Sure I had read about this stuff before, but always with a thick fog of confusion. Mining? hashing? Blockchain? this stuff was way too abstract. More concrete were the stories of people making money- the guy who paid 1$ per BTC and now it's worth 7000X that $$$. I like to think I'm pretty smart (I did graduate medical school with honors) but I figured I would never be able to get my head around this stuff.
Then my high school buddy Douglas came to visit. I live in Hawaii (I have for about 7 years) and he always had an open invitation to come visit, but mainly for financial reasons he never did. Minnesota to Lihue is an expensive plane ticket! Then one day I get a text: "Hey G*- coming to Hawaii next month. Wondering if I can stay with you- but don't worry I can get a hotel room. Money is no problem for me as I made a fuckload of money in cryptocurrencies."
It had probably been 2 years since I had heard from Douglas, and I had worried about him. He had failed out of college, had never really been gainfully employed, and struggled with some personal issues. All this despite the fact that he probably had the highest IQ of any of my friends. His head was always in the clouds. He was a "big picture" guy. Full of ideas about what the future would bring. So it did not surprise me at all when I heard he was early to get into the whole Bitcoin thing.
I read something the other day that said the only way to really get a laymen to understand cryptocurrencies is to give them some and let them play with them. I think Douglas realized this. He came over for dinner to my place in Hawaii, and while we were sipping some whiskey after our meal I kept peppering him with questions about cryptocurrencies. I didn't want to get too personal (So how much money exactly did you make??) but I was asking him more about the big picture stuff. How does BTC have any real value? does it have a future? What is blockchain?
Within a few minutes he was on my macbook downloading the exodus wallet. He then transferred me $100 of LTE and told me to play around with it. I was hooked! that was a month ago to the day, and now my Chrome browser history consists of things I didn't even know existed 5 weeks ago. Coinmarketcap, Binance, Gemini, Radarrelay, IDEX, Cryptokitties, Steemit, Ledger apps, Neon wallet, etc.
My NPR podcasts have been replaced by Laura Shin. I am suddenly noticing all the references to this stuff in popular culture- Richard's "new internet" on Silicon Valley (a decentralized internet), Axe bribing his fellow nefarious wall street conspirators in "cryptocurrencies," even a scene from the raunchy (and hilarious) Netflix animated show Big Mouth where there is a scene in the future where the only currency is a Chinese Bitcoin.
I have not been this obsessed with something in a long, long time. When my girlfriend walked by yesterday, I sort of folded my laptop screen a little, as if I'm watching porn or something. In fact I was searching for the cheapest Gen 0 Cryptokitty with at least 1 Mewtation (is 0.19 ETH too much?). She wouldn't understand.
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I read about how to download your tokens into Metamask (Where are the tokens exactly? oh- they're on the blockchain. You are just copying the token address which is a record of all the tokens dispersed, and it puts the total sent to your address in your wallet. The tokens are not moved however. It took my a while to grasp this. In my search of etherscan, I stumbled across a Unicorn candy token, value $0.00, 25 of which I apparently owned. What the fuck is a unicorn candy token? A google search and quick signup for Medium answered my question. (I would provide a link, but I am too lazy and hey I found the link on my own, you can too!).
I bought a ledger wallet- with BTC no less- My first (and only) purchase of a tangible item with BTC. I love playing with it- I feel like James Bond. I put the backup 24 word seed phrase in my safety deposit box. Finally I have a reason to have a safety deposit box!! Maybe one day it will actually have a lot of money on it!
I stumbled across Discord (I'm not a gamer) which led me to Spankchain. Now I'd say I'm probably below average with my porn consumption (honestly!) but hey I'm still a human being. I signed up for the beta cam site. Used metamask to load my "spankcard" and tipped some cam girl. This is fun! and it's an actual use case for cryptocurrency. I'm 43 but I feel like a millennial. I have entered a whole new world that I literally had zero concept of 5 weeks ago. Now it consumes me! And it is not just greed- sure we all have fantasies of a .00004 cent coin "Mooning" but it is way more than that. This IS the future. Even I can see that. These so called experts who equate BTC to the tulips of Holland (Jesus if I hear one more ass hole mention the fucking tulips!!) have no clue. Proof of work, zero inflation, decentralization, 1 cent transaction fees, no banks, no credit card companies, no government seizures- there is a lot more to this than just Tulips!
THIS STUFF IS SO FASCINATING!!!!!
thanks for reading my ramblings
JR
ETH: 0x51ec5e1b8b3c4c6bae49619e657f94c4ad577b45
(hey somebody just send me .001 ETH- that would be so cool!)