‘Bitcoin accepted here’: How Coin Bureau’s 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. The host of the educational channel Coin Bureau is a recognizable face who has garnered a reputation for delivering witty, entertaining and insightful content.
Speaking to Cointelegraph during the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference in October 2023, Turner recounted his journey into crypto and how Coin Bureau successfully transitioned from a blog-only platform to a video content powerhouse.
Having studied English at university, Turner spent several years teaching corporate writing before discovering Bitcoin (BTC) in 2013 at a local pub in East London called the Pembroke Tavern:
“They had a sign behind the bar saying ‘Bitcoin accepted here.’ That’s the moment it first sort of registered with me. I went home and Googled a bit further, and that was it — I was fascinated.”
Turner watched with interest as the collapse of Mt. Gox thrust Bitcoin into the headlines, but only began investing in BTC in 2014 after seeing Bitcoin’s resilience as a decentralized protocol despite the failing of the largest centralized exchange at the time:
“It showed the technology and its fundamentals are sound. It’s just these centralized elements that it’s relying on that faltered.”
A couple of years later, Turner became a founding member of Coin Bureau alongside Nic Puckrin. Describing his co-founder and friend as a former Goldman Sachs banker who went down the crypto “rabbit hole,” the pair eyed a gap in the market for a blog focused on quality crypto educational content.
“One of the things that I noticed fairly straight off was when I started researching it, there was a lot of material out there, but not much of it was very well written,” Turner explained.
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In a couple of years, the blog became a top-ranked site for educational content but hit a snag when Google changed its algorithm. Coin Bureau dropped down the search pages and “basically ceased to exist,” as Turner recounted.
In an effort to salvage what had been built, Turner suggested going down “the YouTube route” as other crypto channels began to emerge and ended up agreeing to be the channel’s presenter.
Coin Bureau's video content had humble beginnings, shot with an entry-level camera in a friend’s living room. The team tried to focus on “substance over style” and began see growth in views around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Things snowballed quickly from there as millions of home-bound people took to the internet to entertain and educate themselves while lockdowns took effect:
“All these people who were crypto-curious but hadn’t had 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 of a million. As of January 2024, Coin Bureau has 2.38 million subscribers on YouTube.
The brand is now widely recognized by crypto enthusiasts, with Turner recalling how Bitcoin Miami in 2023 hammered home the realization that the content and his likeness were making an impression.
“We were outside the venue near that huge bull, and my colleague was like, ‘I wonder if anyone will recognize us.’ I turned around, and a guy was sitting about six feet away wearing one of our T-shirts,” Turner explained.
The channel’s content has shifted to a “macro focus” that maintains a solid connection to cryptocurrency and blockchain themes. Turner highlighted how the growing influence of macroeconomics and traditional finance events affects the crypto ecosystem, necessitating content exploring these topics.
Driving an understanding of the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem and some common misconceptions is another goal for Coin Bureau. High-profile industry failures like the collapse of FTX are prime examples, according to Turner:
“I think it is important to make sure the lessons are learned and hammer home that these are failures of individuals and centralized companies, not of crypto or blockchain technology.”
The channel will also continue to educate individual users on the importance of cryptocurrency self-custody and advocate for industrywide best practices to safeguard user funds, Turner said.
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