The bitcoin trading community has been quite dispersed for years. When you have a broader crypto community that is so focused on individualism, decentralization, and anarchocapitalism — it is quite difficult to form longlasting communities that thrive.

Whalepool currently reaches thousands of individuals every day, spreading content and providing a platform for cryptocurrency traders to meet and share ideas. Our Teamspeak and Telegram are active 24/7, reflecting the buzz of the crypto markets.

The community has not always been this organized, though. Quite the opposite, it has been constantly fractured. Broadly, it’s a loose connection of people interested in tech, cryptography, trading, economics, libery — there’s so many vectors for people from different places to come together and cross paths in what is the crypto trading community.

There is a narrative, a common thread, which defines us as a community and a culture, at least that I can trace back for as long as I have been in bitcoin.

On this day marking 1 year of the community successfully staying under one umbrella without a coup, I offer to take you on a journey.

Come sit on grandpa swapman’s lap as we go from the community as it is now all the way back to the early days of bitcoin market trading communities, while reflecting on how crypto markets in general have evolved.

I’ll also be breaking down exactly what the current state of things are…is Whalepool doing well or are things looking bad?

I will also reflect on how community rules have changed, how difficult moderation and management can be given the values we hold dear, and the prospects going into the future.

History Lesson

The financial markets and crypto as an asset class are maturing more and more. Despite the ETF rejection this past month, there’s continued interest from legacy money to get involved in crypto and prospects are good.

In the coming years, options will become more liquid, more exchanges will get regulatory blessing, and the community of traders will continue to expand. Truly sovereign money — without the state, without banks — is here to stay, and we will forever be part of history.

It was one year ago today that an April Fool’s joke was played in what was then called StakePool in the year 2016. This led to a lot of underlying resentment coming out from a shaky partnership that was formed amidst tumult in the community.

What was a project grown out of a revolutionary split in the cryptocurrency trading community — led by flibbr, fyrstikken, and swapman — was experiencing another disturbance.

You see, three months before WhalePool was formed, a coup had happened on WhaleClub Teamspeak, in late December 2015. Flibbr had been ousted unceremoniously from his position as founder and administrator, by BTCVIX, Jim, and btcHelmut. The whole episode was a Machevellian shit show not worth detailing, but it involved dox, character assassination, and threats against people’s children.

This event came after the community had been used and abused by nonstop spamming of links, mod abuse, no respect of freedom of speech, and general chaos. The environment was ripe for cypherpunk revolution.

2015

This was no coincidence, because 6 months before StakePool was formed, a totally different revolution was attempted in the summer of 2015. Fyrstikken, swapman, and Adam Guerbuez had attempted to rally support around a fork of the WhaleClub Teamspeak to Bitcoin Underground Teamspeak. We were joined by only a handful of people, including pelonis and velo who are still around today.

User count had been dropping on WhaleClub and the community was lacking in proper leadership to represent the spirit of the group. Nevertheless, the environment was not quite right and the revolution in summer 2015 fizzled. The mods of WhaleClub — flibbr, BTCVIX, Jim, Helmut, WidespreadBTC, and others — had stuck together and effectively suppressed the revolution attempted by Guerbuez, fyrstikken, and myself. A few users stuck around the smaller, offshoot Teamspeak — but most stayed with WhaleClub.

The Fall of 2015 was awkward, the markets were not incredibly active, and drama was brewing as a result. The alliance formed that was holding WhaleClub together was structurally unsound, and the frustration in the community of feeling exploited, manipulated, and spammed was growing. It set the stage for the inevitable, and it was sad to see because there were great times in the earlier days of WhaleClub.

2014

A whole year before all this revolutionary activity was occurring, WhaleClub Teamspeak got started in late 2014 (almost three years ago). It branched out from a smaller group of Google Hangouts — with flibbr, Jim, and others —combined with Trollbox (BTC-E) and IRC ( #coinmarkets, #bitcoinmarkets, #bitcoin-otc) traders. It was an interesting mix, and the community was quite successful in getting started in late 2014.

2014 was a paramount year in Bitcoin. We had already hit above $1,000 per coin in price, and suddenly a massive wave of investment was being made in exchanges, financial services, and all kinds of other bitcoin-based businesses. In 2013, the only derivatives we had were really sloppy illiquid contracts offered by ICBIT and a shady Romanian (love ya Mirceau). By late 2014, a liquid futures book was trading on OKCoin, margin trading was big on Bitfinex, and plenty of other exciting projects were under way. We finally had margin products that allowed traders to effectively hedge the fiat value of their stacks (which was a major game changer) and also allowed for extremely profitable speculative trading at high leverage.

2013

Back in 2013, the game was completely different. Bitcoin was barely above $10. The media was still calling it worthless tulip mania back then, before understanding the technology. Most of us traders were either on BTC-e trollbox shitposting with fontas as he regaled us with tales of coke and whores, or passing around rumours on Freenode about MtGOX adding Litecoin. However, a clear community identity was emerging. Reddit’s r/bitcoinmarkets was becoming civilized and active. Bitcointalk threads were becoming more and more trading based — in terms of speculating using technical analysis, arbitraging, and various risk management tools.

As traders, we were and are a unique subset of the niche of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. We don’t just fit the characteristics of your average bitcoin evangelist cypherpunk, we are a special group that is able to harness the right dose of idealism for bitcoin, while being realistic and ruthless on market realities of altcoins and trading bitcoin. Many in the community did really well as price was pumping through 2013 — and more respectable exchanges like BitStamp and Bitfinex were competing with the Gox monopoly. It’s also not unusual for people who discovered bitcoin in 2013 to say they bought their first coins with Coinbase.

2012

Before this, in 2012, localbitcoins was becoming a big thing. Traders on Stamp, Bitcoinica and Gox were making large premiums by having liquid access to growing spot markets and profiting off the FOMO of average Joe on LBC. It was an exciting time — if you wanted to buy bitcoin you had to wire money to shady offshore banks, sometimes using sketchy middlemen. But, like buying a good bag of coke in the city, it was all worth it once the deal was done safely.

2011

Trading back in 2011 was hilairous because there was barely any coherent spot market. At the start of the year, price was not even above $1. People (including myself) still weren’t quite convinced, and did not quite respect what throwing coins around might mean 7 years later. It was here that a lot of the earliest investors got involved, and saw the true potential of bitcoin. Many millionaires were created by true believers who bought and hold in this period. Most transactions were occurring OTC, face to face, or with trusted middlemen performing escrow.

2009–2010

It was this critical period — broadly from 2009–2010, where bitcoin truly gained its value. 99.999% of people who encountered bitcoin — even cypherpunks, codemonkeys spending all day on IRC — thought it was a joke that would never catch on (again, including myself). The idea of creating money out of thin air was absurd — why should we be just as bad as the bankers and create money out of nothing?

Bitcoin is the only crypto currency that had this unique overwhelming doubt to overcome. Bitcoin went through the blood, sweat, and tears of being written off as worthless because “there’s no physical asset” or “it’s unregulated”. Every altcoin since bitcoin has had the luxury of not going through that — but they will never reach the value of bitcoin because of that. Bitcoin is security, immutability, and has the best minds in cryptography taking care of it.

It takes your average bitcoiner years to come to the realization of what value bitcoin is bringing to the table. In this period, coins were mineable with laptop GPUs. You could synch the blockchain in minutes, and send coins to strangers on the internet WITHOUT EVEN PAYING A MINER’S (NETWORK) FEE! This is where the infamous 10,000 bitcoin pizza was purchased. Early nerds who were intrigued by the technology but saw it as a mere ponzi live to regret how careless they were with coins back then.

Since the beginning, traders have been the target of shills and scammers. Coinstealing malware was spreading around everywhere, scams were pulled more and more as price rose from 2009 to 2014 and again 2015–2017. This has been the biggest obstacle to proper community formation among cryptocurrency traders: nobody trusts anyone, and everyone seems to be trying to scam everyone else. Dog eat dog.

While it’s true that the market is free and pain must be felt — the value that a strong community can offer is valhalla where you can trust your fellow member and trust that you won’t be misled or shill scammed (maybe trolled a bit, but that’s a different story).

The April Fool’s Revolution: Lessons in Community Management

This takes us full circle back to 1 year ago, when StakePool collapsed as it had suddenly became hijacked by a megalomaniac who declared “I am the CEO, this is a business now. I am in the driver’s seat.”

The whole reason why StakePool even emerged around New Year’s 2016 as the dominant realtime audio bitcoin trading club is because the community clearly wanted to be exposed to less spammy shilly exploitation, and instead wanted to feel like they could trust their fellow trader.

To get an appreciation of why this “revolution” of StakePool was necessary, you need to get a feel for what it was like to be an everyday user on the original WhaleClub Teamspeak. Back then, it was completelæy normal for dozens of affiliate links to be spam-posted by mods and users alike. Backroom deals were being made where mods at WhaleClub were making money from advertising without including a cut for the original founder, flibbr.

Any new user was not given solid advice, but merely shilled blindly. Any sense of belonging was disappearing as trust was eroded. WhaleClub Mods wanted to spam their affiliate links, and if they were not to be seen as hypocrites then they had to allow the general community to do it too. The result was just a mess of bad incentives from a community perspective.

Thats why the focus had always been on keeping the forked revolutionary community of Stakepool non-profit and in the interests of the traders who were members. We wanted to always stay open, never charge anyone, and to keep scammers and shill artists out. On top of that, our connections within the crypto trading space, as well as our development skills, meant that we could be providing a useful platform to communicate important information from players in the space to your average retail trader.

Lots of time was being invested in building up a proper institution in StakePool, especially coding and technical work by flibbr and swapman. Flibbr, especially, did amazing work building the website and providing the community with an actual location to refer to and catch new eyes on Google. Lots of people like to give flibbr shit about some of his opinions, but no matter what he should be highly respected for his voluntary community contributions in the webserver and helping with talks and being interactive in sharing chart ideas. The Stakepool revolution in December 2015 succeeded where the Bitcoin Underground Summer 2015 rebellion failed: Flibbr was on board and it made the difference.

As far as flibbr and I, who have development skills that can be put to use to give traders good resources, we have always been in it for the passion. We wanted to just set up useful data feeds and resources that traders could use — web, real-time interaction on Telegram and Teamspeak, as well as Twitter and Youtube content. This has involved collaboration with others in the community like Nomad at WhaleCalls, and Aztek the Telegram monster.

That first month of the community, getting the Telegram, TS Server, Web Server, and social media stuff going was a solid 40/hours a week volunteered, night after night, collaborating and coding together. Meanwhile, fyrstikken was more in “community management” and talking a lot on Teamspeak — it turned out, a lot of it was shitcoin shilling, and users were starting to lose trust.

While these efforts were (and still are) completely voluntary, frustration was emerging about how the servers would be paid, and others wanted to make money off it as administrators.

In the very beginning of StakePool we collected donations to help get Teamspeak setup and run a simple webserver to attract traffic. However, it’s annoying to be constantly begging the community to fund things. It never feels right to do that, so we sought to build a model that was more sustainable, one where we were not “selling out” by doing advertisements with any old bitcoin company. So after a few months of lots of work on StakePool and lots of awkward conversations between the three admins about monetization strategies and how to keep the right community ethos, in a sustainable manner, we made a strategy to do affiliate marketing with exchanges that traders already use.

It was slightly successful — it did not meet the expectations of some, who imagined creating massive streams of income that would be shareable between admins — but it did pay overhead that we were facing.

To flibbr and swapman, it was clear that in order to truly profit off the community, it would require “selling out” and exploiting members — which was simply not worth it. Thus, we were resigned to just being volunteers and using affiliate and donation streams to help keep things going in a sustainable manner.

Fyrstikken was very unpleased with this. He had dreams of making StakePool into a profitable business, and was not interested in lofty ideals from the revolution we had against WhaleClub tyranny — those of freedom and community spirit.

This situation boiled up until April 1, 2016, where swapman made the fateful decision to do a practical joke. I changed the banner on StakePool to this:

It should have been an obvious joke, but it ended up being an opportunity for underlying resentments to show their heads. Fyrstikken erupted in a rage and declared himself King of the community:

To make matters worse, baseless accusations were thrown around from fyrstikken, claims that other admins were DDoSing users and that his measures were “for the safety of users”. Only the snitchiest of snitches believed this to be true, while most of the community smelled a rat and knew something was not right about the situation.

It soon emerged that Fyrstikken, in his frustration about not being able to personally profit off the bitcoin trading community, was busted on tape trying to earn money by offering to scam members.

This was the last straw, it was clear that some remnents of the “old guard mentality” were showing their head again. The collective disgust in the community led to a massive demand to move to create a new home for the now quite nomadic community. The core of the community just wanted to have a place with good data and information, to communicate instantly with other traders in a 24/7 market where being on top of what’s new is critical. It was time for another revolution, this time from the unstable admin of StakePool.

Despite being removed from admin group and server access, I had left a little back door to ensure that if any situation like this were to arise, I would be able to handle it. So I wheeled out the guillotine!

The April Fool’s Day Revolution of 2016 was a blessing in disguise, as it allowed the community to move on from its toxic elements in StakePool and to get a fresh start as WhalePool.

Whale Pool, 1 Year With No Coup

Going through the coup process for a 2nd time was needed, but the drama had taken its toll on the admins. Friendships were torn apart. I was so fed up at that point with all the drama and betrayal and frankly all the hours I had been spending volunteering to keep things afloat with what felt like was not paying off in terms of the passion it was giving.

Nevertheless, a new beginning was upon us. Flibbr and I had many long conversations in those early nights, frustrated about what the best solution was. It was similar to the days we talked when the original coup happened. The community had to have a home, and we naturally had to provide it. We kept fyrstikken on a short leash with StakePool and it was not hard to quickly move the webservers and start fresh, stronger Teamspeak server to host the community.

At the start of the new community we did not even have a name. We were too tired to even care about a name. We were completely drained from putting so much time and effort into Stakepool only for it to be screwed with by an unstable actor. I did not even want to be an admin or mod, because I became so disgusted with politics and lying scum. I opted to be just a “technician” handling matters of server setups, security, and data bot feeds. However, because of my many years in the community and extensive network with players, I was also organizing and holding most of interviews we were having in WhalePool with big names in crypto.

This was a chance to do it right with the community management, and allow the core of the crypto trading community to really have a place they would be proud to be a member. Transparency, openness to the public, and offering connections to data and people is something many have demanded.

The community was rapidly growing in mid-2016. Bitcoin price at the time was in the lower 400s, we had successfully broken out of the hellish 200–300 range and the uptrend was only getting started. Quality members like Mayvune, Pysiek, Yerb were taking more active roles in helping to manage the community into what fit our culture as crypto traders.

We are a group that loves freedom, but hates scammers/shills. The wisdom of the group helps keep the latter out, while preserving the former. The Telegram was growing in usercount as more and more traders were utilizing the platforms we offer. The YouTube Livestream, operated by Mayvune, has been getting more and more popular and Twitter followers keep pouring in.

As the community has been so abused in the past by people lying and exploiting them, we maintain a policy of being 100% transparent with the funds. And flibbr and I have committed to just covering the costs of running servers if donations and affiliate revenues don’t cover it. This way there are no bad incentives for admins to sell out the community to scamcoins or shady actors. We are all just traders doing our thing.

In early 2016, things looked very dim. But I am proud to say in 2017 that the state of the Whalepool community is strong.

Financially, we currently have 11.7 BTC, currently valued at almost $13,000. This is enough to run the community for almost 7 years!

And whereas in the very beginning we relied heavily on community member donations to keep things afloat, now affiliate revenues on 1Broker and BitMEX, which members (and some random people) are trading and generating commissions that we get a cut of.

It has been very challenging at times. When a community with real technical assets is being built and maintained purely by volunteers, it can get stressful. Bitcoin and trading are our passion, and it is what motivates us to organize and drive the formation and perisistence of this community.

After 1 year, flibbr and myself still have not received 1 single satoshi in compensation. We also have not had to cover any costs out of pocket. This shows the power of the community. We now regularly have 150 active Teamspeak traders, over 2,100 Telegram users, over 2,000 Twitter followers, nearly 750 YouTube subscribers. We have hosted the top names in crypto — developers, exchange owners, lead blue chip altcoin devs, and more.

The community has grown so much over the past year, and it is all thanks to the members who contribute their ideas and interaction with everyone. Without the regulars who participate actively on any of our platforms, we would be nothing. We have so much appreciation for those who, for example, hang out on Teamspeak and share a little trade setup or even help a noob out with some mechanical trading issue. You guys make the community strong and keep it going, and together we bring big names in from Crypto markets and can better argue and fight for our collective interests in this Wild West.

We have distributed over 2 BTC to the community this past year in the form of prizes from games (quarterly premium guessing game, halvening guessing game), resources and initiatives in the community (Streaming, art and content generation), and other fun things (He Will Not Divide Us troll-bombing).

At times it is not easy administering such a large and growing community. There’s differences of opinions constantly clashing, and even at the highest level it can get tense when dealing with certain high-emotion situations. Maintaining an environment where freedom of speech can flourish while still effectively stopping the shilling and scamming behavior is a very difficult balancing act. The community is designed to be as flat and open as possible. The turnover can be high — most early members from 2014 are no longer with us — but that’s why the experienced long-term traders help to inspire new traders to come aboard. We allow anyone’s opinion and voice to be heard within the basic boundaries of civility.

The role that the moderators and admins at Whalepool take, overall, is to simply guide the community, protect it from scamming and shilling influences, and help to maintain the original culture that has persisted over the years. While flibbr and I handle technical administration, really the community should be seen as a self-sustaining decentralized entity that organizes around many issues.

I want to thank the mods and all the guests we have had over the past year — we will continue to have a great second year. And I hope that it will continue for many years to come, as bitcoin and crypto continues to grow as an asset class with a rapidly expanding base of active traders, big and small.