(10/16) Non-fungible by Nature
(10/) The following post is part 10 of a super long story about how I came around to crypto. Part 9 can be found here. Part 11.
A year or two later into my new ‘career’ as a Web Developer, I was really digging into how things worked. Crypto was something I wanted to at least understand on a more technical level, but it was hard for me to do so without owning any. I eventually found out that an old high school buddy had accumulated a bit through some early mining, so I began buying small amounts digitally directly through him…I’d send him a few bucks via PayPal, he’d hit me off with the market rate for whatever I sent him. Looking back at my transaction history, I bought about a few hundred bucks worth and promptly started testing it all out…spending on this, on that, all largely forgettable transactions. There was definitely a learning curve and it was all terrifying but also kind of exhilarating. Now if someone would just accept this stuff for real-world transactions, I think we’d be golden…
I mean, we had all heard of the Bitcoin pizza story, and today the whole thing looks absurd and monumentally stupid, but what it did do was essential for any new idea: it validated it.
It was mid-2015 when Ethereum came out…I had heard about Ethereum for a little while and I think I heard it referred to as ‘Bitcoin on steroids’ built by some 19-year-old kid from Russia, so when I heard it was available for purchase I desperately wanted to figure out how to do so…I hit up my friend and asked him what the deal was - apparently if you had one bitcoin a few months prior, you could trade it for 2000 ETH in the pre-mining stage. I didn’t have anywhere near a full BTC to trade, so I had to wait until it hit the market…and…what was the market? Mt. Gox was shut down and there wasn’t a Coinbase or anything you could go to just buy some... A few days after it hit, I bought a few dollars worth of BTC from my buddy, then hit up my buddy from the previous posts (the guy from Reno). He told me I could buy some on Poloniex, where it was currently trading for around $2. I didn’t know what Poloniex was, but I typed it into my browser and it was just a crude website with a bunch of charts and confusing symbols. And it had a ‘trollbox’. Huh?
Thankfully, it wasn’t all that intimidating to me (as I was used to looking at charts from my Wall Street days), and I managed to figure out how to purchase some by the end of the day. It wasn’t much, but it felt like a lot…up until that point I hadn’t bought anything ‘virtual’ in my life. That shift was difficult for me, but I was determined. So I totally understand why people ask that question - why should I spend *real* money on something that isn’t actually *tangible*? I remember after buying it asking my friend ‘hey what do I do with this now?’ and he was like ‘nothing. Just wait until they build some apps.’ Great.
I was also feverishly working on The Sneaker Savant’s grading algorithm + physical products + a new job at a new startup + I was a new dad and all of these things were just happening. I forgot about what little I was holding until my buddy hit me up -
him: ‘hey, did you ever get in on ETH?’
me: ‘yeah, a little bit’
him: ‘check the price’
me: ‘where?’
him: ‘coinmarketcap.com’
My first time seeing coinmarketcap was a revelation…finally, someone had built something where this stuff could be tracked (they actually built it in 2013, but I had only just discovered it). But that wasn’t what I was looking for - when I saw the rankings - ETH was now around $5! My initial $100 had doubled and I was suddenly sitting on $200! Way better than anything I had invested in while on Wall Street.
Thing is, crypto wasn’t like at the forefront of my mind. Again, I thought it was cool and, I thought it had the potential to change the world, but I didn’t see the rest of the world buying into that idea. A few people I talked to had heard of it, a fewer people actively pursued it, but the vast majority of people had no idea what the hell I was talking about.
And I had finally put my money where my mouth was. I finally bought in.
Continued with part 11.