Cryptopia: Bitcoin, Blockchains and the Future of the Internet

Hoffmann's follow-up to his 2015 documentary widens the lens from Bitcoin to the broader blockchain ecosystem: Ethereum, smart contracts, ICOs, scaling debates, and the early promise of what would later be called Web3. It is more skeptical and more reflective than most crypto documentaries, in part because Hoffmann himself appears on camera as an investor wrestling with whether any of this is going to work.

Who it's for

Viewers who already know what Bitcoin is and want a tour of the wider landscape circa 2019, including the ideological split between Bitcoin maximalists and Ethereum-and-everything-else proponents. It's a good film for someone whose mental model of crypto stopped at "digital gold" and who needs context for why people care about programmable blockchains too.

What it does well

The interview list is unusually broad and includes real critics. Hoffmann talks to Vitalik Buterin, Andreas Antonopoulos, Laura Shin, and various builders, but also to skeptics and to academics. The Bitcoin-versus-Ethereum sections are notably even-handed: he lets maximalists make their case, then lets Ethereum developers respond, and doesn't pretend the disagreement isn't real.

The film also does something rare for the genre: it lingers on the social and governance questions. Who runs these networks? Who decides what gets built? What happens when the answer is "a small group of mostly young men on Twitter"? Those threads make it more interesting than the average explainer.

Where it falls short

The structure is loose and occasionally meandering — by the time you reach the third "and here is another thing blockchains might do" sequence, it can feel like a long video essay rather than a tight documentary. Some of the future-of-the-internet material has aged awkwardly: a lot of the 2019 Web3 enthusiasm did not survive 2022.

There's also a recurring problem with all of these films: the technical explanations are necessarily shallow. If you actually want to understand what a smart contract is, you'll need to read after watching. As a survey of the state of the conversation around 2019, though, it's one of the better entries in the genre.