DiscoverByline Times Audio ArticlesHow Epstein Saved Bitcoin - and Accessed Trump's Tech Inner Circle
How Epstein Saved Bitcoin - and Accessed Trump's Tech Inner Circle

How Epstein Saved Bitcoin - and Accessed Trump's Tech Inner Circle

Update: 2025-12-04
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For two decades, Jeffrey Epstein moved through the private networks that shaped modern Silicon Valley - even after his sex-offending conviction.

Newly released House Oversight Committee files, combined with a deep review of archived material, reveal how his money, ideas and relationships flowed into the founders, labs and political circles now defining America's new tech order.

Part One of this exclusive three-part investigation explores how Epstein was embedded in the Silicon Valley 'Broligarchy' brains trust. Part Two uncovers how Epstein intersected with pivotal moments in Bitcoin. Part Three, the channelling of an apocalyptic vision of climate 'culling' and eugenics.

Jeffrey Epstein's ties to Silicon Valley did not break after his conviction. As we revealed in part one of this investigation, through the Edge Foundation - a private forum that functioned as a kind of inner brain-trust for the founders of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tesla and others - years after being jailed for soliciting a child, he remained in circulation among the architects of the digital age, now among the biggest donors to Donald Trump.

But the newly released documents point to a deeper story. The Edge Foundation was not just a talk-shop. For Epstein, it was a route to influence the direction of Silicon Valley, AI, Big Tech and cryptocurrency at their most pivotal period. One of the most crucial moments of impact was on Bitcoin, the world's most recognised, valuable and widely used cryptocurrency.

At the very moment Bitcoin's future was in jeopardy, Epstein's money and access placed him inside the institutions that were beginning to frame the cryptocurrency as a tool to route around nation states - and consolidate power among a new class of networked tech elites.

One of them was billionaire tech magnate Peter Thiel, who not only operated in Trump's inner circle during his first term, but has massively expanded his influence on the second Trump administration, with more than a dozen people closely connected to him now folded into it.

MIT Media Lab and the Fight for Bitcoin's Future

In 2012 Joichi (Joi) Ito - Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab - delivered a webinar to the Edge network. Ito had been a member of the Edge Foundation since 1999 when he first attended and dined with Jeffrey Epstein.

By 2013, Ito began concertedly inserting Epstein into MIT circles despite him being "disqualified" in the university's donor database, telling colleagues that Epstein had been fully vetted. A key figure at this time was the co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, who sat on Ito's MIT Media Lab advisory council. Ito turned to Hoffman to help manage Epstein's relationship with the Media Lab - arranging to meet both men on campus to discuss fundraising.

Hoffman and Ito have since apologised for their connection to Epstein.

Between 2013 and 2017, Epstein donated $525,000 to the Media Lab. Other MIT recipients aligned with the Edge network had already benefitted from his money - including £100,000 to AI pioneer Marvin Minsky in 2002 and $225,000 to the quantum physicist Seth Lloyd.

In April 2015, Byline Times can reveal from the House Oversight corpus, Ito forwarded Epstein an internal summary of a major shift underway in Bitcoin's governance. Its core code was maintained by "five core developers" and around a hundred contributors, Ito explained to Epstein - but "only the five core developers decide what changes are made to the core code". The Bitcoin Foundation, which had financed the project's infrastructure, had just imploded. The collapse came at a pivotal moment: Bitcoin's next upgrades would determine whether it became a global monetary platform or remained a niche experiment.

Into that vacuum, Ito wrote, the Media Lab had "moved quickly", persuading three of the five programmers - "lead develo...
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How Epstein Saved Bitcoin - and Accessed Trump's Tech Inner Circle

How Epstein Saved Bitcoin - and Accessed Trump's Tech Inner Circle

Nafeez Ahmed