S17 E44: Marc De Mesel on the Bitcoin Cash Bet

There is a particular kind of person the Bitcoin Cash community produced in its glory years, and Marc De Mesel is the purest example of the breed. He is the investor who did not just hold the fork and wait. He sold his Bitcoin for BCH in the weeks after the split, at a rate that implied full confidence in the flippening, and then went further: he started paying for development out of his own pocket when the project needed it most. They call him the guardian angel of Bitcoin Cash, and unlike most nicknames in this industry, this one was earned with invoices.

I met Marc in Amsterdam, where he let me drive his Tesla Model X on full self-driving through a city I did not know, which is either a sign of great trust in technology or in me, and I am still not sure which. Four and a half hours of conversation later, what stays with me is not the trade that made him famous. It is the honesty with which he dissects it.

(Sponsored by Orange Rock, Layer 2 Labs, Cake Wallet, SideShift, and Braiins Hash Power. Cake Wallet sponsored the $100 giveaway. The winning number was 69, because of course it was, and congratulations to Alisandaz for guessing it.)

The Trade That Defined Marc

In August 2017, while most Bitcoin holders were deciding whether to dump their free BCH or hold both sides of the fork, Marc was on the futures market buying. BCH traded at roughly 0.1 to 0.2 BTC before it even existed, around $300 against Bitcoin’s $3,000, and he thought it was a steal. He sold Bitcoin to buy more. His expectation was not a hedge but a flip: value would migrate from BTC to BCH once the market understood that a currency needs cheap transactions.

Nine years later, BCH still trades around $300 and BTC went from $3,000 to $80,000. Marc does not hide from the arithmetic. He runs it himself, out loud: at seven or eight percent real inflation over a decade, BCH would need to be at $600 to $800 today just to have preserved purchasing power. At $300, the position lost half its real value, and that is before counting the opportunity cost.

At the peak, his holdings were twenty times what they are now. Much of the position was liquidated in 2022, when leveraged bets during the bear market triggered margin calls and he chose to sell BCH rather than Ethereum. The year cost him 93% of his total portfolio, a number he volunteers without being asked.

This is what separates Marc from most figures in his position. He publishes his portfolio. He names his mistakes. He still holds about five or six percent in BCH, slightly more than he would recommend to a stranger, because his personal pain of missing out is higher than average after everything he invested. That is not stubbornness, he argues. The distinction, in his framing, is that conviction rests on arguments you can articulate, while stubbornness is love without evidence.

The Governance Fight That Made Marc a Benefactor

Marc’s transition from passive investor to active funder came in 2020, when Amaury Séchet proposed the Infrastructure Funding Plan, a mechanism that would redirect a share of newly minted coins to development. Marc is careful with the terminology: calling it a dev tax is uncharitable, because Dash pioneered the model and Zcash runs a version of it, and he considers the treasury concept genuinely smart. What cryptocurrencies lack, in his view, is a business model, and Joel Valenzuela’s years of work funded by the Dash treasury prove the model can produce value.

The problem was never the idea. It was the implementation. Amaury’s version routed the funds to an address he controlled, with him deciding where the money went, and it collided head-on with the inheritance of the Bitcoin design, where Satoshi’s implied funding mechanism was voluntary contribution. The community chose the latter. Out of the split came Flipstarter, a non-custodial crowdfunding system where developers propose a project with a price tag, donors pledge, and funds only move when the goal is met.

Mike Hearn had sketched something similar years earlier, before declaring the Bitcoin experiment resolved and failed in his famous 2016 article, the same article, I confess on air, that scared me out of buying Bitcoin at the bottom of that bear market. Marc’s verdict on the IFP episode is blunt: funding Amaury’s vision would have meant funding a project ruled with a hard hand, and that would have killed Bitcoin Cash faster than any market force.

Why Bitcoin Cash Failed, According to Its Guardian Angel

Marc’s autopsy has two main findings. The first is fragmentation. Bitcoin Cash was designed, in the Satoshi tradition, around the idea that miners vote with hash power and then everyone stays together. Instead, every disagreement produced a split, and every split took people the project could not afford to lose. BSV peeled away one faction in 2018. Amaury’s eCash took another in 2020. Each time, the community got smaller and the brand got weaker.

The second finding is more self-critical. The community spent years chasing brick-and-mortar merchant adoption, and Marc now considers that a strategic error. The economics never worked, and the years spent on it were years not spent making the chain useful. The current pivot toward smart contracts, CashFusion privacy, and developer tooling is, in his reading, the community finally accepting that even the real Bitcoin has to compete.

My own contribution to this section was an argument I have carried for years: at launch, Bitcoin Cash was barely different from post-SegWit Bitcoin. With SegWit active, BTC blocks effectively reached 4 MB of capacity, so the much-advertised 8 MB of BCH amounted to a 2x advantage, not the orders of magnitude the rhetoric implied. The fork was political before it was technical. Marc admitted he had never looked at it that way, and that failing to differentiate more aggressively at launch may have been a genuine mistake. It is a rare pleasure to offer a Bitcoin Cash veteran a perspective he has not already considered.

Saylor, Stablecoins and the Hijacking Thesis

Marc agrees with the framing of Roger Ver’s book: Bitcoin was hijacked, and sabotage is not too strong a word. The narrative shift from peer-to-peer cash to store of value, the goalposts moving from “use tabs” to “never sell” to “borrow against it,” the conversion of a payments network into a collectible: he sees the same pattern I do. His critique of Michael Saylor is structural rather than personal.

Saylor did not build his Bitcoin position the way Bezos or Musk built their wealth. He borrowed it. A leveraged treasury only works while the number goes up, and an asset held by weak hands at scale is an asset with a trapdoor under it. Marc also dredges up the 2000 newspaper headline, Saylor losing $6 billion in a single day when the dot-com bubble burst, as a reminder that the man has run this play before.

Where I expected agreement, I also found nuance. Marc’s case against BTC is not that the market is irrational, but that network effects decay slowly. Bitcoin dominance has fallen from 90% to around 50%, and he expects the decline to continue, possibly slowly, possibly through a sudden tipping point. He names two scenarios: a bull market where altcoins simply outshine BTC, or a bear market where leveraged structures like Saylor’s are forced to sell into weakness. Either way, his position is that you do not need to be right about the timing to be right about the direction.

Marc’s Privacy Basket

The most forward-looking part of the conversation is Marc’s privacy coin thesis, which he frames with an explicit historical rhyme. In 2011, everyone said to only invest play money in Bitcoin, including the developers. Roger Ver put in everything he could gather, because he understood entrepreneurship and was not afraid to lose his savings. Privacy coins today, Marc argues, sit in the same spot: obviously important, legally gray, and priced as if the future will never arrive.

Having learned from picking NXT over Ethereum, a mistake he quantifies as the difference between a thousand-fold return and zero, Marc now buys the basket rather than the horse. Monero for adoption. Zcash after experts told him it has the best privacy technology, despite his reservations about its dual transparent-shielded design. Zano because Roger Ver, exiled on Mallorca during his legal battle, would not stop talking about it. Smaller positions in Firo and Pirate Chain, and a separate allocation to Dash for its treasury model rather than its privacy.

Here I got to return the favor from the SegWit discussion. Marc’s claim that Zcash privacy goes largely unused is several years out of date. Shielded supply has climbed from roughly 200,000 ZEC in 2018 to 4.9 million of the 16.9 million circulating today, nearly a quarter of the supply and rising, helped by mobile wallets that finally made shielding practical and by DeFi integrations like NEAR Intents and Maya Protocol that let users spend from the shielded pool into any asset a merchant wants. Marc took the correction gracefully, then admitted he has sell orders sitting above the market after ZEC’s 40x run, because waking up wishing you had bought more is, in his experience, a reliable top signal.

Tesla, China and the Holy Grail Portfolio

Marc’s non-crypto positions reveal the same contrarian method. He bought Tesla in 2019, after five years of sideways price action and peak anti-Musk sentiment, with half his portfolio. The thesis then was cheap EVs conquering the market. The thesis now is robotaxis and humanoid robots, with the caveat that Chinese manufacturers have already won the part of the market that wants to own a car.

His most contrarian current position is Chinese EV makers like Xpeng, trading at a tenth of their American counterparts’ valuations while growing 20 to 40% a year, balanced by put options on Intel, Korean equities, and AI semiconductor indexes as crash insurance. The goal is a 20% annual compound return after inflation, achieved through uncorrelated high-conviction bets rather than the conventional safety of indexes, bonds, and real estate, which he considers the real risky assets.

His framework has a name, the Holy Grail portfolio, and a scar. The 93% drawdown in 2022 taught him that concentration in one volatile asset, even one you love, is a mistake you only make three times before it takes.

Marc’s Personal Life

The final stretch of the conversation leaves markets entirely. Marc speaks openly about his polygamous relationships, his seven children with a stated goal of thirty, his years in Kenya, the court cases there that he describes as false accusations of money laundering after large bank transfers to his girlfriends made him a tabloid celebrity, and the dating philosophy he developed after concluding that Western dating culture had failed him. He frames partner selection with the same portfolio logic he applies to altcoins: diversify, watch for red flags, never concentrate in one position.

His views on gender roles, dating strategy, and family structure are his own, stated plainly and at length, and listeners will form their own judgments about them. For my part, I pushed back where it mattered to me: reducing a relationship to a financial ledger, where the higher earner is owed domestic labor, turns love into employment, and people quit jobs. Marc took the disagreement in stride, as he did every challenge in these four hours. Whatever one makes of his conclusions, he has built a life that matches his stated principles with the same thoroughness he brought to funding a fork, and the segment is unlike anything else in this show’s catalog.

The Flip Scenario

I closed with the question every Bitcoin Cash veteran deserves: what if, ten years from now, the market decides BCH was the real Bitcoin all along, and he knows he once held twenty times as much? Marc had already answered it with his wallet. A month before recording, he took out a DeFi loan to increase his BCH position by 50%, moving his allocation from 4% to 6%.

Not because the thesis is strong, but because the risk-reward at these prices justifies a small bet, and because he refuses to be at his all-time low of coins if the improbable happens. It is the same logic he applies everywhere: size positions to the pain of regret, not just the probability of success.

His closing advice to listeners is simpler. The altcoin bull market has, in his reading, barely started, sentiment at dinner tables is still cold, and the trend line says crypto is undervalued. The second biggest mistake in markets is selling too soon. The first, as a man who once sold Bitcoin for Bitcoin Cash knows better than anyone, is being so sure that you sell everything.

If Marc's story leaves you wanting the bigger picture, I wrote Bitcoin Cash: The Big Block Breakaway about the 2017 split he bet on, and Zcash: The Privacy Moon Math Bitcoin Was Afraid to Include about the coin that anchors his privacy basket. For the other side of the Mallorca visit, hear Roger Ver in his own words on S15 E26.