(13/16) Non-fungible by Nature
(13/?) The following post is part 13 of a super long story about how I came around to crypto. Part 12 can be found here. Part 14.
After a bit of deliberation, I decided I wanted to try my hand at teaching. I called a couple of schools in East Oakland and got a call back within about 30 minutes. They brought me in for an interview on a Friday and they were looking for a teacher to start on Monday. I had NO idea what I was doing but I knew that anything would be better for me than staring at a computer all day.
It was a tough transition and I questioned myself a lot during that first weekend, but I loved it. The kids were the kids, and it took me a minute to find my footing, but eventually, I realized that I loved it. I talked about Bitcoin WITH middle schoolers in East Oakland. I taught some how to code. I taught others about traveling the world. I took a group of them to Facebook (that’s us in front of the FB sign in Menlo Park - I’m on the left below) so they could learn about the *perks* of staring at a computer all day…
Apart from the kids, the *teachers* I was working alongside had known nothing BUT education and teaching - so they found me and my past experience to be extremely interesting. I remember sitting down with several teachers and aides just talking with them about Bitcoin. I sat with them and walked them through their first Bitcoin purchases. It’s funny because even to this day, people I worked with 5+ years ago still hit me up thanking me for getting them into Crypto.
Even though I’d talk with people about crypto and walk them through it, I didn’t touch any of my wallets and rarely looked at my exchange accounts. I knew it was there, but also knew that if I focused on it, I’d just feel like a disillusioned idiot all over again. So I bided my time. I knew this stuff was gonna pop off again, I just didn’t know when. My Wall Street experience told me to correlate it with Gold and Commodities, but that proved to be erroneous. I really thought things were gonna pop off at the start of the pandemic, but they didn’t. And I couldn’t really understand why. But, again, I wasn’t spending all that much time thinking about it.
I want to say I dipped my toes in the NBA Top Shot market after that massive WSJ article - and that’s only relevant because I think it was one of the factors that contributed to the crypto markets picking back up - but I didn’t recognize it at the time, nor did I put much thought or effort into it.
I had been following the Reddit ‘wallstreetbets’ thing when all the movement with GME and AMC happened and I was transfixed. I was stoked. Finally, the little guy was putting these hedge funds in their place. But…something happened…the little guy was winning and the main trading platform, Robinhood, took some steps to mitigate risk. Again, the corruption was getting under my skin. I simply could not believe that Robinhood had gotten away with what they got away with - they *stopped* people from trading GME and AMC - so I made it known that anyone who I knew who was in on Robinhood should get out immediately. I was proud of the Reddit guys and I was really proud that they screwed over the banks (who were just trying to screw over the markets). And listening to the talking heads in the media talking down on these regular people who had outsmarted a bunch of corporate crooks just infuriated me. I would have thought more people would have supported what was going on, but I dunno if most people even knew what was going on. Again, I was apoplectic. And everyone in the media was spewing this bullshit about how great the (traditional) markets were and I was SO over it and wondering (again) when Bitcoin was going to enter the public consciousness (again). I was ready but very trepidatious.
It’s actually my cousin who shook me out of my slumber. One morning at about 6 am he texted me: ‘J, can you buy me some Doge? I heard Reddit army is getting ready to run it up.’
A couple of years earlier - When I first heard about Dogecoin - I felt personally insulted that anyone would make a ‘meme coin’. My worldview, again, made into a mockery. But I watched it go and I watched it grow and it was actually being used for transactions. For months (years?) I had been thinking of buying Dogecoin as a longshot but never got around to building up the nerve (because I couldn’t bear to look at my decimated accounts). So that text from my cousin got the wheels of my memory turning again on how this stuff worked. I felt it was as good a time as any to dust off the old notebook and put a few bucks into. Shitcoins indeed.
Click here to get to part 14.