SeattleUnfreeze on Nostr: Ah the vidya gaming days. To think the little anarchist teen in me was more involved ...
Ah the vidya gaming days. To think the little anarchist teen in me was more involved in MLG boards and 4chan than any cypherpunk mailing lists and IRCs in 2009.
By 2010 I took off the anon mask to study hard and make something of myself. I was so swept up in university I wouldn't even stumble upon Satoshi's white paper until 2013, and I more or less brushed it off as "neat, its like WoW gold but birderless. Now to get back to work".
I developed a passion for stock trading after graduating and made a second job out of it. I studied and refined models & strats and still managed to pretty consistently lose money at it. My work paid well, at least, but owning a house still felt so far out of reach.
Before I know it, early 2017 comes around and I was finally pricing out a new gaming rig for myself. I opted for the top tier Nvidia GPU since VR was all the rage and I had a rudimentary understanding of PoW mining. I felt like a genius as I began racking up altcoins and found the ROI on the card to be somewhere in the 6 month range. It was intoxicating.
So naturally I open a Coinbase account and build positions in whatever coins looked promising. Ethereum hellspawn were getting thrown off quicker than I could keep up with, but the trader & investor on me was up to the task. I consumed everything I could about countless tokens and chains. With so many to go through, I didn't take time to study the OG.
Even still, BTC was my largest position right up until I liquidated my portfolio merely days before the ICO bubble popped.
I thought the show was over for sure. The FTC would control the show. The SEC won't let it be.
I focused more time and energy to grinding for Amazon. My performance was suffering because I just couldn't muster up any fucks given trying to build SDKs to entice more humans into telling more things to more subsidized microphone spyware pucks. Somewhere toward of my time there, the rebel in me started buying more BTC. But I still didn't bother studying it. I didn't have anyone to share the journey with.
For my laziness, I thoughtlessly sold it all again, this time at $0.005M a coin in the midst of the pandemic. I rolled the cash into short-dated puts against US stock index ETFs for dem quick gains while the economy went to hell. "There's no way this 25% drop has fully priced in the damage to our fragile supply chains and employment structures."
I was depressed, and gambling my money where my mind was.
Then the Fed pulled out the QE bazooka, and with my pants down around my ankles I learned the hard way: never bet against the money printer.
My net worth tanked, and my ego was shattered. I looked at the plaster of my rental home's wall and asked myself how everything got so messed up. I was in great shape, with a loving boyfriend and a lease on a home in the suburbs of an expensive city. I hardly saw my friends, but I had let myself get peer pressured into two jabs "for the good of the people". I had a great job but was compelled to gamble with huge portions of my income. My boyfriend was rapidly climbing the corporate ladder himself, yet also gambling with huge portions of his income.
Everything seemed upside down, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I had violated some yet-unknown code wasn't the equity I threw away, or the dollars. I felt self-violated f had let go of something far more precious.
I finally started reading into Bitcoin. The technical underpinnings weren't nearly as complex as I thought they would be.
I got my first hardware wallet and stacked gently through lockdown.
China banned mining. FTX collapsed. I stacked.
Signature and Silvergate folded alongside the run on SVB. I stacked.
Bitcoin's game theory was starting to make sense to me. It felt almost like the intoxication I had felt during the ICO hype, but more sustained, more gradual. Underpinned by an unwavering optimism bubbling up in me for the first time in living memory.
Immutable, distributed recordkeeping.
Final settlement is the intrinsic value.
Honesty is more profitable than deception.
Rules without rulers.
I began to ponder just what it could mean for this corrupt system we're born into.
I stumbled, and into the rabbit hole I fell.
***
I look back and think what a shame to have gone to a top-10 CS undergrad program yet never once heard about Bitcoin on campus. To have been an anon through high school and give up on the ethos just as literal faucets of sound money sprouted up on the internet.
But I probably would have lost it all even if I had. If by some miracle I managed to keep my keys safe, I would've sold it all for pennies anyway.
So I just remind myself:
🫂 your loved ones
👣 touch grass
and live life to the fullest 💞
10 years is only a few epochs away.
By 2010 I took off the anon mask to study hard and make something of myself. I was so swept up in university I wouldn't even stumble upon Satoshi's white paper until 2013, and I more or less brushed it off as "neat, its like WoW gold but birderless. Now to get back to work".
I developed a passion for stock trading after graduating and made a second job out of it. I studied and refined models & strats and still managed to pretty consistently lose money at it. My work paid well, at least, but owning a house still felt so far out of reach.
Before I know it, early 2017 comes around and I was finally pricing out a new gaming rig for myself. I opted for the top tier Nvidia GPU since VR was all the rage and I had a rudimentary understanding of PoW mining. I felt like a genius as I began racking up altcoins and found the ROI on the card to be somewhere in the 6 month range. It was intoxicating.
So naturally I open a Coinbase account and build positions in whatever coins looked promising. Ethereum hellspawn were getting thrown off quicker than I could keep up with, but the trader & investor on me was up to the task. I consumed everything I could about countless tokens and chains. With so many to go through, I didn't take time to study the OG.
Even still, BTC was my largest position right up until I liquidated my portfolio merely days before the ICO bubble popped.
I thought the show was over for sure. The FTC would control the show. The SEC won't let it be.
I focused more time and energy to grinding for Amazon. My performance was suffering because I just couldn't muster up any fucks given trying to build SDKs to entice more humans into telling more things to more subsidized microphone spyware pucks. Somewhere toward of my time there, the rebel in me started buying more BTC. But I still didn't bother studying it. I didn't have anyone to share the journey with.
For my laziness, I thoughtlessly sold it all again, this time at $0.005M a coin in the midst of the pandemic. I rolled the cash into short-dated puts against US stock index ETFs for dem quick gains while the economy went to hell. "There's no way this 25% drop has fully priced in the damage to our fragile supply chains and employment structures."
I was depressed, and gambling my money where my mind was.
Then the Fed pulled out the QE bazooka, and with my pants down around my ankles I learned the hard way: never bet against the money printer.
My net worth tanked, and my ego was shattered. I looked at the plaster of my rental home's wall and asked myself how everything got so messed up. I was in great shape, with a loving boyfriend and a lease on a home in the suburbs of an expensive city. I hardly saw my friends, but I had let myself get peer pressured into two jabs "for the good of the people". I had a great job but was compelled to gamble with huge portions of my income. My boyfriend was rapidly climbing the corporate ladder himself, yet also gambling with huge portions of his income.
Everything seemed upside down, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I had violated some yet-unknown code wasn't the equity I threw away, or the dollars. I felt self-violated f had let go of something far more precious.
I finally started reading into Bitcoin. The technical underpinnings weren't nearly as complex as I thought they would be.
I got my first hardware wallet and stacked gently through lockdown.
China banned mining. FTX collapsed. I stacked.
Signature and Silvergate folded alongside the run on SVB. I stacked.
Bitcoin's game theory was starting to make sense to me. It felt almost like the intoxication I had felt during the ICO hype, but more sustained, more gradual. Underpinned by an unwavering optimism bubbling up in me for the first time in living memory.
Immutable, distributed recordkeeping.
Final settlement is the intrinsic value.
Honesty is more profitable than deception.
Rules without rulers.
I began to ponder just what it could mean for this corrupt system we're born into.
I stumbled, and into the rabbit hole I fell.
***
I look back and think what a shame to have gone to a top-10 CS undergrad program yet never once heard about Bitcoin on campus. To have been an anon through high school and give up on the ethos just as literal faucets of sound money sprouted up on the internet.
But I probably would have lost it all even if I had. If by some miracle I managed to keep my keys safe, I would've sold it all for pennies anyway.
So I just remind myself:
🫂 your loved ones
👣 touch grass
and live life to the fullest 💞
10 years is only a few epochs away.
quoting note1pe2…6wz3🥲
