winklevoss twins neglected to mention this.
All Three Liked The Social Network
Hardly news, but all three agreed that The Social Network was a good film, with the twins saying that the representation of events was “pretty accurate”. They also “don’t really think about” Mark Zuckerberg, apparently, although their body language suggested otherwise.
A Success Wrapped up in a Failure?
While the upshot of the entire awkward exchange is that Portnoy is now a Bitcoin owner (again), and he has been tweeting about Bitcoin to his followers ever since the meeting. However, despite their efforts, it seems that the Winklevoss twins failed in their goal of helping Portnoy understand the cryptocurrency, given his parting words to his cameraman:
I literally have no idea what Bitcoin is […] the things they were saying at times I thought were jokes.
Sometimes the line between success and failure is so thin as to be indistinguishable.
