My Bitcoin Story

When I was young, every morning in elementary school the teacher would have us write about an imaginary world in our journal. Subjects normally consisted of questions like “if you could make it rain anything in your world what would you make it rain?” However one morning the teacher put an interesting question the board. The question was something along the lines of “what would be used for money in your world?”

After a few minutes of thinking I thought, what if all the money in my imaginary world was on the internet? I was young at the time about seven or eight years old. I didn’t know much about the philosophy behind money let alone the internet. Little did I know at the time that what I was writing about in that elementary school would become the future.

So I wrote three short paragraphs on how in my imaginary world we had money that was all on the internet. In the short journal entry I believe I called the currency either Cyber Coin or Cyber Dollars. I honestly don't remember that detail. It didn’t take long to write, as most of these morning journal assignments did. After I finished the entry I took my journal and put it in the bin to be graded by the teacher.

Later on in the day while myself and rest of the class were working on something else the teacher, Ms. Diane, said she wanted to speak to me at her desk. So I went over to her desk and I saw my green journal on it open to the entry from that morning. This teacher already didn’t like me. I was always the kid getting in trouble for little things like doodling in class.

Ms. Diane went on to berate me about what I had written. I still remember her saying in a very condescending way “now Mitchell, money can’t exist in the internet. It has to be something real.” Even as a little kid I felt like she was resisting the urge to say your idea is fucking stupid. She ended up giving me an F for the journal entry that day.

Fast forward around to around eight years later. Around this time I was a freshman in high school who had recently discovered libertarian philosophy. One day while on a computer in study hall I came across a website called The Muslim Agorist which had some pretty nice pins for sale. I noticed the site featured payment option for a currency I had never heard of called Bitcoin. Curious about what this was I did a little more digging and found out the very imaginary currency that had gotten me an F in elementary school had become a reality.

I still wonder what that teacher would say today given Bitcoin's place in popular culture as well as the rise of other cryptocurrencies. The very thing she had failed me for is now a reality. I returned to my hometown around 2015 to see the elementary school I had attended was closed. Apparently years of poor management eventually caught up to the school.

Unfortunately, the green elementary school journal in question was eventually lost. I moved a lot growing up. If the journal isn't packed away in a box somewhere then it is most likely in a landfill by now. If I ever manage to locate the journal I will upload the page where I wrote about Cyber Coin.