A student’s journey into cryptocurrency, or how I went from Reddit to Zurich, Cancun, and back.

This is the story of my immersion into crypto as a student, investor, and developer- turned smart contract developer and organizer. For anyone who seeks to go beyond their local communities, Twitter, or CoinMarketCap.com, here’s how I got out into the field and the perspective it’s brought me.

*Checks Coinbase* 😱 🎉

How it all started

Having made considerable returns on a “fuck-it” purchase of Ether in early 2016, I experienced a weighty disconnect with this thing that had made me a lot of money and the merit upon which it had been earned. Guilt, as well.

My grandmother, who immigrated from Korea in the 70’s, worked double shifts for minimum wage at a wig shop, where gunpoint robberies were common. My mom’s situation was better, but still, she paid for her engineering degree by waitressing throughout college, getting by on homemade sandwiches, which are never good.

I, on the other hand, invested a portion of my savings into “internet money,” which turned not only into a means of subsistence but relative luxury (for a college student).

After a short period of intense exuberance 🤑, I became obsessed, then disillusioned 🥀

Following Eth’s meteoric rise in early 2017, I spent money like a drunken sailor. Fortunately for my wallet, I was in South East Asia at the time so “balling out” meant a $100 table at a fancy Indonesian nightclub. More importantly, I could stop dj’ing fraternity basements and shit bars for extra cash. The excitement soon wore off, and I started looking to other tokens.

My “ ETH Lambo, ” a beautiful Italian road bike I found on Craigslist

As financially and intellectually wedded to the idea of a token economy, I soon found it disturbing that the main vein of crypto awareness was less often a real-world use case like the pilot of uPort’s user-managed identity, than it was the ICO of yet another new crypto-currency for yet another to-be-tested idea.

Sure, we’re supposed to think of these tokens as “utility tokens for future usage of its perspective network”, but like other mainstream investors I couldn’t help but approach tokens as speculative investment vehicles. And, judging from the amount of time and money crypto projects allocate to marketing (paid news endorsements, terrible youtube ads, and shameless LinkedIn DM’s), they understand this mentality. Each time I saw an ICO advert that stunk of fraud, I thought of friends who, not knowing any better, could watch their hard-earned savings get #REKT (Jesus I despise crypto hastags).

😞😞😞

Still, the market cap of cryptos was exploding and I played the game of trading alt coins, combing twitter for news, and searching for arbitrage opportunities. At work, on the toilet, anywhere- I anxiously monitored for upticks.

My thoughts became increasingly fleeting as I watched my creative energy being sucked away into a solitary, greed-driven hobby. It had gone too far. Trading provided a constant dopamine drip, the necessary condition for an addiction.

What a great song

I converted all my positions back to Ether, determined to #HODL. If I were to appease my shouting sensibilities and separate my interest from greed, I felt it necessary to understand blockchain at a technical level.

Studying up 📚☕️

Over the next few months, stepping outside of the Twitter/Reddit echo chamber and became a student of the blockchain, protocol agnostic.

Determined to deeply understand the “why” behind this thing that had made me lots of money, I asked friends for reading materials and soon sped through Mastering Bitcoin, various white papers, podcasts, Youtube channels, and Solidity documentation/tutorials (Ethereum smart contracting language). You can view my syllabus here.

While there’s an abundance of popular materials to understand use cases of blockchain, reading through smart contracts particularly helped me understand the capabilities of blockchain-based applications. And, as a Python/ Javascript developer, the syntax and logic of Solidity was easier than expected.

Still, it was hard avoiding a relapse 😵

I continued to avoid trading as the worst of the ICO frenzy ensued. I still struggled in rationalizing the ICO model of fundraising with everything I learned on lean startup/ bootstrapping/ fundraising/ founder’s narrative from my university’s best attempt at teaching entrepreneurship. I was frustrated with the few applications I could find, as they demonstrated little empathy for the end user (try explaining how something as simple as a wallet works to your parents!).

BOOOOH, #FUD, BOOOOOH #FUD

Meanwhile, I watched the online crypto community mock mainstream media’s coverage of crypto for its frequent misconceptions rather than its criticism of massive, often fraudulent ICO raises. With no agreed-upon methods for valuing new tokens along with a lack of users, operational insight and accounting data, where was all this trust (money) coming from?

Though I held onto my conviction in blockchain as a method to decentralize and #banktheunbanked, my skepticism and cognitive dissonance widened.

Returning to Youtube and subreddits, however, would not solve my qualms with the community and the token economy. Neither would attending a Bitcoin meetup, where I met a group of friendly but largely non-technical enthusiasts more focused on price predictions (it’s going parabolic!) rather than new innovations. Having near exhausted what I could learn online, it was time to meet the humans behind my favorite projects.