Join CryptoMondays Zoom USA on Wednesday, October 21st for a fireside chat with Mike Evron and host Lou Kerner.
Most systems work because someone is in charge. What happens when nobody is? Join us for a candid fireside chat with Mike Evron, who has spent his career on that question. He left a consulting role at Goldman Sachs to build The Farmer’s Market, an anonymous online drug marketplace that ran for nearly a decade, years before most people had heard of Silk Road. He was also one of the earliest bitcoin miners. After 63 months in federal prison, he is now building MarketDAO, a system designed so that incentives hold when nobody is in charge. Expect honest lessons on permissionless systems, early bitcoin and what it really costs to build them.
Key Discussion Points
- How early bitcoin looked from the inside in 2009
- Why he walked away from Goldman Sachs to build something permissionless
- What it really costs to build systems that run without permission
- Why he decided bitcoin was unworkable in 2011, and how that looks in hindsight
- How to design incentives that hold when nobody is in charge
- What MarketDAO is and where it is going
Featured Guest
Mike Evron walked away from a lucrative consulting position at Goldman Sachs to build The Farmer’s Market. It started around 2003 as a Hushmail-and-mail-order operation and was still running in April 2012, when the DEA came for him. He wrote the software, ran it, and scaled it to roughly 3,000 customers in all 50 states and 45 other countries. About 2.5 million dollars moved through the site over nine years, and he says he barely made ends meet. He was charged as one of two organizers of a continuing criminal enterprise (that charge was dropped) and served 63 months in federal prison. He came out with the same question he went in with, pointed somewhere legal this time: how do you design a system where the incentives hold when nobody is in charge? That question is MarketDAO.
Fun Fact
Mike started mining bitcoin in 2009, when the client reported just six peers on the entire network. He mined roughly 3,300 coins before the GPU farms arrived, then sold almost all of them far too early, like everyone else who was actually there.
About the Company
MarketDAO is Mike’s answer to designing incentives that hold without a central authority. Learn more at https://marketdao.dev/
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
🕔 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT
📍 Online
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