My start in distributed computering and crypto-currenciering

When I first heard about bitcoin, I thought (and still do) it was gross. Disgusting, even. You see, I was intimately familiar with distributed.net, seti@home, and folding@home at the time. I had a small dual Celeron rig I built in the late 90s specifically to run BeOS and, due to my insane work schedule, basically just let it contribute to my team's d.net score. I thought this was going to be big: distributed computing to build on-the-fly supercomputers networked across the world. Then came seti@home and folding@home, both of which aimed to solve a couple of real problems: search for ExtraTerrestrial signals in the background noise of the universe (maybe I'll make a post about my Church of the All Signal eventually.. ;) ), and another for simulating protein folds for medicinal research. At first, I was all about folding@home, but then we came to find that the originators were charging people money for access to their distributed network. No, just no. I'm donating my electricity and my computing resources for a good cause; I'll be damned if you're going to make money on my goodwill. This comes into play today with my experiment here on steemit. We'll come back to that. Distributed.net, btw, if you weren't around then, was an attempt to prove how strong various encryption techniques were by brute forcing the keys using a worldwide network of computers. We got to see, first hand, just what kind of effort it would take to break those algorithms by force. It was fun and it was for science!

distributed.net cow image taken from www.distributed.net/logos official logos. Created by Jeff Lawson

And then came bitcoin. I distinctly recall most of us thinking about what a waste of resources, what a waste of time it would be to do a distributed currency. What problem were we solving? Outside of the radical anarchist nonsense about central banking, I couldn't think of any. I mean, if I stopped contributing to folding@home because of unpaid commercialization, I just couldn't get myself to get onboard bitcoin, which is basically the purest form of commercialization with the singular incentive of making magic internet money. I, rightfully, analyzed that bitcoin, if it were to take off, would eventually require an immense amount of resources. The days of mining on your desktop or on a forgotten garage computer would be limited, as we've seen over the past few years. It just seemed... wrongheaded. I saw potential in cryptocurrency in the future (after all, if we ever travel to other planets/build space stations, etc, are we really going to lug around gold and silver, or even paper if we don't have to? mass = $$$), but I wasn't convinced $BTC was the future. Plus, I wasn't exactly enamored with the politics involved. Charles Stross wrote a nice article that, while I won't say I agree with his... let's call it vigor, I think it sums up a lot of my feelings towards crypto-as-politics. And we won't even get into TPS. Maybe Lightning will fix it. Maybe this year will be the year of Linux-on-the-desktop.

Just because I poo-poo'd $BTC doesn't mean I ignored it. I was very much aware of the big use case: buying drugs on the internet. How many accidental millionaires do I know because they bought $BTC to buy drugs on the Silk Road and forgot about it? Of course, how many of those also forget their public key or had it confiscated when DPR got busted? I think almost anyone peripherally involved with tech knows at least one of these poor folks. I'm also not naive to think if I had collected some $BTC back in the day of early mining I'd be sitting on top of a skyscraper in my villain's lair; shit, I'd have gotten out if it hit $1. Most of us would have and many of us did.

But the point is, I kept an eye on it. I still found it disgusting, and also started looking at ethereum. And last year, I finally realized the following things about myself:

• I was wrong about the iPod and Apple. I thought the iPod was lame and Apple products in general were too expensive and would remain a niche market. I was a fan of NeXT, but who could afford one of those? I had read Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning...was the Command Line (referral link removed for your pleasure), which I recommend as some decent reading into the state of computing in the late 90's. I was a BeOS guy, and still find myself dinking around with HaikuOS from time to time. I have an old Sony Netbook I am tempted to install it on. Anyway, Neal really did a decent job of articulating what it was to those of us who had discovered BeOS. Apples were walled gardens. Linux was anarchy. BeOS was somewhere in the middle, with a user experience that had to be used to be enjoyed. Anyway, just take a look at Apple's stock price and imagine my acceptance of the fact that even though I still own no Apple products, I was wrong. So, so wrong from a prediction standpoint. (I did have a Powermac G5 that I pulled from a garbage heap for awhile there. It was nice, especially for the price of a CMOS battery and a harddrive, and it doubled as a space heater in the winter).

• I was wrong about the housing market. I didn't buy in the mid-2000s because I thought it was a bubble and was proven right. Unfortunately, the market had the effect of destroying my job, so I could no longer buy a house as I didn't have a stable income. But hey, the market won't return to the ridiculous prices it reached pre-crash, right? sigh

• BeOS never went anywhere.

• Mother-fucking bitcoin hit $20k.

Here's a little story

Last year, I had dinner with a buddy who mentioned he was getting into penny stocks. I laughed. And he asked me to take a look at a certain penny stock "guru" (whomever came up with that term to use for these guys needs to be kicked in the dick). So I did. And jesus christ, that guy sounded like a big fucking douche, but he sounded like a rational douche. I bought one of his courses, and decided I wanted to give it a whirl. Now, I skipped over the part where I had bought a little Ethereum earlier last year when it had a big dip to < $200 just to experiment with (and I vastly prefer Ether over BTC for various reasons; I'm sure you can think of them yourself). I was sitting on a nice return and sold it to fund my first trading account. Now, it wasn't huge, about $500. Get my toes wet. And by mid-December, I was sitting on $3500. I mean, jesus, that's not bad at all. There's something to it, I guess. The problems:

1. Waking up every morning at 6AM to get ready for market open sucked. I'm a night owl. Given no responsibility, I naturally go to bed around 5-6AM and wake up around 1-2PM.
2. Gambling addiction issues. My family has addiction issues. Gambling is one thing that runs in the family. I used to have a problem with gambling; I worked 2 jobs for awhile there and one whole paycheck went to feeding the casino. I did that for about 6 months before I came to my senses. But as I watched the candlesticks, price action, order sheets, I began to feel that same feeling I got at the craps table. Clammy hands. Cold sweat. Adrenaline pumping and dumping. I realized this was going to be problematic as my blood pressure began to climb and climb. No wonder stock traders look like they're 50 when they're in their late 20s. You know, even if I could make a million a year doing this.. I'm not sure I wanted the lifestyle.

So, my last penny stock trade, I setup over 3 weeks. Instead of the quick day-trade I had been doing, I made a calculated bet. $BTC would continue to climb, so I found a couple of stocks that had previously seen a lot of action and followed $BTC's price for a bit there. I researched and determined, as always, it was a scammy scammy scammy stock (as all pennystocks are.. If anyone tells you otherwise, they've swallowed the cum-filled-kool-aid. Exceptions prove the rule), but the pattern didn't lie. The two $BTC funds were going to hit the market soon, and my wager was that as $BTC continued to climb, people were going to call their brokers and say "I want to buy bitcoin!" Because $BTC isn't tradable on the exchanges (yet? maybe now?), their brokers were going to buy anything with the word "bitcoin," "blockchain-," or similar in the name. I put my money where my thoughts were and et voila! I doubled my money in 3 weeks. That long term hold was the least stressful I felt in the past 3 months of day trading and I made just as much money. But then I thought, why bet on something that's dependent upon the price of bitcoin when I can just buy it direct? Well, let's not get too hasty because I still think $BTC is gross; but there are alternatives.

I began pulling my money out of the market. I began reading about alt-coins. Awesome! Just like penny stocks, there's hype, there's news-price-action, there's pump and dump, all the things you love about pennies with ZERO REGULATION. But more importantly:

• Cryptocurrencies are a scam and will never take off

See my predictions above that failed? Apparently, the stronger the conviction, the less likely it was to be a truthful indicator of the future. I felt (feel?) strongly about crypto's use. I felt (feel?) strongly that crypto's price is not generated by genuine usage cases, but by speculation. I felt (feel?) that after analyzing crypto, it's still ripe for massive scams (ICO exit scams.. bitconnect...). But goddammit, I was wrong about all these other big things, why not put my money to the test?

I bought in. I created accounts on several exchanges. Nevermind that I have no idea who those exchanges are and knowing my luck, keep all of our identification stuff in fucking Google Docs or an unsecured AWS... Instead of day trading, I decided I'm buying and I'm holding long term. And I've continued to add to my holdings because I firmly believe it's going nowhere. Not a lot, mind you, but I'm buying and continuing to buy. For a minimum of 1 year, that's the agreement I made with myself.

Here's the thing, though. The speculation part is nice. Yeah, I'd love to buy a lambo one day (actually, more like a Ford Transit or Nissan NV200.. I'm a utilitarian kind of dude. Okay, so I'll get a naked Aztec Princess holding a serpent airbrushed on the side and blast doom metal or something). But I figured, if I'm going to do this, let's avoid the moon rush and look for use cases. Let's look for real world problems. Let's go beyond the "I hope I hope I hope" and get into "What can I use this for?" And that's what I think I've done a decent job at. So far, my portfolio looks like my girlfriend's tampon, but I think that goes for anyone getting into the market in late 2018. But I hold.

Steemit

I gave up facebook. #fuckzuck Remember what I said about folding@home? It's sobering to know that I was creating content that people were reading and reacting to, and the only thing I had to show for it was some magic internet points. Reputation. Oh yay, 200 likes! Sure, I don't mind sharing, but you know what? Facebook is making money off of people like me. People like you. We create the content, but all we get are a few "attaboys"! and continue on with our day.

One of the first coins I bought was REQ. I thought it was trying to solve an interesting problem, that of micro-transactions. Of course, I think micro-transactions, in current state (and the state we've been battling since the 90s) is that no one wants to pay for anything. I don't want to pay for anything if I don't have to. The big saving grace of Amazon Prime, besides the shipping, is that it saves me from bittorrent. And if you haven't watched Babylon 5, what the hell? Get on it. Back to REQ. I ended up selling it with a 30% profit because I just wasn't feeling confident in it. I put it into another of my alts, but continued thinking about this issue. A few months ago, I ran into steemit. I think I had googled something and there was a steemit post about it. I began looking through various sources and realized that $STEEM was poised to solve those problems about monetizing and incentivizing creators. I still see some issues with some of the assumptions, but you know what? Here it is. A coin with a real use-case, right now. I can buy some STEEM, create an account, and start posting. If people like my shit, I can make a little scratch. If not, it's no worse than facebook, where I get exactly dick for my efforts. And fuck wordpress. Sure, steemit may be filled with a bunch of bearded nerds (I don't know, is it?). I'm a bearded nerd. Why not give it a shot?

I guess my round-up of all of that is: Sure, lambo/moon is great! But what I really want to see is REAL WORLD USAGE. REAL WORLD ADOPTION. And $STEEM seems to be delivering that right now.

I bought some STEEM today. I created my account. Now hopefully, maybe I can see the future.

Hello, World!