By Steven Longenecker
ON BEING FIRST...
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Eric Wade is waiting at the Las Vegas resort when I arrive – sitting at a table with his wife of 28 years, Ana Montoya-Wade. He’s shorter than you might expect from his appearances on stage and television. But his salt- and-pepper hair, one strand escaping over his eye, combines with an unbuttoned white shirt and a light jacket to give him a rakish look. He confides later that he cuts his own hair. He has a twin brother... whom he shot. He’s written a dozen feature movie scripts and even sold one to Adam Sandler. He spent years at Merrill Lynch and held Series 3, 6, 7, 63, and 65 licenses, ran an advertising firm in Laguna Beach, and owned a live music venue in the shadow of Paramount Studios. Wade was in Vegas at an investment conference to give his perspective as an early bitcoin pioneer... and to share what’s next for it and other cryptocurrencies.
But as we talked, it became clear that his enthusiasm for bitcoin was only his latest adventure in a long, long line of firsts...
MILLION-DOLLAR NICKNAME Wade’s first brush with fame was in the mid- 1990s. At the time, he was a financial manager with Merrill Lynch, the largest retail brokerage in America. Despite calling Albuquerque, New Mexico, home, he went by the nickname “Wall Street” – and with the advent of the Internet, he needed a good e-mail address. So he and a friend plunked down $7 to register the domain wallstreet.com... “Sometimes when you see a good opportunity, you don’t buy it having fully recognized all of the values it will eventually turn into, right? At the time that we bought
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November 2019
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