Marcus Dent ’09

Marcus Dent ’09 has become an expert in the world of bitcoin. A graduate of DePaul University, Dent now runs his own media business about Bitcoin that consists of a daily newsletter, “Marty’s Bent,” and a podcast “Tales from the Crypt: A Bitcoin Podcast.” He also is Director of Business Development at Great American Mining, a bitcoin mining company. Alumni Prep Update recently caught up with Dent and learned about his newest ventures.

 

APU: How did you become interested in Bitcoin?
MD: I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole while in college as I was studying monetary policy and interning at a Managed Futures fund in Chicago. The distributed and sovereign nature of the Bitcoin network attracted me almost immediately and I've been obsessively studying as much as I can about Austrian economics, distributed systems, and freedom in the Digital Age since my first encounter.
 
APU: What are some of the interesting experiences you have had in the Bitcoin world?
MD: I started the newsletter and the podcast as a way to help educate friends and family about Bitcoin when they began incessantly texting me in the spring of 2017 as the price of Bitcoin began to climb. I shared the links to the content on social media and started to gain a lot of subscribers and listeners over time. Four years after launching the newsletter and podcast, I am at a point where I have created a revenue stream that allows me to work for myself and provide for my family.

The podcast has opened up a lot of doors for me professionally and has provided me with the opportunity to meet and interview some very interesting individuals including: Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square; Adam Curry, the inventor of podcasting; and many of the extremely smart individuals working to build out the Bitcoin protocol.

Working at Great American Mining along with running my media business has given me some incredible exposure to energy markets, natural resource extraction, and the ways in which the Bitcoin network helps the world become significantly more energy efficient. It has also opened my eyes to the complexity of energy extraction and delivery, a process that most people take for granted and misunderstand. 
 
APU: How did the Prep prepare you for what you are doing now?
MD: My experiences at the Prep provided me with the confidence to go out and start my own business. The focus on critical thinking enhanced my ability to be receptive to Bitcoin when I first encountered it when most people tend to immediately dismiss it. 

The elective Economics course that I took during the fall of 2008 as the great financial crisis was unfolding had a profound impact on my worldview and set me on a course to go to college with a mission to understand the financial system, how it works, why it's flawed, and how it may be improved. 

And of course, the focus on being able to write articulately at the Prep has made it easy for me to incorporate writing into my career. I don't know if I'd be able to write a daily newsletter without the education I received at the Prep, which focused on writing clearly and convincingly on a wide range of topics.