- russian mom used to send cash to grandparents who were relocated to iran - terrorists used bitcoin, second life, et al as a way to get around hawalas - bridgewater didn’t know what cryptocurrency was - some former tiger global guy took pity on me and invited me to Consensus conference
read blockchain revolution & cryptoassets back to back in 2018 & couldn't not get involved after. had heard about bitcoin as early as 2011 but wrote it off.
Napster - showed me the power of P2P. Then saw Bitcoin and realized “oh it’s like Napster for money” Then saw Web3 and was like “oh it’s like Napster for everything”
Got hired as a remote COO for a crypto startup in 2017, fell in love with the idea of creating incentives that combine self-interest with collective benefit “Keep doing what you want to do anyway, and it will be good for everyone else” “Permissionless altruism”?
I've had a passing interest in cryptocurrencies since BTC came on the scene. No direct involvement, just a "huh, neat" sort of interest. I dove in head-first in March 2021 once I heard about NFTs (per the Beeple Everydays story). I had never been able to monetize my digital art until that point—oh, and I tried!
I was a web3 hater almost 3 years ago. Studied art, no one really bought any. Started working as an assistant, self-fired myself after my boss’ fiancée purposely coughed on me during the start of covid, and he didn’t do nothing about it. Saddest walk home, stumbled into @coinbureau talking NFTs, and now I live her
I was asked to do a project for a bank while at grad school (2016). seemed boring so subverted the brief, used the research budget to buy bitcoin and started researching Ethereum to make a project about a crypto wallet instead. Wasn't well received, but I still have the bitcoin.
To be honest all my friends started leaving their web2 jobs for web3. And I feel like we’re in the HTTP era of web3 and it would be cool to make something like HTTP
A friend was using this strange thing called bitcoin to buy stuff on Silkroad. Made no sense to me how it could scale as a payment modality given the 30-40% price swings over night.
Two paths IMO: (1) Anti-censorship, anti-authority P2P tech lovers, into it since back before you could make a single dollar off of it. Gnutella, I2P, Freenet etc. (2) Came for money, and absolutely would not have touched it otherwise. Group 2 is mentally wrecked by bear, while 1 ok. Group 2 is 50x bigger than 1.
Introduced to crypto in 2016-2017. ERC-20 tokens (ICOs) were the hype. Got interested in DEX’s (back then ppl used one called EtherDelta) and self-custody. Discovered CryptoKitties and CryptoVoxels in 2017-2018 which lead to discovery of OpenSea and NFTs. Then became curious about DAOs and tokenized communities.
Awareness of Bitcoin for a few years, fascination after stumbling upon the Ethereum, ultimate realization that my dream (born from many hours playing Eve Online) of building a social game that could reward major contributors was possible due to Ethereum.
Started with a friend sending me an NFT, then NBA top shot, then Twitter spaces and losing all the money in my 401K
Worked at a coffee shop in college. My computer broke. IT guy that worked at the coffee shop told me to bring it by his office. Went over to his sweaty ass lair with a ton of computers pasted on the wall. Was like “Wtf?”. He told me he was mining Bitcoin. The year was 2013. Never turned back.
Worked @balajis company Counsyl coming out of Google. Then some years later Kimchi premium happened, and people I did not know approached me at a cafe asking me why crypto was blowing up in S. Korea. First time people asked me about anything Korea, after Gangnam Style. Went all in.
I read about Bitcoin in a blog when it was still possible to mine with a PC. Then I met Vitalik and Mihai Alise in Barcelona, and they invited me to participate as writer in Bitcoin Magazine, and then I got really involved in the blockchain ecosystem.
Listening to @balajis on Tim Ferriss podcast give a compelling argument for decentralization and then minting NFTs for a friend.
Axie Infinity! I was really curious about its business and revenue models, I didn’t know how was possible to have such KPIs with a really high entry barrier for new users (money and UX)
Crypto: Bought bitcoins on mtGox in 2013. Eth in 2017. BNB. Web3: Year ago was surprised that almost no one had NFTs in a community of 100 crypto investors/traders. Decided to help onboard new users. Invited experienced ppl to cofound coNFT.app - NFT multi-chain aggregator with social features
“Litecoin is like the next Instagram for money! You should absolutely invest.” She did, in fact invest 😂 🤦🏼♀️
was working on group creative tooling (a group blogging product), and fighting against the web2 tech stack the whole time a friend explained to me and my team how blockchain (Ethereum) actually worked on the tech side - we were blown away: relational data is so much easier in web3, perfect for collective tooling