First experiences with Bitcoin

In 2011/2012 stumbled upon Bitcoin through a radio show called FreeTalkLive. The idea of a P2Ppayment system and currency sounded promising. I bought some BTC from Mt Gox, downloaded Bitcoin QT, and tried it out.

My first take was that the idea was cool but it would never take off because it took too long to download the blockchain (hundreds of MB at the time). At the time, I was working on a payments company with a friend, and I knew quite a bit about how card payments worked online. The lack of intermediaries in bitcoin was amazing; the user experience was not.

Hosted experiences defeated the purpose of decentralized payments. At some point, I stumbled upon Electrum, an open source SPV wallet, that enabled most of the benefits of self custody and trustlessness without requiring users to download the entire blockchain. I could see how this could work.

Hooked on Bitcoin

In 2013, I moved to SF to work full-time on bitcoin. I founded a p2p marketplace called purse.io (acquired), and we contributed heavily to bitcoin infrastructure including an open source bitcoin implementation in node.js called bcoin.

I took all the liquid capital I had and converted it to bitcoin. As CEO of a bitcoin startup, we also decided to do all our payroll and pay as many expenses in bitcoin as we could. If you wanted to get paid in fiat at our company, you were not welcome. We asked all our vendors if they would accept bitcoin (many said yes), insisted investors to invest in bitcoin, etc. It was fun avoiding fiat as much as possible.

Views on Bitcoin today

I lived off bitcoin for more than a decade. Bitcoin culture changed and fewer people use bitcoin for payments than they did in 2013.

I’m not sold anything can be a Store of Value (SoV) without being a Medium of Exchange (MoE). Kinda feels like it should be both or neither.

I’ve since diversified although bitcoin is still by far my largest holding. There’s a good chance bitcoin, like all good things, has been co-opted by Tether and/or Blackrock. I’ll share more thoughts on where I see bitcoin and crypto going in this section.

Last update: July 10, 2024