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HOROWITZ-GHAZI: The place is staged in grays and white with large pieces of abstract art on the walls. MASIH: Yeah, they're, like, cake doughnuts. MASIH: So I had to vacuum, got some food.ĪRONCZYK: He bought some fancy-looking lemon poppyseed and buttercream doughnuts. And when we get there, Mark is doing all the normal things real estate agents do to get set up.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: About a month later, Mark organizes an open house. It can be hard to separate the fake from the real.ĪRONCZYK: Today on the show, we visit the crypto house, a house that promises to generate its own cryptocurrency and maybe make a difference in the real, non-crypto world. Right now, we are in the middle of a crypto meltdown - cryptocurrencies losing value, people losing their savings to the crash or to scams. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It's lost $2 trillion, two-thirds of its peak value, turning us all into skeptical Philadelphians.

Because from the time Mark was finishing up the house to today, the laminate floor has fallen out of the crypto market. What's going on here? How are you scamming me? How am I getting got?ĪRONCZYK: How am I getting got? - is another question swirling around crypto these days. So that the average buyer is going to come in and say, why? Why'd you do this? I don't get it. MASIH: Philly has a very - what's the word where they don't trust people? - like, distrustful nature. So we thought if we went to this open house, we might find all kinds of people wrestling with this question - what is crypto actually good for? We figured at the open house, there'd be crypto true believers mingling with newbies, mingling with skeptical Philadelphians. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: This was a place where the hard-to-pin-down digital world of crypto would meet the real, physical world - inside a house with a classic Philly porch, laminate floors, quartz countertops, going for $240,000.ĪRONCZYK: Mark was pitching this whole thing as an investment within an investment. But even if that was true, there was something about this idea that was intriguing. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Wait, I can't tell if you're joking.ĪRONCZYK: No, that is a real account. I don't know - maybe this guy was trying to get his listing on Zillow Gone Wild. But until then, I'm going to go ahead and claim it.ĪRONCZYK: Now, I might have ignored this as, like, just another crypto gimmick. MASIH: And then I will gracefully say, OK, I guess I was No. But I'm going to say it until someone else proves me wrong. MASIH: This will be the first crypto fixture ever being sold in the world.ĪRONCZYK: Mark, how do you know that this is the first time ever? I cannot fact check that 100%. And he's made this cryptocurrency miner sort of like cabinets or countertops, a permanent fixture. You know, like, a device that generates new crypto that could then be exchanged for actual cash. And unlike other houses he sold, this one would come with something unique, of the moment - a cryptocurrency miner built into the house.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Mark was writing to us because he was just about to put a house on the market, a property he bought to flip.

#Vibe check meme templatwe license#

MARK MASIH: So I am a realtor and a investor, got my license when I was 18. And all of these celebrities were hyping it up from LeBron James to Larry David.Īnd in the middle of all that froth, we got an email from a listener named Mark Masih, who lives in Philadelphia. Millions of people had just watched the Super Bowl where several crypto companies ran big ads. SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.Ī few months ago, we were in the middle of a crypto frenzy - not the first time.