Me

Hi, my name is Yegor. I’m a Ukrainian dude who currently lives in the USA! I first heard about Bitcoin in 2015, when my Ukrainian neighbors were mining cryptocurrency at the dorm. The electricity was free, and the dorm housed thousands of students. This made it hard to catch who was mining, and where the huge leak of electricity originated. The guys did not tell me too much about what was going on and how it worked. So unfortunately, I missed out on the opportunity to buy Bitcoin back in those days. 

How I Stopped Trusting Banks and the State

Everything started for real in 2016, when I was finishing my bachelor’s degree and preparing to move to the US. To get the visa I needed to show a bank statement with the required amount of fiat to the consular. I didn’t have a choice, so I put my money into the bank. To get a bank statement I couldn’t deposit and withdraw it in the same day, the money needed to be sitting there for some time. Turns out, after a couple of weeks this bank was liquidated! To be honest, I was shocked. I know how everything is handled in Ukraine, and that I might not see my money again at all! I came to understand that the banks are like a casino! You never know if you will get your money back or not! Fortunately, today they are paying me back, but in small fractions.

Later, in 2018 after I arrived in the US, my Chase checking account was suddenly closed without any explanation. For me it was obvious that the reason was they saw I was buying Bitcoin. When I went to the branch to try and get an explanation from them, they were repeating the same sentences like robots:

Chase: Sorry, you can’t be our customer anymore!

Me: Why?

Chase: We can’t give you any information!

Me: But also why didn’t you close my credit card together with checking account?!

Chase: Because it’s different.

I was like: okay, then I will just go and open another checking account at a different bank, not a big deal at all.

After this situation I asked myself the question: why the fuck do we need banks at all in the 21st century?!

With Bitcoin I can be my own bank, wherever I go and whenever I need it, without any problems and permissions!

Fuck the banks! 

I went to study in the US in 2016. My major was “Law”.  After the graduation I couldn’t find a job in my field, so I found temporary job at a warehouse. My boss back then, and now my friend, introduced me to Bitcoin by saying “This thing is going to $100K”, and tried to convince me to buy at least a small portion of it!

He didn’t know too much about Bitcoin, and couldn’t explain it very well. He just had a lot of fiat and invested it everywhere. In 2017, I went ahead and bought a small portion of Bitcoin, and later on unfortunately some shitcoins!

So yeah, I lost some money that I made together with my wife. After suffering a loss, I soon converted the shitcoins to BTC to add to my small stack. For a long time I was depressed that I just came to the US, and already got burned. So I focused on my new journey at my current job (to be honest this is not the best place where I would want to work, but I’m actively looking for new opportunities). Due to time constraints I stopped thinking about Bitcoin at all for a while.

Bitcoin Twitter

In 2019, on Facebook, I found out that Chicago would host a Blockchain conference. I went and met different people who kept asking me: “Are you on Twitter?!”, and no, I did not have a twitter account, lol. So, they encouraged me to create an account and start following Bitcoin hashtags. I came home and created my Twitter account.

I guess the first guy who showed up in my search was Peter McCormack. I found out that he has a podcast about Bitcoin, and my rabbit hole journey had started! I listened to almost everything Bitcoin-related on his podcast.

Then I started figuring out who I should follow to keep up to date on everything that was going on. This was hard, because I didn’t know anyone and had no clue who was good and who was bad! To be honest, even now this is hard to filter!

I started seeing comments in my feed with Fartface2000, El Barto, Mr. Hodl, Adam Back, Marty Bent, Matt Odell, Hodlonaut, Jimmy Song, Saifedean. I understood that I had missed a lot of interesting stuff by not being on twitter, and a new world of information opened. I started asking a lot of questions, and I was surprised that the community was helping me out with everything I wanted to know. I felt like: “Wow, these people are very kind, and I should learn from them”.

Then I remember Mr. Bitcoin tipped me some sats through the BottlePay bot on Twitter, and after that I discovered Telegram. Over there I met a lot of really cool people who I right now have a good relationship with! One of them is Duck, he is my Bitcoin sensei! He helped me with everything that I needed to know from the beginning. He encouraged me to run my own Bitcoin full node. Then he inspired me to get a good hardware wallet. I saw a lot of tweets from Matt Odell about coinjoining and mixing stuff. Of course, my e-friend Duck taught me about coinjoins and how can I do that. I was like “WTF, how have I owned Bitcoin for 2.5 years and didn’t know about all of this stuff?”

Then, my wife gifted me Saifedean’s “The Bitcoin Standard” book. After reading it I understood that I don’t need to save dirty fiat anymore! I need fiat only to pay my bills and that’s it! I started average buying Bitcoin whenever I had some fiat left.

So, stacking sats had now become a part of my life!

How I Started Making Bitcoin Pictures

As I learned more about Bitcoin, I wanted to start somehow contributing back to the community, but I didn’t know what I could do. First, what was on my mind was to start learning to code. I took some basic Phyton courses on Udemi, but I understood that without a mentor it would be hard to achieve my mission. So, I put it aside for a while.

Then I found an interesting Twitter account, called Swedetoshi. I saw that this dude was making cool stuff with his followers avatar pictures, and they liked it. I was like: “Wait, it should be easy for me to use Photoshop and make something like that, but in a different way”.

So basically, my caricatures started together with the Coronavirus. I was sitting at home, and for whole days, even weeks, I was photoshopping. I was just randomly choosing the avatars of my followers, and people I’m following. I remember my wife said to me: “If you will not stop doing this, you will not have my attention anymore”. But of course, I was unstoppable, and I couldn’t help it, lol!

I remember probably the most cool stuff that I have done was the “Bitcoiner Wanted 1.0” thread.

My DMs got so many messages that I couldn’t even respond to everyone. I was very happy that Bitcoiners liked and accepted what I was doing. Also, I understood that it might be temporary, because to be honest I don’t have too much free time. I am in the US on a student visa, so I’m studying (to keep my legal status) and at the same time working full time. So, now I’m thinking about something else that I can do for my Bitcoin Plebs Fam.