Goxed

I’m not exactly sure when I first heard of Bitcoin. It took me a couple of times before I made the brilliant move to buy some. I think I had first read about it online sometime in 2011. And I believe I heard about it on the radio once too pretty early on. My educated guess, supported by my poor memory, is that it wasn’t until May 2013 that I decided to buy some of these newfangled bitcoin. I still have the account verification and registration emails I received around that time, early May, 2013.

My first bank transfer to the Polish bank account of Mt. Gox must have been around that time too, as it’s subsequent accreditation to my account completed halfway through May. It wasn’t a big amount. Although for me, at the time still finishing up my masters degree in graphic design, it was a good chunk out of my monthly allotment. I repeated this process two more times that year. Once in July, and once in October. 

I also have an email from late June 2013 asking me to confirm the email address used for my BTC-E account. I know I had some coin on there. I have a note from that time, dated July 1st 2013, that has me speculating about arbitrage opportunities between BTC-E and Mt. Gox. This note also lists the total amount of fiat spent and the total amount of bitcoin bought on both exchanges and it seems I averaged about € 70,- per coin. 

This is where my brilliance ended. Like so many, I had only taken the time to figure out how to buy some bitcoin and promptly stopped my investigations directly after. Yes, I had heard you could hold it yourself, but it all sounded awfully complicated. Besides, I had better things to do!

I was living the leisurely life of a - no care in the world, caution to the wind, maximum student loan indebted roisterer. I always had a small part time job in one form or another, but nothing that ever netted me a lot of income. So between studying and working, I was fat-fingering a bunch of my coin away, trying to trade the ups and downs of the fledgling bitcoin market. 

You all know what happened next. Mt. Gox failed miserably. Frankly, I had failed myself harder. If only I had taken the bare minimum of extra time to learn just that little bit extra...

I didn’t lose a lot in fiat terms.

And I did not “own” a lot of bitcoin by any stretch, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever get my stack up to the amount it was at back then. For me, what ensued was plain and simple ragequit. I was done. “To hell with Bitcoin. To hell with trading. I’ll not burn myself again on that crap!”

Yeah, right! LOL

My memory about that time is pretty glitchy and I can’t piece together what happened to the BTC-E coin. Last I can find from that exchange was a “successful authorization” mail from early February 2014.

Did I just forget about it after the closure of Mt. Gox? Had I already removed my coin somewhere else? Unlikely, as I had not bothered to learn how. I don’t know. I can’t find any notes on it.

My personal accounting at that time was botchy to say the least. For all intents and purposes, everything from those days is lost. Oh well... Let’s throw it on the huge “noob pre-shitcoiner doing dumb stuff” pile.

Yes. You read that right. Pre-shitcoiner. For that is what I was for the next ~3 years. Doggedly ignoring all accounts of bitcoin creeping higher. My denial and anger rose whenever I got confronted with the name, or anything related to Bitcoin.

Shitcoinery

It wasn’t until October of 2016 that I once again bought some. I bought three times that year. And another three times in the first quarter of 2017. These were very small amounts each time. Sadly, that coin was spent. A personal milestone for sure, as these were my first times actually transferring bitcoin. And it really wasn’t all that hard.

So, with renewed confidence I bought some more sats in November 2017. Again, small amounts. Main difference being these were for hodling! 

A step up from my previous attempts for sure. As the value of bitcoin reached new highs again and again, FOMO overtook me. You won’t be surprised to learn I bought most of the sats I stacked that year very close to the All Time High. And you might find it quite predictable that I got suckered into the “diversify your stack” narrative proclaimed by all the shitcoin influencers that infest YouTube.

I had yet to find the knowledge to reach the level of conviction I have for Bitcoin now. Proof-of-stake seemed appealing. And why not have a world with all manner of coins and tokens doing everything “on the blockchain?” It all seemed quite reasonable at the time. I knew nothing about Gresham’s law. And I had yet to be burned by the abundance of wonky software, exit scamming projects, and the flawed logic peddled by half arsed shitcoin shillers. 

At one point I had 200+ different shitcoins.

Then came the bear and it left me bloody. I hadn’t sold a damn thing. I couldn’t. I was petrified that once I did, the bull would trample me right after the bear had mangled me thus. So I held on to everything. I wouldn’t be persuaded to dump the mountains of shit weighing me down. I still thought “there’s gold in these here mountains!”

Toxic Maximalists

Luckily, during these times, I found the “toxic” Bitcoin maximalists roaming Twitter. Though it took some time, it was these fine folk that eventually set me straight. The more I read and the more I learned, the less likely it seemed any other “crypto project” was more than wishful thinking or a blatant money grab. These thoughts gnawed at me. 

I started 2018 with a meager 2% allocated to bitcoin. But as my knowledge grew I started dumping shitcoins. Hesitant at first, which got me to ~45% bitcoin halfway through the year, but with ever more confidence after that. By the end of 2018, I’m proud to say, I had gotten to the point where just about 4% of what remained were crapcoins.

At the time of this writing my shitcoin holdings are less than 1%. I tried to get rid of everything that was worth taking the time getting rid of, but at some point you run into failing software, crap exchanges and abandoned projects. All that remains is literally worse than shit. Absolutely no one wants to touch it. I’m sure this last remainder will trend to zero faster than Dan Larimer can create another shitcoin. 

While these events unfolded, I was slowly but surely converting all my savings into bitcoin. I must admit that, even with my newfound conviction, I was quite nervous as I put the last of it into bitcoin around the ~$3700 mark. I was heavily in the red at that time.

I couldn’t have done this if it wasn’t for all the so-called “toxicity” of the Bitcoin maximalists we all know and love. If it wasn’t for you, who knows when it might have finally “clicked” for me.

I knew the incumbent monetary system was downright fraudulent, even back in 2011 when I made the stamps pictured here. The woes of fractional reserve banking were clear to me even then. The solution, however, was not.

The Rabbit Hole

So it came to be that I started 2019 with about half the amount of bitcoin I could’ve had if I had never touched any of the shitcoins. I won’t make that mistake again. It’s only Bitcoin from here on out!

So what is a pleb to do? Experiment with the Lightning Protocol of course! The #LNTrustChain, started by our beloved hodlonaut, was moving strong! But the amount of sats transacted was too steep for my blood.

I had just set up an instance of myNode and wanted to test it out. The first satoshi I sent over LN was on February 24th to @LonesomeLook. It worked! And he generously offered to send it straight back. I had no clue a second LN-Torch would be born when I jokingly told him to “Send it on to someone else, plus one satoshi. We'll make it the poor mans #LNTrustChain ;)”

Before I knew it @verimad had coined the term #LNTinyTorch and @danbadjar had built a site for it. It sparked a plethora of other Torches, like the #LNPrimeTorch started by @zackvoell that would require you to send sats based on prime numbers, or the #LNFibtorch started by @skwp wherein the hops increased according to the Fibonacci Sequence. It was a real #LNWildfire! At the moment, the #LNTinytorch sits at hodler #307, @webdiverblue, where anyone can pick it up.

At this point the Bitcoin mindvirus was installed solidly into my wetware, a strong urge to do something with Bitcoin, anything, arose in me! So together with @csw_the and @SEB71215442, we made some Bitcoin themed music! Yes, we were drunk. Yes, it is quite terrible. No matter, we had fun! Listen to it here.

Making music is fun, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to still my hunger for a more heavily infused bitcoin pleb lifestyle. Thus the idea to start bitcoinfortunecookie.com was born. The idea is simple. Pay some Sats to open a fortune cookie or send a random or custom fortune to anyone on Twitter. 

I penned down the concept, made a few designs, and structured the flowchart. While I was trying to find a developer to get everything functional, I dusted off my rusty CSS skills and skinned a custom BTCPay Server checkout page. I hoped that would come in handy once the project got up to speed.

This got the ball rolling for me and I have since done a bunch of custom designs for all manner of folks and projects. At first I thought someone was trying to scam me when Andreas Antonopoulos sent me a DM asking me to make a custom BTCPay checkout for him.

It wasn’t long after that I had the honor to design one for the Human Rights Foundation. 

I couldn’t accept their bitcoin and they promised to donate some sats to the BTCPay Server team instead, which they did. I got to know @RickV3D and @thefuckisalommy, both great guys, as I was making a custom checkout for @CryptoCloaks. This is how I became a part of their team as a graphic designer. Earlier this year I started working with the wonderful folks at BTC Direct, a bitcoin broker in Europe, where I’m doing what I love most, namely creative work to usher in the Bitcoin standard.

I love working in the bitcoin realm. Especially now that I can pour my creativity into it. It’s fantastic collaborating with all these great people and businesses and seeing my work find its way into the wild. Be it via the BTCPay Server docs, where you can download some of my custom CSS work or via btcdirect.eu and cryptocloaks.com where you may expect more of my work in the near future.

I’m also really happy that as of now, thanks to the help of @gcomxx and @JacksonDMiller, the Bitcoin Fortune Cookie project is finally in beta and live! So head on over to bitcoinfortunecookie.com and follow the @Bitcoin_Cookie bot on Twitter if you want to know your fortune!

Buckle Up

Life has been good to me, always. And I’m not one to worry. But since recognizing Bitcoin for what it truly is — a leveling of the playing field and a democratization of the money — the optimism I have always had, has been reinvigorated.

Bitcoin was just the thing that was missing in a world where individual freedoms are ever more encroached upon by the state and unelected institutions. The internet, together with bitcoin, all but guarantees any pleb with a mobile phone and shoddy internet connection has the potential to be a catalyst for major change.

It's been a wild ride. And I suspect it’s going to get a whole lot wilder for us all pretty soon!

So buckle up, stack them sats and let’s go build this thing together!

One last thing. I hope you love the cover of this edition of Citadel 21. I had a lot of fun creating it. One very limited edition on plexibond will be made and auctioned (This has since been auctioned for 3 million sats). Also 21 paper posters (A1) will become available via the http://cryptocloaks.com webshop. Maybe some smaller sizes too. If you would like to have a chance at winning one of these prints, send me a DM with the text “Citadel 21 Lottery participant reporting for duty!”

Follow me on Twitter if you’d like to stay up to date on all of this.