(7/16) Non-fungible by Nature

(7/) The following post is part 7 of a super long story about how I came around to crypto. Part 6 can be found here. Part 8 can be found here.

I don’t totally remember when I first heard about Bitcoin, but I know it was right around the time I left Wall Street, completely disillusioned with the financial markets - the industry on which I had built the beginning of my ‘career’ on for the past 7 years. I still had a bad taste in my mouth after it all, so I was looking for something…ANYTHING…to give me hope that this wasn’t all that there was. I DO remember, though, that when I did learn about Bitcoin, the only person that I could talk with about it was this guy I used to hang out with in high school - an ex-juvenile delinquent with who I worked with a few summers as an apprentice plumber.

This guy had also learned a bit about Bitcoin and found it as compelling as I had, but from a slightly different perspective. I was coming at it from the finance side, while he was totally plugged into the matrix fascinated with any and everything going on with the internet. We had a million conversations - I’d stop by his place around downtown Reno and we’d just shoot the shit for hours on end. Or I’d pick him up and we’d dip out to the river and talk about news we had heard. Or he’d come out to where I was staying - at my parent’s house up in Virginia City. Through conversation after conversation - we really were just trying to build an app - but this Bitcoin stuff was just too compelling. Neither of us really understood how to get our hands on our Bitcoin, but we did know that in order to get any we would have to send actual USD sight unseen to someone random, and that kind of scared us. Plus, neither of us were really making enough money to justify any kind of unnecessary risk, so we just decided to watch it unfold from a distance.

A year or so rolls on by, and I’m paying attention from the fringes, but still not participating. I started working at Intuit in Reno, Nevada, and because I had developed a bit more interest in tech and had recently moved back to the West Coast, I decided to apply to one of those ‘coding boot camps’ that were huge in like 2012/2013. I enrolled in one for January 2013 and spent the next 3 months learning all I could about coding on the internet. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to land me a job.

While I was in the boot camp, Bitcoin made its first real run…at least ‘real’ in the sense that the media started paying attention. It went up to $1k and that’s when I freaked out. I needed to figure this shit out immediately because if I didn’t I would be assed-out FOREVER. I looked for all the information I could find on Bitcoin and stumbled upon an earlier version of this article by this guy named Erik Voorhees - and this article changed my life. At the time the original article was posted the price of Bitcoin was $4.88/coin. Not even a year later Bitcoin was sitting at $1k. Reading this article, though, shaped a lot of my perception.

Everything that I hated about Wall Street was addressed in his blog post.

Everything that I hated about corruption and inflation and basic economics was fixed through Bitcoin.

It was no longer a choice: I had to get my hands on some Bitcoin.

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To be continued…part 8.