Randi Hipper expects the work she does today to look strange in twenty years. The founder of Miss Teen Crypto, who started posting about bitcoin at 17, told me at Bitcoin Amsterdam that people will one day ask whether she really went to conferences around the world “just to tell people what Bitcoin is”. That future question is the reason she keeps going: “What I’m doing right now isn’t for me. It isn’t for right now. It’s for later.”
She came to the Cryptofocus booth at the SugarFactory in Halfweg on Friday 6 November, shortly after the 14:30 Orange Stage panel “Creating a Bitcoin Brand” with Lea Thompson, Alejandra Guajardo and Neil Jacobs. That morning she had been on the 11:15 panel “Making Bitcoin More Accessible for the Masses” with Claire Chisholm, Kelly Ann Collins and Staci Costopoulos, and on Thursday she gave “Bitcoin 101” on the Proof-of-Work Stage, according to the Bitcoin Amsterdam agenda. She hosted one of the Friday panels and sat on the other, she wrote on X afterwards. Both were on the stage I MC on Friday, so I introduced them.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Randi Hipper is a digital asset educator from New York. She started Miss Teen Crypto in April 2020, when she was 17, and spoke three times at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026: "Bitcoin 101" on Thursday and two Orange Stage panels on Friday. |
| 2She said her father first told her about bitcoin in 2016, when she was 13, and that her first transaction at 16 showed her it was "simply a QR code". |
| 3She said she was on Fox Business by the time she was 18 and is still on it, and that her goal is to "spark the biggest revolution in history, the most peaceful one". |
| 4My read: her case for bitcoin rests on safety and freedom, and the story of how she kept going at 17 carries it further than any price chart would. |
The full conversation runs 21 and a half minutes. On camera I told viewers that our videos usually run eight to ten minutes at most.
From a QR code at 16 to Fox Business at 18
I asked how she got from a teenager with a microphone to the stages of Bitcoin Amsterdam. She started at home:
10 years ago, my father told me about Bitcoin, and I was 13 years old. It was 2016. I thought he was crazy. Like, what do you mean? I thought it was a stock. I didn’t think I could do anything with it.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
The moment it clicked was practical. At 16, in 2019, she made her first transaction and found that it was “simply a QR code, copy, paste a username. You can send money to anyone, anywhere in the world.” Her bank account did the rest. She had grown up being told that money in the bank earns money, and the few hundred dollars in her account did not:
And I discovered that I didn’t earn any interest. And I compared how far my dollar went versus my parents. And it’s astronomically different. So I decided to put my money in Bitcoin.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
The brand came a year later. In April 2020 she was 17, a junior in high school who loved school, and without it she needed something else to do. “So one morning I woke up and Miss Teen Crypto came to my head and I saw it was available on every platform, took it, started posting.” By her account she was one of the first creators to mint NFTs, in October and November 2020, and she asked strangers in the streets of Manhattan whether they knew about bitcoin. By 18 she was on Fox Business and teaching at middle schools, high schools, colleges, Ivy League universities and to adults.
Read the thread on X
Why she calls her work something for later
Her explanation of why she still teaches the basics went back to elementary school, where a weekly computer class taught pupils to make PowerPoint slides. Today, she said, every Instagram carousel is a PowerPoint, which makes that class look redundant. She expects the same of bitcoin:
In 20 years from now, people are going to say, was she really going to conferences all around the world just to tell people what Bitcoin is and what the blockchain is when it’s literally everywhere? So what I’m doing right now isn’t for me. It isn’t for right now. It’s for later because this is a revolution of being able to have money and energy and time that’s value and that nobody could take from you.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
To show that the stakes were bigger than prices from the start, she pointed to the message satoshi-nakamoto/" data-term-title="Satoshi Nakamoto" role="button" tabindex="0">Satoshi Nakamoto left in bitcoin’s first block, a newspaper headline about a second bank bailout that the genesis block still carries. “This is bigger than just money. This is bigger than greed. This is a revolution.”
That framing explains her programme at this conference. “Bitcoin 101” is the session a bitcoin-only crowd might assume it has outgrown, and she gave it on the first morning. Her bet is that the people who still need it will keep arriving.
The counsellor who said she would make it
I asked what has kept her going. “I just don’t give up,” she said, “and I think that’s probably the Brooklyn in me that just never stops.” Then she told the story that became our first short. In her junior year a guidance counsellor stopped her to ask if she was all right, because students and teachers were talking about her over bitcoin. She told him they just did not understand, and he agreed:
And he was the only person that told me, he’s like, Randi, you’re going to make it. You’re going to be the one that makes it.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
She called it one of the pivotal moments of her life, at a time when, in her words, “family, friends, I lost like everything talking about Bitcoin.” She did not go to college, because her family could not afford to send her, and she held on to what she called a dream instead.
When I asked whether the road had been harder as a woman, she said yes, at the beginning:
When I first came on Twitter, at the time it was Twitter and I was posting, and people started to speculate, is she real? Is she fake? And, you know, it wasn’t exactly welcoming at the beginning, but that fueled my fire even more because for some reason I love when people doubt me.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
Age was the other hurdle: at 17, she said, people looked at her as a kid and wondered why they would pay one, or put one on a stage. Her answer was to keep asking. She reached out to every conference, and she went after Charles Payne of Fox Business the same way: “I was 18 years old blowing up his DMs blowing up his comments saying give me a chance give me a chance. He gave me a chance.” Five or six years later she is still on Fox Business, and she told me about recent specials she made for it, one on how Gen Z makes money and, a few months earlier, one on bitcoin and crypto.
Money that cannot be taken away
She lives in the United States, so I asked how it feels to fly home to a country where the landscape for digital money has changed so quickly. “I think going back home, there’s more of a necessity for it than ever,” she said, and went back to the debanking she saw in 2020, around the elections:
But how can they take away your speech is by taking away your money. So that way you can’t go ahead and purchase things to fuel your revolution. So it was like financially starving you in a way.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
“So I saw right then and there that we need money that’s censorship resistant, something that can’t be taken from us,” she said. She separates bitcoin from the crypto hacks in the news, which in her view hit “the surrounding parts” such as wallets and exchanges, not the technology itself. And she reminded me how short memories are when it comes to banks. She mentioned five bank failures in a row in 2023, and the FDIC’s list of failed banks shows five US failures that year, starting with Silicon Valley Bank in March. Her conclusion: “your Bitcoin is guaranteed because you hold it, you custody it, and it’s verifiable.”
The most peaceful revolution
I asked how she keeps a rebuttal positive when the news turns negative, since you cannot fight negativity with more of it. She answered with energy, and with Bob Marley, whose music, she said, made listeners from the US to Jamaica feel the need for a peaceful revolution and changed how they think. “And Bitcoin does the same thing where it’s literally verifiable energy,” she said. “And once they have Bitcoin, they use it, they understand it, then it changes the way they think about money.”
Her case against fiat money is that it needs force behind it. With bitcoin, she said, “there’s no weapon needed to defend that currency and that energy. It’s peaceful.” That is the point where she spoke for her generation:
And so I think people are sick and tired of fighting, especially my generation. They don’t want to go out and hurt other people. They just want to be heard and they want to feel safe. And I feel safe when my money is in Bitcoin in my own wallet.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
I asked for her deepest wish for the next year, in one line. She gave me one: “I’m trying to spark the biggest revolution in history, the most peaceful one.” When I asked whether a revolution without a war is possible, she said yes, “because people’s voices are a lot louder than they think,” and compared it to standing up to the bullies in her schoolyard:
We’re a lot stronger than we think we are. We just have to open our mouths and be confident when we do it.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
Is Miss Teen Crypto rebranding?
Her route onto stages like this one was the same as her route onto television. She has been asking the Bitcoin conference for years to put her on its stages to “preach the Bitcoin for beginner stuff because I want people to understand this technology,” and she described what a newcomer sees on a floor like this one: “Walking into this conference, you see great panels, great people. But what is it? How can I actually use it?” Doors were often shut, she said, until organisers decided to “let this girl take it” and see what she had. Bitcoin Vegas and Hong Kong came before Amsterdam, and Nashville is the next stage she has in mind.
People who meet her now tend to miss the years before, she said: “they didn’t see I sacrificed the college experience,” or the years on minimum wage while she supported her family. So I asked the question her name invites, now that she is no longer a teenager. Is she going to rebrand? Yes, she said, but the name stays. She cannot change the handle on all those platforms, and she calls it “my genesis”:
And I think it shows my longevity and how my persistence that I didn’t give up and that I grew up on the internet and I want that story to be told.
Randi Hipper, Miss Teen Crypto
What changes is the scope. “I’m working towards financial education in general as well,” she said. A teenager’s crypto channel growing into a broader education in money fits her own forecast for bitcoin: when the basics are everywhere, the lesson moves on to what to do with them. The question for the next few years is how fast that happens. Until then she plans to keep answering the one she imagines a newcomer asking on this floor: how can I actually use it?
Read next
- All our interviews from Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, recorded on both days at the SugarFactory.
- Alejandra Guajardo of Miss Bitcoin was on the same “Creating a Bitcoin Brand” panel, and explains how many Salvadorans actually use bitcoin.
- Kelly Ann Collins of SheCrypto was on her 11:15 panel about making bitcoin accessible, and says many women in crypto may go unseen.
- Lea Thompson of Cake Wallet moderated the branding panel and talks about newcomers who have never set up a Lightning wallet.
- Randi Hipper is at missteencrypto.com, on X and on YouTube.
I recorded the interview with Randi Hipper at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, at the SugarFactory in Halfweg, on 6 November 2026. Quotes are verbatim, with filler removed. Cryptofocus is a media partner of Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026; I moderated a panel there on 5 November and am the MC of the Orange Stage on 6 November. Nothing here is financial advice.
