- A Bitcoin O.G.
- Reviving the VR industry
During a recent appearance on a podcast hosted by American entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey stated that he is a “big time Bitcoin guy.”
“I have been from the beginning,” he said, adding that he actually mined Bitcoin during its early days instead of actually buying it.
“I have been doing this since before there were any exchanges,” Luckey added.
A Bitcoin O.G.
Luckey was a member of the legendary BitcoinTalk message board, where Satoshi Nakamoto was interacting with other early adopters.
He also sold a banner ad on one of his websites for 700 Bitcoin. It would be worth $74 million at current prices, with Bitcoin currently trading at $106,000.
Luckey also used BTC for placing a bet on a Bitcoin slot machine, which he admitted did not work.
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The 32-year-old entrepreneur also admitted that he had lost all of his coins during the infamous Mt. Gox hack. He only managed to get roughly 13% of these coins back several years later following a daunting recovery process.
Luckey, however, is not a fan of alternative cryptocurrencies, which appears to be the case for a lot of early Bitcoin adopters.
Reviving the VR industry
Luckey was fascinated with various electronic projects as a kid. At just 16, he became preoccupied with building his own VR headset in his parents’ garage.
Early headset prototypes started appearing all the way back in the 60s, with “The Sword of Damocles” being a notable example. Over the next few decades, the industry barely made any progress. The very few existing commercial headsets suffered from bulkiness, low resolution, high latency, and awful tracking. Some PC VR headsets from the 90s would cost more than $10,000 while offering an awful user experience.
However, Luckey emerged as the tech evangelist who single-handedly managed to revive the VR industry with the Oculus Rift prototype that was launched on Kickstarter in 2012. It was the low-cost, low-latency model that helped to revive the seemingly dead industry.
Meta (formerly Facebook) bought Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, turning Luckey into one of the richest tech entrepreneurs.
He then went on to found defense-tech company Anduril, which is currently valued at $8 billion.