The Story That Started Quietly

It all begins with an idea. Sometimes it’s noble, sometimes it’s just curiosity. Tom Klaffky once had the idea for a coin called Bigcoin, but lawyers shut it down before it could see the light of day. That could have been the end of the story. Instead, it became the seed of something much bigger.

I heard about it and started building quietly. The code wasn’t entirely new — it was similar to what I had written for a few hedge funds. If you focused on the 2–5 year low-grade portion of the Broad Investment Grade Index, you could generate consistent returns of 15–25% without annual drawdowns. Why? Because of the way analysts operate, and the way indexes create their own selection and deselection bias.

Names have always been part of the fun. Salomon wanted to call it $BIG, after the Broad Investment Grade Index. Bell Labs pitched “BIT Token,” a nod to their Information Technologies division. JR even tried to brand it the “JR Token.” The truth is, Bigcoin stuck because it felt inevitable. Patterns get recognized, and once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

The story of Bigcoin isn’t about hype. It’s about persistence. It’s about finding structure in the noise, and giving that structure a name people remember.