Note: Cao Xiaogang, an early bitcoin adopter and holder, is now an entrepreneur and co-founder of a crowdfunding platform. He believed:

“At this particular point in history, the bitcoin community should pull together to change the world of bitcoin for better instead of insulting and attacking one another.”

Here is the full interview.

I’ve heard a lot about you in the bitcoin community, and I never thought I would have the pleasure to meet you in person. You’ve been adopting bitcoin ever since it was born in 2009. You must have a lot of stories to tell.

Thank you for saying so, but I’m not one of the very first bitcoin adopters. It all happened overnight in the middle of 2011 when I was beginning to read news about bitcoin. And there were articles telling you how to mine bitcoin. I started to use GPU to mine bitcoin, but I never regarded bitcoin as a means of making money. I only saw it as, how can I put it? Experiment. In the end of 2011, bitcoin price plummeted and fake news like” bitcoin has died” were all over the web. But the price of bitcoin soared and transaction volumes increased dramatically in 2012. The truth was that if electric charges were cut out, I was not making any money at that time.

Then why not sold all your bitcoin?

Believe you me. I thought about it all the time, but I told myself,” Just hang in there. A great revolution is going on and you are part of it.” I wanna see what’s the future of bitcoin and how it’s gonna change the world, for better or for worse. That’s why I didn’t care about bitcoin price that much. I only checked some bitcoin forums once a month to see what people were interested.

What mining machines were you using?

I invested part of my money in Avalon in 2012, but there was a delivery delay. Anyway, I was really lucky to receive the first batch of its mining machines. At that time, I invested a lot in ASICMINER, but it failed to deliver its products in the end. Unexpectedly, I got a full refund. As you may see, at that time, the bitcoin community and the whole bitcoin ecosystem were built on trust. But later things went kinda nasty. You started to hear lots of news about bitcoin exchanges be shut down, be hacked and users’ assets be drained. You see verbal abuses going on among different platforms and coins. This is just so sad and pathetic. I mean, in China, we’ve got the money and the people, we should work to change the world of bitcoin for better instead of insulting and attacking each other. How come we only think of price? There are a lot of things to work on.

How to bring talents together to develop, test and scale best software and hardware solutions?

How to disseminate news and information to help bridge Chinese bitcoin users and their counterparts in the West?

How to utilize blockchain, the backbone technology of bitcoin?