Editor's note: We're happy to say we know the guy who owned the domain name WallStreet.com first... But we can't say we're as happy as he was when he sold that domain back in 1999 for $1 million – after buying it for just $7 only a few years earlier.

You see, our colleague Eric Wade has a knack for being "first" to things. And that can often pay big-time...

A former stockbroker, Eric turned his attention to Internet-related businesses back in the 1990s. Today, he's "all in" on the cryptocurrency world, and has quickly established himself as one of the foremost experts in the space.

Eric runs our Crypto Capital newsletter, and we haven't come across anyone who knows more about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This year alone, for instance, Eric's subscribers have booked eight triple-digit winners trading cryptos using his recommendations, and he says there's much more upside ahead.

In this weekend's Masters Series, we're featuring a November 2019 profile of Eric from our friends at American Consequences magazine. It's about Eric's incredible journey over the past two-plus decades, why he believes the case for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is so compelling, and which trends to watch today.

We'll share the beginning of the story today and the conclusion tomorrow. It starts with Eric's long history of firsts...

On Being First, Again and Again

By Steven Longenecker, publisher, American Consequences

Eric Wade is waiting at the Las Vegas resort when I arrive – sitting at a table with his wife of 28 years, Ana Montoya-Wade.

He's shorter than you might expect from his appearances on stage and television. But his salt-and-pepper hair, one strand escaping over his eye, combines with an unbuttoned white shirt and a light jacket to give him a rakish look.

He confides later that he cuts his own hair. He has a twin brother... who he shot. He's written a dozen feature movie scripts and even sold one to Adam Sandler. He spent years at Merrill Lynch and held Series 3, 6, 7, 63, and 65 licenses, ran an advertising firm in Laguna Beach, and owned a live music venue in the shadow of Paramount Studios.

Wade was in Vegas at an investment conference to give his perspective as an early bitcoin pioneer... and to share what's next for it and other cryptocurrencies.

But as we talked, it became clear that his enthusiasm for bitcoin was only his latest adventure in a long, long line of firsts...

Million-Dollar Nickname

Wade's first brush with fame was in the mid-1990s.

At the time, he was a financial manager with Merrill Lynch, the largest retail brokerage in America. Despite calling Albuquerque, New Mexico home, he went by the nickname "Wall Street" – and with the advent of the Internet, he needed a good e-mail address. So he and a friend plunked down $7 to register the domain wallstreet.com...

"Sometimes when you see a good opportunity, you don't buy it having fully recognized all of the values it will eventually turn into, right? At the time that we bought wallstreet.com, it was solving a problem – I needed a good e-mail address. And I immediately went from this horrible AOL address to eric@wallstreet.com."

But like cryptocurrency, being early was an incredible opportunity. "We started getting e-mails, people saying, 'Hey, I'll buy that from you.' And the value of it just mushroomed after that."

In 1999, Wade became the first seller of a domain name for more than $1 million.

He received press ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Wired and PC Magazine. His prediction at the time in the Washington Post looks prescient now... "This is only the beginning," he said. "These dot-com names are the Rodeo Drive and Fifth Avenue addresses of our industry. Once they are gone, they can't be replaced."

The book The Domain Game: How People Get Rich From Internet Domain Names put it this way:

[WallStreet.com] was an ideal name for many different businesses, from an investment bank to a financial news outlet. And it drew a lot of traffic. "Between 4,000 and 17,000 people a day would just type 'Wall Street' into their browser," Wade said. "We called it background noise. People were just typing it in to see what would happen." Wade's wife, Ana Montoya-Wade, likened the domain to the "most prime beachfront property on the Internet."

As Wade points out, though, "The only way we got $1 million for wallstreet.com is we said no to $60,000, we said no to $250,000, we said no to $500,000. And then, at $1 million, you say, 'OK, that's it – we'll take it.'"

Of course, not every early venture is a success...

The Only Plane in the Sky

It was September 13, 2001. A plume of gray smoke and dust still rose from the Twin Towers. And Wade was flying in the only plane in the sky.

All other civilian air traffic in the U.S. had been grounded – a precaution against further terrorist hijackings – but the Federal Aviation Administration had authorized this one flight from Albuquerque to New York. On board was a rescue team that hoped it could help find bodies underneath the World Trade Center rubble.

Wade was a former stockbroker, an investor, and entrepreneur. He didn't have rescue experience. But some months prior to the September 11 tragedy, a filmmaker friend had reached out about a documentary about rescuing people after disasters hit. And in late August, a group attached to the documentary approached Wade with a new machine that could help find bodies.

The timing seemed serendipitous. As Wade said, "9/11 hit – within a few days of looking at the investment. And so they said, 'We're going to Ground Zero with this box to see whether we could help there.'"

The invention was meant to be a "dog in a box" of sorts... replacing a dog's incredible sense of smell with a package that could be quickly shipped in quantity to disasters around the world – like rural India or Asia – where it would be difficult to get trained dogs.

But soon, they realized the box couldn't hit the same level of accuracy as a dog. "The minute you realize that, there's nothing that we can do here. Let me just get a shovel or something – help any way I can," says Wade.

"We were shoulder-to-shoulder with the crews who were trying to dig stuff out – but there was also so much death all around," Wade says. "And you're looking at the firemen that risked their lives, the police, and the nurses... And in some respect, there was almost nobody to help. And then you leave the site and there are throngs of New Yorkers who are aching for something to appreciate. And they're appreciating you for being there, and you're like 'I didn't help,' right? 'I'm here, I'm trying to help, but I didn't help.'"

"He was different when he got back," his wife says.

Wade nods. "It was this event in your development where you're thinking 'this is the solution'... and then it's not. It was overwhelming," says Wade. "It's still very emotional for me. It's heartbreaking."

Too Early for Billions

Failure is part of being first, explains Wade.

Sometimes, the big wins only come because you say no to small wins along the way – like with the $1 million sale of wallstreet.com. Other times, being "early" isn't enough, and a latecomer ends up with the gains.

In the dot-com heyday, Wade helped found a startup with a promising future. It was an early pioneer in Voice over Internet Protocol ("VoIP") chat... the technology that today powers Skype, Google Talk, and the iPhone's FaceTime.

His wife gives him a hard time about its name... "Really Easy Internet."

"Intuitively, it sounded like it was a good solution... Let's make something that's hard, easy. But that wasn't a selling point enough to overcome that the market wasn't ready for it," says Wade. The group raised $2.5 million in venture capital but shut down in 2001 when the dot-com boom turned into the dot-com bust.

"The saddest part was that what we had invented was something that was just too early. It was a voice over Internet. And eventually it became something like Skype, but we were too early, when nobody cared."

Skype was founded a few years later. It ultimately sold to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion.

That's around when Wade was discovering his next major opportunity, at a stage when almost no one could have guessed just how big it would get...

Editor's note: We'll be back with the second part of Eric's story tomorrow. In the meantime, be sure to listen to more from Eric in our recent "Capitalism in Crisis" presentation from our founder Porter Stansberry...

Eric joins Porter about halfway through this free event to talk more about how he got into the bitcoin and cryptocurrency world, and where he sees it heading next. You'll also hear why Porter says a bet on bitcoin is "the ultimate asymmetric bet" of today and why it's a great answer to the Federal Reserve's endless easy money policies.

Thousands of subscribers have already watched the video featuring Porter and Eric. If you haven't yet, you can watch it right now for free here.