Take My Bitcoin...Please! A Comedian Mines the Currency for Laughs

Margaux Avedisian entered the worlds of comedy (via an open-mic night) and bitcoin on the same day in 2012. Illustration: Gary Hovland for The Wall Street Journal

“Do we have any libertarians in the house?”

The comedian, Margaux Avedisian, is setting up her audience.

“You must be so happy with this administration,” she continues, after maybe half the 50 audience members cheer. “It actually makes Gary Johnson look like not a bad idea. But he’s like Bitcoin Unlimited—never gonna happen.”

There’s a smattering of laughter, but it’s drowned out by the mild gasps and “oohs” that come from the audience. With this crowd, any offense taken isn’t in response to the reference to Mr. Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s 2016 presidential candidate. Instead, the audience is reacting to the knock against Bitcoin Unlimited, a software update that is controversial in the cryptocurrency’s community.

If you aren’t laughing—or don’t even get the joke—that’s understandable. It was told at a cryptocurrency conference, and it’s fair to say that Ms. Avedisian’s is a specialized form of comedy, written by a bitcoin nerd, for other bitcoin nerds.

“I’ve been in crypto since 2012. It was the first time I worked in an industry where compared with everyone else, I was the sane and rational person.”

‘Bitcoin audiences are open to being made fun of,’ says cryptocomedian Margaux Avedisian. Photo: Jonathon Marin

The 33-year-old Ms. Avedisian is a bitcoin investor, founder of two bitcoin-related companies and an adviser and director at others. But what sets her apart is this unique job title: bitcoin comedian. She performed in May at Consensus 2017, a New York conference dedicated to all things bitcoin and blockchain (that’s the ledger used for bitcoin transactions), where no explanations for her jokes were needed.

Ms. Avedisian has traveled the world using bitcoin, accepts tips in the form of the cryptocurrency and has worked at every level of the industry. She has been dubbed, by herself and others, the Queen of Bitcoin, a nickname she wants to shed. “Because I don’t have that much bitcoin,” she says, “and because I’d like to not get kidnapped.”

“It’s not a crypto conference without someone who is, like, in prison or banned from the country.”

Ms. Avedisian entered comedy and bitcoin on the same day in 2012, and both decisions were largely impulsive. She has no formal performance training but was curious, so she signed up for an open-mic night. After her set, she went to a party and met a founder of Tradehill, an early bitcoin exchange. “They were looking for a business-development person, were going to a meeting in San Diego, and had an extra seat on the plane,” she says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ ”

The move to technology wasn’t out of left field. Though she studied psychology and chemistry at Mount Holyoke College, and was trained and certified as an emergency medical technician, Ms. Avedisian also worked at a variety of startups in San Francisco, including Answer in 30, a video-based information service she co-founded.

Wild West adventure

“I got a little jaded—how many photo-sharing apps do we really need?” she says. “But bitcoin seemed like something that really could disrupt the world and change finance, things that could really have a large impact. And it was such a Wild West that you could help shape it as well.”

When Tradehill shut its doors later that year, Ms. Avedisian went on to co-found AlphaPoint Exchange, a financial-software company specializing in digital-currency networks, where she also served as chief executive officer. She stayed there only three months, then co-founded another company, MonetaGo Inc., which works with financial institutions on blockchain-related issues.

“She’s like Zelig,” says Michael Terpin, referring to the Woody Allen character who finds himself at every pivotal moment of the Jazz Age. Mr. Terpin is chief executive of Transform Group, a public-relations firm that focuses on companies that deal with new technologies.

Ms. Avedisian is currently a vice president at Transform, but it was at MonetaGo that she began combining her comedy with her work, starting a weekly comedy show at New York’s Bitcoin Center—an educational and promotional site for the currency—that lasted about two years.

“We initially laughed about it: ‘You’re going to tell jokes about bitcoin? That plays?’ ” says Jesse Chenard, CEO of MonetaGo. “But the best comedy is what you live, and she lives bitcoin.”

Her material has never been exclusively bitcoin-related. She has booked spots at a variety of venues, doing routines about Florida and San Francisco, as well as her experiences on dating apps and being a woman in tech.

“If everyone had a reference to what bitcoin was, it’d be a lot easier to do jokes about it outside the context of a conference,” Ms. Avedisian says. Meanwhile, bitcoin-specific audiences pose unique issues. “They’re nerds, so typically they’re not the most gregarious audience, and the community can be very cliquish,” she says. “I find I get more of a reaction if I roast the audience a bit or reference things that are more obscure.”

The Antonopoulos joke

Those references to things that are obscure to bitcoin outsiders become a sort of inside joke. For example, the setup to one of her Consensus jokes—“I was in a car with Andreas Antonopoulos, ” a major figure in the industry—got a bigger laugh than the punchline, about why they weren’t in a nicer car given the amount of digital currencies he holds.

“Bitcoin audiences are open to being made fun of; God knows they’ve been the butt of the joke for seven years,” Mr. Chenard says before Ms. Avedisian’s Consensus performance. “There’s a whole raft of comedy—or tragedy—that can be created out of the fact that this is literally digital gold, created out of nothing. Of course, it must be easier to have a thick skin when the digital gold you spent $10,000 on is now worth $2 million.”

Ms. Avedisian agrees, and then jumps on a table to begin her set in front of the bitcoin crowd. “I’m very honored to be here, ’cause this may be the last comedy show some of you see before you are jailed.”

Mr. Vlastelica is a markets reporter at MarketWatch in New York. Email him at rvlastelica@marketwatch.com.