Like everything, it looks different from the outside, and it’s both way better and way worse than what your imagination could come up with. In my college days I rented a lot of places where realtors would come knocking with clients ready to buy my hovel out from underneath me. I developed a distinct distaste for the breed. After college I moved up Parley’s Canyon to Park City, UT, which I've heard has more realtors per capita than anywhere else on earth, and for the last three years I've been one of them. The first thing I learned was you have to work hard and have a thick skin. People don’t trust you and they shouldn't, at least until they know you’re on their side. The best thing I learned is that you can make good friends by forgetting about the money and putting everything you have into the millions of little tasks that make up the job. If the only rewarding moments you have are when you deposit your commission check, you’re going to spend most of your time miserable.

Steep and deep, seizure and censorship resistant

Why accidental? I got my real estate license while working in the oil business, then the USA outproduced Saudi frikkin’ Arabia for the first time ever, the oil glut was on, and the exploration side wasn’t the gravy train it had been for me for eight years. If you live in Park City and don’t know at least three brokers and thirty agents, you haven’t lived here very long, so eventually I was taking leads at a brokerage started by a friend I did a website for back in the 90’s. You could be a ski bum and a web developer in the 20th century, good times.

Enough of that. The best part, the absolute sweetest part, was getting a call from a friend I hadn't met yet that wanted to know if I had heard of bitcoin. As a matter of fact, yes. I had heard of Bitcoin. I even owned a few after I spun up a node around 2011, kind of drifted away from it, didn’t know it was still a thing. You see, in September of 2017, Bitcoin was not on the radar of anyone outside of the crypto community — which was, itself, a very small, dynamic — if fringe — group.

And thus began the odyssey that ended with the largest real estate transaction conducted with bitcoin in the USA to date:

But it was really just beginning. Signed up for Twitter (which is also not what it looks like from the outside) and started following the usual suspects, diving deep into cryptography, distributed ledgers, Austrian economics, monetary policy, carnivory (just what it sounds like), and basically being exposed to the best and the brightest and all the scams and the scammers who scam them (looking at you, bcash). Drinking from the fire hose, so much new knowledge, so many incredibly brilliant people who felt the same way I did, that they had never been so captivated by a single subject in their lives. Seriously, it consumes you. If you follow the right people it’s like jacking into the hive mind.

The Genesis HODL’er

So now I HODL, I've been lucky enough to have a couple of more HODL’ers find me and we are working on taking some of their scarce resource and putting it into another scarce resource. There’s only ever going to be 21 million bitcoin, and we already have all the land on this rock we are ever going to get, so it’s a great match if you are a Scarcity Surfer(tm). I’ve heard there’s 31 million millionaires in the world, so there won’t be enough bitcoin for all the millionaires to own a whole one. I mean, it’s not like they’re tulips and you can just grow more. I’m putting this blog up so more HODL’ers can find me, because they are the most interesting and smartest people I’ve met so far, and I cannot surround myself with enough of them. And you really gotta check Park City out, it is a seriously great place to be. My mother said don’t move there after college, it’s not real life, it’s a bubble. What better place to be than a bubble within a bubble.