My Introduction Part II: How I Became Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

So about three years ago I started to work at Western Union as AML (Anti Money Laundering) Compliance Specialist. What I did is I monitored suspicious transactions, analyzed alerts and basically looked for possible criminal activities though specific Western Union network. Until that moment I knew practically nothing about cryptocurrencies. I've heard of Bitcoin before, that's for sure. It's like some kind of virtual property that is very volatile, but still growing. Oh, and you can't use it that much, unless you want to buy some drugs online.

That's what I knew back then. Western Union also didn't put much effort in informing their employees about possible encounters with Bitcoin world which then seemed way smaller than now. Only once we were given a paper to read about "possibly fraudulent activities". Basically what it said was not to deal with Bitcoin at all. Of course, that was 2014.

The same year I'm hanging out with my colleague at work and I take a look at his computer screen. All I see is a few lines of numbers, few colored buttons and his name along with his profile picture.

-What is that? - I asked him.
-Oh, that's a thing I do. Uhm, it's a startup. Virtual currency company. They have their own currency you can earn. - As I now remember he wasn't very sure what he was talking about, but that is understandable. I'm sure he was pretty confused back then.
-Really? How is it called?

So that's the story I first heard about yet another cryptocurrency than Bitcoin. I was highly skeptical about it, but my itching curiosity could never ever let this go. As a top compliance analyst I start to dig into this company. Trying to find something sketchy and shady about them but ultimately failing as I do. I even went through global criminal databases Western Union used. Nothing.

As I studied this case I've built for myself I got more and more interested. A month has passed and my head is overwhelmed with huge amounts of information. Ohh, so you can use Bitcoin's code and make something out of it? Blockchain is a thing?? Whoa, there's Microsoft investing in these things???

I got really excited over it and I don't really know why. Maybe because it was such a new thing for me and it made so much sense from evolutionary aspect of monetary system. Of course I didn't understand much back then and a lot has changed, but then I knew that I must get into this. What can I lose? One way or another, finally I found something I can sink my teeth in. Something new to learn. Something very exciting that nobody around me knows yet.

March of 2015 was the time I decided to join the company called "Compumatrix Inc.". Registration itself seemed kind of weird and very official. You have to send you ID for verification (that made sense since I very well knew how compliance works), verify yourself online with Gravatar, sign a tax form and so on though everything went pretty smoothly as I got help from my colleague. Then I started to look around. There's this forum with members chatting in it where all the major updates come up. There's this portal thing where you can manufacture some kind of cards. There's blog where you can earn coins somehow. There's store, oh, and you can run some IBM's World Community Grid program which is a network full of volunteers who want to contribute to science. A million devices calculating genomes, looking for cures for AIDS, Ebola and so on. Compumatrix pays you their coin for this activity. So far everything sounds good to me. I guess.

Few months pass by and everything seems slow. Nothing is happening. You can't really withdraw this coin. You don't really understand it yet. Well, it's not Bitcoin. It's not connected to Bitcoin. But it's built on blockchain. Somehow. We had a wallet before, now we don't. Because we are not money transfer business anymore. That's how they say and I'm just waiting for my money to be cashed out, because that's what I'm hoping for while being here.

Let's fast forward a bit. January of 2016. I still don't have my euros in my bank account, but I've earned some Compuceeds. We almost got them cashed out once, but our partners backed out (there's a whole story, but it really doesn't matter anymore at all and we are way past that). That didn't stop our BOD. That's when our Founder Henry James Banayat (you can find him almost everywhere you look on the Internet decided that the best course of action is decentralization of our network and focus on trading other cryptocurrencies, not only Bitcoin. By the end of 2016 we already had brand new portal with the opportunity to send our own currency to Bitshares DEX 2.0. A membership of a few thousand people weren't that excited about it, because so few understood what is happening. Nobody wanted to deal with OpenLedger and trading assets because for many it seemed dangerous and complicated. Especially when you don't really follow where all of this is going.

Time was standing in same place back then. Nothing is ever happening. Sure, I made this OpenLedger account, transferred some coins here. What now? What to do? Who is going to buy those?

All these questions bothered a lot of people. But believe me, work was done in that time. Our portal suddenly has live Bitcoin rate in it. There's new buttons that say "Cash Out", "Buy BTC", "Sell BTC". Wow, this is getting exciting! Of course, nothing works at first, again everyone is confused, more time passes and somewhere around autumn of 2016 there's announcement that closed BETA begins with members that are qualified for it (that means your ID's are good, you activated you account balance, you set the weight on your Bitshares account, etc.).

We had this clumsy API that didn't really work that well, but a portion of people managed to take a change and get their transaction through blockchain before interface bugs and countless errors crashed everything down (or something, I don't really know, that's just my educated guess from experience I had with it). We were promised this will be fixed. We wait more, though nobody has patience for it and only a small group of people cares to put their minds to it and understand what is being done here.

During that time a lot has changed. Company had to adapt to different circumstances. In my opinion, our membership itself were not ready for such quick leap and that impacted a few changes that I think now became a huge plus and another tool this company can use in upcoming future (just like Steem have Steem Dollars and Steem Power, Compuceeds have Cryptoceeds, BTCPlus, Eload, Oceania, their own market, their own exchange, every coin has their own purpose and is managed by professionals). And just think about it for a bit. This company has most referrers in Bitshares. They are with top assets on cryptofresh.com (currently 6th after OBTS and USD). They have trading volume, liquid and relatively stable markets (meaning Cryptoceeds) even if they didn't even begin to talk about what they are offering. And that's what is going to happen next, because everything else seems to be ready.

Though all that took a while. Naturally over time I became interested in other blockchain opportunities. So I started doing some trading at Bitshares DEX 2.0. I thought I will give it a try, look around a bit. Press the buttons and see what I can do with it.

That was the second time my mind was blown away. Until this moment I knew everything about Bitcoin. I followed Coindesk.com every day, I read about consortiums, Bitcoin policies around the world, how blockchain works, how you can use it, what you can do with it, what has been done already and so on and so on. But I have never thought about what decentralized currency exchange is capable and how good of a solution it is for so many things. As I mentioned, I pressed all the buttons, read all the Help Section has offered, went through markets and endlessly stared at green and red candles which didn't make sense back then at all.

And that happened way after the fact that I understood that I have a wallet full of different assets of my own portion of a company. What a bliss! I start trading different assets and I guess I got lucky, or maybe I'm good at it, but I instantly made a profit. Then I paid my rent with that money. So I traded more. After a while I'm much more into it and I'm not taking unnecessary risks anymore.

Cryptofresh.com provides so much information if you are willing to look for it. You can read about assets, analyze charts, see who is holding what and how much, even track bots and try to understand what they are doing (well, that's what I do in my spare time). You can see the top assets, read about them and maybe take an opportunity to invest in them. Maybe they provide some kind of product you might be interested in. Maybe the company itself is really making a buzz and might be worth something in near future. Why not? These coins are the first startups on near perfect decentralized trading platform. And there's big ones.

It would be so difficult to argue with me as this is the way I got interested in Steemit. That was the third time in three years when my mind distributed all over the Universe. That's why I'm here.

Though it might not seem like it, I Believe Steemit and Compumatrix one day will be great friends. Just wait for official press release and those Compumatrix issued assets will start to make sense to you. Until then I'm just glad we are being noticed by people not only in Bitshares platform, but on Steemit too.

So my personal advice for you all: try and interact outside Steemit. Look around Bithsares, there's so much to discover. For example I really recommend reading @taskmanager article TASKMANAGER Explained to the Bitsharestalk Community. It's a great article that explains all about this Steemit based project which I think is great and beneficial to all participants. And I'm glad Taskmanager mentions Compuceeds in a grand plan. I myself invested in this and that happen just because we work with different platforms that offer different services.

You see, great things are happening already.

So that's what I am now. I live in a country where people don't really know much about Bitcoin, yet there is about 30 people I introduced not only to Compumatrix, but to the whole cryptocurrency world. And I think that's a huge deal.

I don't have a mining gear, nor do I have money to invest. But I can work for it. I can trade it. I can even write for it if I want to.

And there's so much more. So I hope you learned something today and not only about me.

If you have any questions about Compumatrix, you can PM me in SteemitChat @vilius and if you like my content, feel free to follow, resteem or leave an upvote.

Check out my other content:
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Let's get to know each other - my name is Vilius and I'm here to stay!