My blockchain life and how it was re-inspired by Jon Snow "Winter is coming!"

Game of Thrones: Jon Snow. Source Tumblr.com
My name is Daniel Kaminski de Souza, also known as ProphetDaniel in the crypto community. I didn't introduce myself before because I felt worried about privacy and phishing attacks. And it wasn't without motives, last year the first Bitcoin lending lawsuit in the world was granted in my favor. After that, a lot of contact requests were directed to my social channels. Once I got used and learned how to deal with such situations, that stopped bothering me the way it used to. Anyway I kept a strong policy to always minimize my exposure.

For representing myself today I chose this Jon Snow picture. I chose this picture because a special person to me likes to compare me to Jon regarding both overall looks and lively character. I heard he is one of the most inspiring and captivating man in the Game of Thrones series, which I'm not, but I discovered I can learn with him. So now when I feel I'm not that guy, I look to his pictures and question myself:

How would Jon think? What would he do in this situation?

And then I try to mimic the way he would behave and do the right thing. I tell myself:

I'm now an actor playing Jon Snow in the Game of Thrones.

And surprisingly to me, it became much easier to be Jon and take the right action when I pull the actor. I don't feel all the pain I would if I was real Daniel in real life. The huge problems for Daniel are not for Jon. So I came to the point where I feel so grateful for Jon existing even though I never watched Game of Thrones. Alright, I could get disappointed after watching it, or maybe not. In the meanwhile I fulfill the empty spaces of what would Jon be with beautifull dreams of a man I wanted to be.

Many of you know that I've been pushing my limits for the last months since the inception of Ethereum Classic when we were only 4 guys. Now I feel the community embraced the cause in such a passioned way that my contribution is dilluted in thousands of active members. Maybe it's time for me to take a break, watch the Game of Thrones and learn more about Jon.

I wholeheartedly feel gratefull for all the things the blockchain ecosystem has done for my life that I think it's worth to tell how my journey evolved onto this whole crazy and disruptive thing of smart contracts technology. My cryptocurrency life began when I sought to resolve a very tight budget situation.

My wife felt too much cold in the winter nights and by my calculations it wouldn't be possible to heat enough the bedroom without compromising other areas of our financial life. Then I asked myself a question which would have been stupid if Bitcoin was not created yet.

How can I make my wife happy heating the bedroom but without paying electricity bills?

A year before I remember making the project and assembling my first high performance water cooled low noise PC where high performance, low noise and small size were all present at the same time.

Bitcoin miner powered bedroom heating HTPC

If I'm able to sell the computing power I in this thing I'll solve the heating cost problem.

By turning it on to slow the approaching winter nights in Curitiba, it mined more than 25 Bitcoins that season. Each bitcoin was worth 4.5 USD at that time. A week later, I was in the master's classes in university where the cryptography professor Eduardo Parente Ribeiro that week gave us homework to present about cryptography or related matter.

I chose the Bitcoin subject because I was very happy experiencing the solution of a problem never possible before that way.
I read the whole Satoshi's whitepaper and prepared the presentation. It was awesome to share my story and his. After the presentation I went talk to the professor, who was also the chief of the electrical engineering deparment of the university, and told him:

As bitcoin relates to several subjects being taught in the post graduation courses, I suggest you should utilize all the research computers there are idle and mine bitcoins and directing the revenue for supporting the electrical engineering department closing the virtuous cycle.

He liked the idea and like so many failed to take action. Unlike a person I admire.

I fell in love with the blockchain technology and came home that day very happy. My wife and I had a small savings, around 40kusd, being traded in a portfolio of 10 stocks which were going nowhere in hope of buying a more fit place to live. So I got home understanding and realizing part of the disruption the blockchain was making and recommended to her:

My vote is to invest those 40k entirely in bitcoins. This is the future of money.

She asked some questions to better understand what it was and told me it was too risky. And it really was, and she said:

You can't invest the money destinated to buy us a more fit house into a virtual currency.

I felt I needed a feedback about that. Nobody in my circles saw the potential in Bitcoin, except for me. I started feeling like an ET, a nuts ET.
I answered her:

You are right. Maybe I'm a victim of brain washing and I would be an easy bait for these sharks.

In hindsight I was right. Our small savings would be worth over 5 million dollars today. On our own in the traditional way, we finally bought a great house to live with an additional mortgage that bitcoin mining would have to pay.

We finally bought the house we ever dreamed

Now the PC that was once was a bedroom heater is a relic I cherish. I treat it with such care and joy that my daugther got interested and helped changing the refrigerating fluid one day.

A relic girl for me.

Later on I started lending bitcoins in attempt to enhance our income. Unfortunately some loans defaulted, and as our budget got tight again we had a hard time paying our regular expenses for a couple of years.

My marriage started to have some hiccups and then she asked the divorce. It was a really difficult time for me, I felt like the world was ending, felt like there was no more reason for my life on earth. Divorce also gave me debts.

Thank god I didn't do something stupid and I was able to pull together my life. The strategy I used was to focus entirely on my new found passion, as I had no other options. And I chose to study and go deeper onto the blockchain technology. That's when the idea of programming an autonomous agent for playing in Satoshi Dice came to me, which from now on is going to be called The Noodle.

Winter is coming.

After Jon got permission for creating the bot, he built it. After months of failure and losing, to his amazement it started to win. SatoshiDice started to have problems in their site, and as a result, the amount of active players declined for a month. Jon's new girfriend and him became emotionally bonded with the Noodle. It was able to start with just 200 satoshis and reached 100,000 satoshis within two weeks, that is freaking 50,000% return.

Screenshot shows the Noodle in action.

When the normal flow of bets was restabilished the Noodle started to loose more. I found the solution in debugging the logs and fixed it.
It was exciting to see the Noodle working tirelessly again. Jon was proud for seing his creature taking autonomous decisions.

Then the DAO hack happened. I was seeing the news flowing everyday about it and I believed at the time that the hard fork in Ethereum blockchain was the right thing to do to recover the lost investors funds by a "so called evil hacker".
Studying deeper the subject I realized that maybe the hacker wasn't being actually evil, maybe he was just exposing a problem in the system by deploying his smart contract.

The bug was not in the Ethereum network itself it was actually in The DAO, a software layer built upon Ethereum.
Using a polemical voting mechanism Ethereum Foundation (EF) decided to rewrite the public ledger as if the transaction by the hacker had never occurred. And in doing so the EF commited a fraud by changing Ethereum's public ledger. It's like giving the power to an organization to erase a valid government debt.
Unfortunately EF, in attempt to fix a foreign problem, created another problem in Ethereum - The immutability and fungibility values were broken.

The hardfork allowed the Ethereum Foundation to revert the stolen funds back to the investors in Ethereum blockchain, which is a good thing. It also provided an amazing oportunity for ether holders doubling their investment by doing a firesell on Ethereum Classic. If you look to the data provided by Poloniex, from twenty to thirty minutes after ETC started trading, ETC price crashed giving the opportunity for ether aware holders to maximize their profits. In the other hand the unforked Ethereum was supported by people like me who deeply believe in the values proposition.

Since then I've been an active community member. My membership is well described by a very popular phrase in the community:

Let’s make sure the original Ethereum vision doesn’t just “go gentle into that good night”!

Some of my posts represent my opinion on how the Ethereum community could get benefits from adopting technological social concepts 1, 2, 3. In this community I met many awesome people and I really feel very lucky for being there from day one.

One of the most visionary person I've met there, I have to admit is Michal J. Trout. Not because of his claim to have his idea used by a former EF member to inspire Vitalik to write the white paper which led to the Ethereum. But because for him the blockchain has a purpose that is to bring a new selfless business model for the people. Michal is able to see the system he designed and evolved throughout the years since 2013 like if it was already working live today.
And the purpose behind it is a ground breaking scheme powered by the Noodle to make the world a better place to live. A glimpse of Michael's ideas can be seen here:.

It seems that people nowadays just think that this is normal. Guys, this ain't normal!

• Beach Boy

Michael is a good guy, and I'm convinced he with his project will pull an outstanding application that will push ETC to a whole new level.
This week we jointly launched ETC Foundups and I became the CTO to help bring about a revolutionary platform powered by the Noodle.

I was already working on an autonomous agent (AA) to deliver consistent investment growth. And I'm happy it is inline with Michael's ideas. Even with ETC price falling 6.37% in the last 15 days, the Noodle made positive 13.41% trading ETC/BTC pair. That anualized gives more than a staggering 2,000% return.

Yesterday was a day for the four of us, founders of ETC Foundups, to be proud of. A proposal was made to buy the organization for US 200M. And without hesitation we rejected it.

We are not going to sell Foundups for 200 millions dollars to whales. Foundups has a selfless proposal to save the planet.

• Jon Snow

All we have is our planet and it's priceless. If we don't act now and stop the approching winter, we can lose everything. Money is the important instrument to make sound projects viable.
That's the sweet and noble actitude I was able to witness this week. Congrats ETC Foundups!

Now you might be thinking who's that special person who calls me Jon Snow?
That person is Michael J. Trout - CEO of ETC Foundups.