You know, it’s funny but I can trace every path in my life, to one memory. I don’t remember when I first heard about bitcoin. I don’t remember what the price was or when I first bought it. But man, I will never ever forget the first time I synced a node and sent a transaction.

When most people hear about bitcoin for the first time, they dismiss it. Complex concepts mashed into one system usually takes time to understand. Most don’t make it down the funnel out of lack of interest or get derailed. Fewer devote their time to manifesting the vision.

If I had to guess, the single biggest differentiator between those who got hooked and those who didn’t is whether they used the technology.

You can’t get hooked unless you take a hit.

I didn’t have an epiphany the first time I used bitcoin. Far from it, I thought it couldn’t work, but I learned a lot from the experience.

It required quite a bit of effort. I set up bitcoind on my desktop, qt on my laptop, generated wallets, saved keys, connected to the network, and waited to sync. Then, I bought from Mt Gox, transferred to my laptop, then to my desktop, all while tracking blockexplorer from mempool to confirmation.

Pretty simple? Well, I didn’t think so and concluded other people wouldn’t go through all that.

A few years later, the price went up, and the five dollars’ worth I bought turned into a few thousand bucks.

I dug up the wallet.dat files and re-synced to see whether I still had coins. I noticed the chain grew a lot bigger.

I searched around for newer wallets, and to my delight, I found web wallets and open source light client wallets. “Nice there’s progress,” I said to myself. “Now where can I actually use it?”