My parents were a power couple.

My dad ran an extremely successful company, and my mom was a well known philanthropist who dealt with politicians and celebrities on a daily basis.

My parents were loving and supportive. I was living in an artificially created bubble that would suddenly implode, forever altering the core of who I was.

The 2008 financial crises changed everything for us.

Coincidently, just a few months later, Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto. The domino effect, which was on one hand destroying my family, paralleled the rise of a new money, the hardest money humanity has ever known. Ironically, it was a system many would have benefited from at the time, but simply did not know about.

I found that the Universe has a funny way of messing with humanity like that, and this coincidence has gone so far as to change my faith in my own destiny.

In 2009, when I was in my late teens I experienced the first drops of what would become a long fall from grace. I was in Europe for summer vacation. I got a call from American Express asking for my parents. I was young and curious, so I somehow convinced the lady to tell me what was going on. She said we owed $160,000 and that we haven’t paid our bill in 3 months.

I immediately called my parents, but they reassured me that it was some sort of mistake.

However, incidents like this started happening more often. My parents were never in a good mood anymore. My grandmother would start telling me that I needed to have a backup plan because I could no longer rely on my father for future in employment. I obviously didn’t believe her at the time, but in hindsight I regret that. She was the only one that truly warned me of what was to come.

Without going too much into detail, my parents lost all their assets and subsequently divorced. Before the divorce went through my father disappeared and left us with $120,000 debt to the IRS for taxes he didn’t pay. On top of that, I was just starting my freshman year at college, so I had to drop out. We lost our family home. We lost our only form of income, and my family unit was no longer together.

I lost everything I knew, so at that point I escaped the only way I knew how — through drugs and partying. All my old friends, though initially sympathetic, disappeared one by one and moved on with their lives. I suffered in silence, feeling like my life was completely out of my hands.

I had no purpose, no future, I couldn’t concentrate.

I grew resentful of academia because of it’s false hope for profits, so I no longer pursued an education. I worked with my mom and got my real estate license, but eventually I needed something more stable. I was barely making ends meet.

I gave a 9 to 5 job a chance since school was clearly not for me. I worked a minimum wage job in a warehouse for a cellphone repair company. I was at the lowest point in my life. While the friends I grew up with were working as executives at Goldman Sachs and other top money management firms, living the high live I was supposed to have, I was working in a warehouse every day making pennies. At that point I was living on my friends couch.

I’ve always heard the phrase what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but I never really understood its significance until that period of my life.

I learned more about life in that warehouse than on any of my days at school. Misery made me stronger.

In 2016, my cousin came to visit me from Venezuela.

He eventually brought up that he had been mining Bitcoin in Venezuela.

I had heard of Bitcoin at this point because like so many others, I knew about the Silk Road (#FREEROSS), but had never really paid attention to it’s actual utility. I had a lot going on.

My cousin was the one who told me he had these machines that you plug in, and they pay you magic internet money.

I was immediately hooked because of the financial incentive that represented for me. I was miserable and broke, but worse than all of that, I still had no purpose.

I had a strong feeling in my gut that made me feel hopeful for the first time in many years. It was the first time I could take back control of my life.

I called my uncle, and I told him I wanted to know everything there was about these money making machines that I would later come to know as ASICS. He agreed I could come to Venezuela, but told me he wouldn’t give me a penny from his operation.

Before I left, I began my journey down the rabbit hole. I went on YouTube and watched every single one of Andreas Antonopolous’s Bitcoin videos on repeat, to the point that I would memorize his talks.

He made me realize that the money was broken.

I found out that having money in a bank mean it’s not really yours. We’re all living off of IOUs that could simply not be there from one day to the next.

When I found out that I had the chance to take back full control of my financial sovereignty, that the experiences I faced would never blindside me again, I knew that I not only wanted to go all in on Bitcoin, I wanted to dedicate my life to it.

After speaking with my uncle, I quit my job 2 weeks later, and sold everything I had. I borrowed money from my mom, who was back on her feet at this point. I borrowed money from my grandma and my ex girlfriends. I completely maxed out my credit cards, which I had no intention of paying back, and left the US to Venezuela.

The country was experiencing hyperinflation at the time and was politically unstable, but it had one advantage.

The government was subsidizing the electricity and had an official exchange rate for the dollar, but the exchange rate on the street was significantly lower.

It created a situation where, officially, the cost of electricity was comparable to the industrial electricity rates around the world, but the actual black market exchange rate was so cheap that it was practically free.

I was doing this all while my beautiful Antminer S9s were mining me sweet Satoshis day and night. I absolutely loved it.

I found myself waking up with excitement again. These were some of the best days of my life, all thanks to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, although the center of my life’s purpose now, did not come without it’s ups and downs.

I had to learn what it meant to HODL.

2017 came around and the price of Bitcoin increased a ridiculous amount by years end. I not only had my own mining operation at this point. I learned more in 2016 and 2017 about money, economics, electricity, computing, and life than in all my years of school combined.

Bitcoin gave me an opportunity to live a life I never thought I would have after what happened to me and my family.

Eventually I could no longer mine in Venezuela because the government started to seize mining operations in order to mine themselves.

When the bear market hit, I lost more than half of my hosting clients. I took the extra time I had on my hands to learn to code. Not once, however, no matter how low the price dropped did I ever think of cashing out because I could never put my life in another person’s hands like I once did when I lived in a bubble.

During this time I also started working in commercial real estate again, and almost everything I made I put right back into Bitcoin. In 2019 things started to pick back up again and I could go full time mining again, but I became more interested in contributing to the Bitcoin community.

I figured I knew a lot at this point and had an interesting story, so I figured other people must have had a story as well. I started a podcast that year in which I talked to Bitcoiners from all walks of life. Then, in 2020 I started a 10 min daily show with another Bitcoin pleb because I wanted everyone to discover the power of Bitcoin for themselves. Plus, all the shitcoin channels schilling garbage were starting to get on my nerves.

Bitcoin became my hope for salvation in the darkest hour.

It gave me purpose, a real reason to live again.

I’ll never take the coincidence that it was created on the same year that my family started to lose everything for granted. I will never go back to a bank or the traditional finance world.

I will always demand sovereignty over wealth, and I will always give back with my hashrate and my videos to the community that gave me back my life.