Permissionless public blockchain is new type of computer.
I didn’t need to ask for an account and nobody could take it away
1. In 2018, having more than one Chinese billionaire request to pay my edu company in BTC bc they couldn’t clear >$50K/yr from state-run banks. 2. In 2019, realizing that both edges of US political spectrum would love similar chance to gatekeep our financial institutions. Crypto = credible digital ownership.
A random person that tipped me BTC on reddit + Andreas Antonopoulos vids
blockchains as credibly neutral code execution owning digital assets again, like when we had MP3s, instead of buying a movie on YouTube where Google can take it away if they want transparent ledgers solving the double spend problem and guaranteeing honest accounting composable and interoperable primitives
For me it was seeing that there was demand for things that were built on top of the blockchain. NFTs in 2020. Seeing this opened up a ton of possibilities of what this tech could do.
npm -i trufflesuite Sending value over the internet in one line of JavaScript. 🤯
connecting the dots that ethereum is just like venmo—it’s a social network. venmo won bc it turns out people will give up a little privacy in exchange for seeing who their friends are sending money to, bc it’s a proxy for who they’re spending time with. that’s why i think eth will dominate.
payable(address).call{value: 1 ether}(""); Sending money like it's some builtin function call !!
PoW mechanism. Had spent a couple months trying to understand the btc white-paper in vain, all explainers talked of some kind of "voting" in the abstract. The first time I understood how voting actually works (building on top *is* the vote) it was too elegant!
Sending my first BTC transaction and knowing there was no third party involved. Pure magic.
2017 having ownership over my assets. much more now with content.
The idea of self auditing ledger and learning the history of ledgers in general and how rarely how we record transactions changed and when it did it lead to a massive economic shift throughout the history
In 2016, inspired by the shared, backend as a service with built in identity, compute, and payment. Bought some ETH from Coinbase so that I could pay to deploy some custom contracts. Coming from an open source 1.0 background, shared code -> shared protocols -> shared infra makes a lot of sense.
I bought weed in like 2018 from a dispensary, and their payment system used litecoin to process a credit card.
Bitcoin whitepaper 2011. Reading the Gawker article, seeing the crude early marketplaces emerge, installing nodes on a fleet of my university's computers.