‘Bitcoin is accepted here’ — How Coin Office YouTuber Guy Turner got into crypto

“Crypto YouTubers” often get a bad rap for “shilling shitcoins”, but Guy Turner is not cut from the same cloth. Educational channel host Coin Office is a face that has earned a reputation for delivering intelligent, entertaining and insightful content.

Speaking to Cointelegraph at the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference in October 2023, Turner will discuss his journey into crypto and how The Coin Office has transitioned from a blog-only platform to a video content powerhouse.

Turner, who studied English at university, Before discovering Bitcoin in 2013, he spent several years teaching corporate writing at a local pub in East London called the Pembroke Tavern.

“They had a sign behind the bar that said Bitcoin Accepted Here. That's when it registered with me. I went home and Googled it and that was it, I was so impressed.”

Turner of Mt. Gox collapse pushed Bitcoin into the headlines with interest, but he began investing in BTC in 2014 after seeing the resilience of Bitcoin as a decentralized protocol despite the failure of the largest centralized exchange at the time.

“The technology and the foundation has proven to be sound. It's just these centralized entities that are broken.”

A few years later, Turner became a founding member of the Coin Bureau along with Nick Puckrin. Describing his co-founder and friend as a former Goldman Sachs banker who went down the crypto “rabbit hole”, the couple saw a gap in the market for a blog focused on quality crypto educational content.

“From what I noticed firsthand, when I started doing research, there was a lot out there, but most of it wasn't well documented,” Turner says.

RELATED: Man and Machine: Nansen Analytics Slowly Names Global Wallets

Within a few years, the blog became a top-ranked site for educational content, but it ran into trouble when Google changed its algorithm. According to Turner, the Coin Office dropped its search pages and “essentially ceased to exist.”

In order to save what has been built, Turner suggests that other crypto channels start to pop up and go the “YouTube way” when they agree to become a channel host.

Coin Office Video Content had humble beginnings shot with an entry-level camera in a friend's living room. The group tried to focus on “substance over style” and began to see visual growth around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Things quickly snowballed as millions of people stuck at home took to the internet to entertain and educate themselves as lockdowns came into effect.

“All these people who were curious but didn't have time to do it suddenly did. So we started growing.”

The numbers quickly added up. The page surpassed 10,000 subscribers, then 100,000, then a quarter-million. As of January 2024, Coin Office has 2.38 million subscribers on YouTube.

The brand is now well-known among crypto enthusiasts, Turner recalls, noting that at Bitcoin Miami 2023 their content and image were making a big impression.

“We were outside next to that huge bull, and my colleague was saying, ‘I'm surprised anyone recognized us.' “I turned around, and there was a guy sitting six feet away wearing one of those t-shirts,” Turner explains.

The channel's content has evolved into a “macro focus” that ties tightly to cryptocurrency and blockchain themes. Turner highlights the need for content that explores these topics as emerging macroeconomic and traditional financial events impact the crypto ecosystem.

Driving awareness about the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem and some common misconceptions is another goal for the coin office. High-profile industry failures such as the FTX collapse are prime examples, according to Turner:

“I think it's important to make sure the lessons are learned and that these are the failures of individuals and centralized companies, not crypto or blockchain technology.”

The channel will continue to educate individual users about the importance of cryptocurrency self-preservation and support industry-wide best practices for protecting user funds, Turner said.

Magazine: Slumdog Billionaire: The Incredible Rags-to-Rich Story of Polygon Sandeep Nelwal