Early Days of Ethereum

Michael "Exiled Surfer" Parenti authored the first ever tweet about Ethereum on November 30, 2013, just three days after Vitalik Buterin emailed the white paper to his initial group. A cypherpunk and early Bitcoiner, Michael has been a fixture in the European crypto scene, connecting communities from Berlin to Vienna to Prague.

Bitcoin Foundation Era

Before Ethereum, Michael worked at the Bitcoin Foundation, joining just months before the Mt. Gox collapse:

"I joined the Bitcoin Foundation just months before Mt. Gox collapsed… Mark Karpelès was one of the founders, co-founders of the Bitcoin Foundation. And then Charlie Shrem getting arrested."

He had been following Vitalik's writing through RSS feeds since his Bitcoin Magazine days:

"I still had my RSS feeds and Vitalik had a blog, so he was in my RSS feeds and one day he posted something about Ethereum. And so I like, okay, cool."

That blog post led to what became the first public tweet about Ethereum.

The First Tweet

In 2021, during the NFT boom, someone suggested Michael mint his historic tweet as an NFT. Initially offered $200, he declined—then minted it anyway and sold it for $21,000, making it the second most expensive tweet ever sold (behind Jack Dorsey's first tweet).

But the story took a meaningful turn:

"The guy that originally messaged me, I gave him 10% of that. And he was in Argentina, and he was a schoolteacher. And he took that $2,100 and he turned it into, like, an educational program for Ethereum in Argentina and like, turned it into a career."

Room 77 and the Berlin Scene

Michael was present in the early Bitcoin meetup scene, particularly at Room 77—Jörg Platzer's bar in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, which was the first brick-and-mortar business to accept Bitcoin and a gathering place for early crypto enthusiasts.

He first met Vitalik in person at RIAT in Vienna, one of the earliest Ethereum meetup locations:

"The earliest Ethereum meetups were at RIAT… and they hosted the first Ethereum meetups, which is the first time that I met Vitalik personally."

Status and Department of Decentralization

After the Bitcoin block size wars left the community fractured, Michael was drawn to Ethereum's more open culture:

"Bitcoin was just so toxic… And then there was just all of this bright eyed, bushy tailed, idealistic, you know, unicorns and glitter. And I'm an old hippie. And it just was like natural."

He became "resident cypherpunk" at Status and got deeply involved with the Department of Decentralization, helping to organize ETHBerlin events and participating in the launch of the Goerli testnet:

"Goerli, so they're also in Berlin was a DoD production… Afri and Mr. Ligi, you know, and yeah, it was like two or three people that, you know, that deployed Goerli."

NonCon and Community Building

When EDCON was scheduled for Vienna in 2020, Michael planned to use the occasion to launch Paralelní Polis Vienna. When COVID shut everything down, he pivoted to create NonCon—a virtual conference:

"I did a virtual conference. It was three days with four tracks with I think 80 speakers."

With Kay Gertler, he built Interspace, an integrated online convention portal combining calendar, video conferencing, and chat—one of the earliest sophisticated virtual conference platforms in the crypto space.

He also worked at Brainbot for the Trustlines Foundation with [REDACTED].

Reflections on Ethereum

As someone who watched both Bitcoin and Ethereum evolve from the earliest days, Michael values Ethereum's "move fast, break things" culture:

"All of this fabulous, permissionless stuff has happened on Ethereum that could not culturally happen on Bitcoin and may not ever actually happen on Bitcoin with the way that it's becoming part of the traditional finance."

He particularly appreciates Ethereum's role in enabling crowdfunding and DAOs:

"One of the coolest things that Ethereum enabled was crowdfunding… this completely alternative economy that created stocks, shareholders… It's like amazing. The whole world should literally work like that."

On Ethereum's evolution:

"The promise of Ethereum, I think is well, well, well exceeded its initial sort of vision… the tech revolution has happened."

Primary Source

This profile draws from Michael Parenti's Early Days of Ethereum interview, which provides first-hand accounts of the pre-Ethereum Bitcoin community and the European crypto scene that surrounded Ethereum's birth.