Thank you!

Before PubKey existed, there was another dive bar in this location called Formerly Crow's, and before that it was The Stoned Crow. Thomas used to run bitcoin meetups at what was then his neighborhood bar, somewhat embarrassingly called "Crypto at the Crow." When the pub closed down, Thomas and the other cofounders (Andrew and Jerk) partnered with the previous owner Marshall to reopen the bar as PubKey in 2022 after the NYC bitcoin scene (and the city at large) took a major hit during two years of Covid. Apart from BitDevs and other local meetups including Harlem Bitcoin, there wasn't much out there in the way of a purely bitcoin-focused gathering place. One of the best things about it is that it's still a neighborhood dive bar, and many people who come here don't even realize it's a bitcoin bar at first, because a lot of the bitcoin content fades into the background aesthetic and it's waiting to be discovered by those who look for it. Probably 60-70% of our regular customers are pre-coiners.

We also don't see SN as competition at all, because we're a physical space where people connect in the real world, something that even the best digital platforms can't reproduce.