The Chain

by Mark Goodwin & Whitney Webb.

A forensic deep dive into the power players shaping crypto, tether and bitcoin. Mapping the people, companies, investments, patents, and infrastructure behind blockchain and the emerging stablecoins financial system.

The series doesn’t argue that bitcoin is fraudulent or a complete lost cause. It acknowledges its genuinely disruptive design against evil central banking and their debt based fiat currencies. But it contends that the ecosystem surrounding bitcoin has increasingly been shaped and in key areas controlled by elite financial and tech networks.

In their view, bitcoin’s anti establishment promise hasn’t disappeared, it’s being redirected through institutional influence.

It stops short of conclusively claiming that PayPal / Peter Thiel created bitcoin. Instead, it argues that members of the “PayPal Mafia,” later became major investors in bitcoin infrastructure.

The series also points to Thiel’s ties to palantir and its intelligence connections, suggesting overlapping networks between silicon valley, national security, and crypto / bitcoin.

PayPal is framed as an early step toward platform based digital money, setting the stage for the environment into which bitcoin emerged given their long stated ambition to create a new world currency.

The tone often times encourages readers to question whether bitcoin’s origins and early ecosystem were closer to elite power structures than commonly believed but it stops short of explicitly saying that the PayPal mafia is Satoshi Nakamoto.