Self-introduction: Moritz Bierling

Dear reader,

My name is Moritz Bierling and I am the Director of Research at Exosphere. This post serves as my introduction to the Steemit community and therefore details my personal history with respect to the blockchain community and its constituent elements.

The recent popular reception of my “letter to blockchain community” on Medium prompted comments by readers on Facebook, calling for its upload to this platform. Before doing so, I felt it appropriate to introduce myself first.

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The first time I heard about Bitcoin was in fall of 2013. I had just started my second study program “Maritime Management” at the Hamburg School of Business Administration after quitting my first program “Philosophy & Economics” in Bayreuth. Some blogger – it may have been Jeff Berwick, I don’t recall – had written about it, putting it in relation to our ongoing catastrophe that is the centrally controlled fiat banking system. After spending some more time researching it and looking for more material, I found nearly exclusively anarchist, libertarian, and economist takes on the subject. Naturally, I decided to buy some for myself, speculating it would blow up at some point due to its underlying economics and technical structure. Sure enough, it did.

From the time I decided to buy to the time Bitstamp approved my account, three weeks passed and the price of a Bitcoin tripled from ~$200 to ~$600. As we all know, for a brief time it went up more than twice that (yay!), but then crashed and trended downwards until mid 2015 (damn it!) when it reversed its course (yay!). My interest was piqued and I decided to take a closer look at the technology itself and the other projects that began to come out around the time.

In Summer 2014 I got involved with the BitNation project. I recorded the first ever video for the BitNation blog (“BitNation Visions: Moritz Bierling”) and helped out with some minor document editing internally. Soon afterwards, the project experienced a leadership conflict and, because I could not judge the truth content of either side, I decided to disassociate myself from BitNation and concentrate on my own work. It was during this time that I began to meet an increasing number of “blockchain people” online and broadened my network considerably as a result.

In fall of the same year I participated in Exosphere’s first Hydra bootcamp (their third bootcamp overall). I had decided to suspend my second study program and see whether I couldn’t make my own way in Chile through entrepreneurial activity. At the bootcamp I got to know lots of courageous and curious people, some of which I had already known online, e.g. Gabriel Scheare and the Crowleys of Fort Galt. I also participated in a workshop on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, deepening my knowledge not only of its technical details but also of its role in the current economic climate as well as the broader context of society. Upon finishing the bootcamp the Exosphere team asked me to join them, and so I did, effectively quitting my studies.

In Summer 2015 I met Machiavelli Davis, a recent acquaintance of Exosphere founder Skinner Layne, who upon Exosphere’s invitation joined the world’s first space elevator bootcamp “Copernicus”, for which I had assumed the role as Program Manager.

At the end of that bootcamp I had a few free days in Budapest that I spend exploring the city and talking with Mac about our world views. In 2012 he had sold all his belongings for Bitcoin and bought a school bus, stocked it with 3d printers, and went on a road trip to visit awesome people all over the US. While on the road he had had an accident that nearly cost him his life, giving him a drastic, unwanted – though not unwelcome – change in perspective: he effectively had been “reborn” in the sense that every second of his life after that accident could be considered a gift. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how such a life event changes your approach to risk and may encourage you to live by incredibly strong principles. Naturally, I was intrigued.

We got to know each other well enough that we agreed to work on projects together, one of which I provided the capital for in Bitcoin. My first business venture that cryptocurrency played a role in!

In Fall of 2015, Mac and I started a second venture, helping friends and family to profit from our trading activities in return for a management fee. In Winter of the same year, I also managed to create a partnership between Exosphere and BitNation, where we offered the BitNation Scholarship to members of the BitNation community for attending the Hydra III bootcamp in Spring 2016. Two good people who I now have the privilege of calling friends attended through this scholarship: Conor O’Higgins and Tristan Roberts. At the program they founded Decipher, a design activism agency, to help crypto projects with design and marketing services. Thanks to my many contacts in the crypto community they asked me to join as an advisor and recruiter, or “Hydra Head Hunter”.

After Hydra III finished in early March, I pitched my colleagues at Exosphere on offering an Ethereum course under our new Stream model for the Academy. Everybody agreed that we should do this, and so I took on the role of the Ethereum Curator. I found our teacher for the course (Philip Saunders), marketed the program through media appearances (Cointelegraph story, The Bitcoin Podcast episode #65, and several others), and accepted students to the program. I was especially happy about securing partnerships with some of the bigger names such as ConsenSys and Ethereum Labs in addition to sponsorships from Ledger and Digital Ocean.

Once the Academy was running, I helped our students with forming and refining their project ideas (e.g. Nitrate and put them in touch with contacts from my network. At this time I learned a lot more in depth information about how blockchain works, what industries can truly benefit from it, and how the development process works. I also maintained a pretty good awareness of the entire industry and what latest projects were coming out. It was at this time that I started to formulate my own thoughts about problems I saw in the community and how to remedy them.

Then, on October 11th I published my Letter to the Blockchain Community on Medium and received a fair number of responses, mostly of a positive nature. It seemed as though my criticism had struck a cord and the people who read the article felt like I was articulating not only my own views, but the views of a sizable portion of actively involved developers, marketers, and CEOs. A good two weeks later (October 28th) Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift, tweeted out my letter with some nice words:

https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/792224816757510144

The following day my letter received over 800 views, the most I’ve ever had in a single day in my humble Medium career. To date, the post has been viewed by over 2,800 people, has 84 recommends, and 11 responses. Overall, it has been shared 126 times (as of Wednesday, Nov. 2nd, 3pm CLT).

I posted it in one blockchain group on Facebook and the moderator asked me why I hadn’t put it up on Steemit. So here I am…

My next post will be the letter itself.

[Edit: since first posting this it has come to my attention that Steemit has no viable future as a platform. For this reason, this post and the post about my letter will remain my only posts.]