“Full-Time Crypto”

For nearly all of us in the cryptocurrency space uttering the words “full-time crypto” means something special. For you, that phrase may mean early retirement, a change in your career path, financial freedom or even cutting ties (somewhat) with fiat monies forever.

In my case, all those reasons have made me ponder that phrase multiple times a week over the past 6+ years. Reflections on a hobby that began in 2011 and includes hundreds of deaths of my passion project, solidifies the fact that I’m “oldskool” in the cryptocoin world. Fittingly, it was one of those articles proclaiming Bitcoin’s death that drew me into the rabbit hole to start with.

Illustration: Martin VenezkyThe idea of digital money — convenient and untraceable, liberated from the oversight of governments and banks — had been a hot topic since the birth of the Internet. Cypherpunks, the 1990s movement of libertarian cryptographers, dedicated themselves to the project. Yet every effort to create virtual cash had foundered. — “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” — Benjamin Wallace, WIRED

“Hooked on a Feeling”

Like many of you internet nomads, this sounded amazing. Individual Sovereignty; are you kidding me? Sign me up!

There were limited, believable use cases at this point. Only BTC moving between exchanges and sites like Silk Road or LocalBitcoins, but the promise of a future, free from even these centralized 3rd Party Bitcoin services, was more than enough to spark hope in a decentralized economy.

Things changed about 48 hours later with my first 3X bump…

“I’m in this for the Coin”

👈 For most of you in the cryptocurrency space, this is your morning, afternoon, evening and, most likely, dream life.

People in this state of euphoria contemplate “full-time crypto” life pretty regularly — retiring early, financial freedom and even changing your career path to “day trader”.

Don’t let anyone in this space squelch your new found love for chart reading or magnetism towards FOMO. It’s part of the initiation that every oldskooler worth listening to will admit to participating in when cornered.

I think something else they’ll tell you is, “it’s more than just making money.” Now if you’re listening or not is another story.

Most of the price action leading into 2013/2014 was surrounding Satoshi’s “greatest invention of all time”

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. - “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” — Satoshi Nakamoto

Little did most of us know that the “coin” was only 1/2 of the equation.

Funny how viewing things through money-tinted glasses leaves out details… like, how does this new cash system actually work? I think this is where journalists fail to see Satoshi’s vision in their death bed write-ups, and where many of us found time to learn after experiencing the gut check run-up to $1200 → $160 → $600 → $300.

“Semi-Retirement”

That’s what I called it.

We had our first girl in 2012, and we were blessed enough financially for me to leave my architecture firm and focus on our family and maintain our lifestyle via day trading cryptocurrencies. I think my quota was make 1 BTC/day trading — do that and we were good to go! Still in my late-thirties at the time, calling it a retirement sounded great (to me) but I didn’t want the raised eyebrows all my old college roommates would surely give at our family parties.

So I improvised.

I mean, who was I to spoil their joy of being neck deep in parenthood? Raising children, going to ball practices every night, eating McDonald’s in the car every meal. Spending 40+ hours a week away from the ones you loved shouldn’t be interrupted by such nonsense as retiring 15 years after just getting started.

Essentially it was a sabbatical from my “real job” as a healthcare design architect. The career path I unwittingly signed on for as a toddler building with LEGOs, refined in high-school designing cars and lost days of sleep over in college. “Living the American Dream” of paying into 5–10 years of debt and then trudging through nearly 50 years of service for someone not named “Mr. ME”.

Oh glory days!

”I’m in this for the Blockchain”

I was still playing family man and day trading cryptocurrencies in 2014 when I decided to return to my architecture firm. There really isn’t anything better than having freedom to spend the majority of your day with the people most important in your life.

My decision to return to a real job wasn’t as much a necessity as it was a strategic move. Financially we were good, but I had 2 reasons to jump back in.

First, frankly, I was bored. I missed doing design and I wasn’t really participating in the communities of any of the coins I was holding. When you aren’t involved in a hobby you say you’re passionate about you quickly lose interest. Its the Curse of the Entrepreneur; lacking focus and chasing ideas.

There weren’t hours of crypto webcasts that popped up daily in my feed to keep me entertained, only Bitcointalk.org which was good for a couple train wreck sightings a week.

Looking back at this time, I can see the tight bond of community, value and technology. We like to shill our favorite coin’s “first to” and “best at” technology but most users still don’t understand it all and deep down they only want more people to talk about their project so the price goes up.

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Bitcoins's split into Core and Cash is what has lead to the collapse of Bitcoin's dominance. It's not new coins, or ICO's. Lightning network won't save it. The most valuable aspect of any coin is its community; not its tech; and Bitcoin's community is permanently fractured.

 — @leoncfu

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Second, Bitcoin was in a remarkably stable price state and it was telling me it is time to accumulate (hence we needed capital), as news was beginning to surround the distributed ledger 1/2 of Satoshi’s invention; the “blockchain”.

I had already begun focusing on privacy coins before returning to the 9–5 with new projects like Darkcoin and Monero beginning development. But I really gravitated to projects that were bringing utility into the crypto space. I didn’t sign up to Bitcoin for merely another way to move money on the internet from one exchange to another, I signed up for a better this 👇

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. — “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” — Satoshi Nakamoto

To me this speaks to the power of the blockchain. The ability to create trustless models for social platforms, exchanges, marketplaces, storage and even oracles. These projects were moving past the coin and building in utility, just like the quote above taken from the first line of the Bitcoin Whitepaper introduction.

This ultimately led me to the Shadow Project which had already developed a privacy currency, ShadowCash SDC, but was now building in some utility with a decentralized marketplace. To me, this was the next step for crypto; creating a decentralized, anonymous economy!

Around this time I finally began volunteering for the first time, wherever I could help within the SDC community. It may have taken me a while to figure this out but, I had skills from real life that could actually help a team of volunteers working on an open-source project that I also believed in and invested in.

“Get off your ass and do something!”

If you have one of these posters plastered on you’re wall or screen you need slapped upside ya head!

This ain’t a religion, it’s a revolution! A revolution is led by people not a person.

ICOs were around before 2017, but this year we saw ridiculously-funded teams begin to pour into the space. Before 2017 nearly all projects were being developed by a handful of volunteer developers, had zero marketing presence and were reliant on community volunteers to create the news. In fact, many of these older projects still rely 100% on volunteers.

I began helping more and more within Shadow and got excited feeling like I was making a difference rather than piggybacking on everyone else’s hard work. I’d like to think the content I was creating was educating people and helping the price, which also helps with adoption.

As 2016 was coming to a close, I was in line with everyone else waiting for a private, anonymous, decentralized marketplace to spend and earn my coins. I had moved most of my holdings into projects trying to make a difference, not just forking for a niche currency. And my own project I gave most of my free time to was on the brink of a major pivot.

I was invited to help.

“I’m in this for the Platform”

The need for change was harder to see between the green and red candles on Poloniex or Bittrex.

After all, the Shadow Project team was developing a top 30 cryptocurrency project. They were focused on privacy. They realized merely maintaining a currency did nobody any good so they were going to build a decentralized marketplace to give people a place to spend and earn their coins. They were building a trustless economy powered by the blockchain.

And people were starting to notice

Chart shows the 7 months leading up to the SDC/PART token exchange. Median price ~$1.50“You can’t build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid foundation if you’re going to have a strong superstructure.” — Gordon B. Hinckley

There were many factors pointing to an inevitable pivot away from Shadow and into Particl, not the least of which was breaking the implied connection to any underground, shady activity from the name. Darkcoin rebranded to Dash, Dogecoin Dark rebranded to Verge, BitcoinDark rebranded to Komodo, etc..

A rebrand is an easy transition, sometimes an overnight decision, right Jamie?!

What the Shadow Project team was internally asking all of us to solve was how to properly build this idea of a decentralized economy — privacy, marketplace, buying, selling and earning (currency + utility) — on a secure foundation. To be big and make a difference we would need a codebase that could be developed on, added to and easily enhanced as new technological advances came about.

You see, SDC was built on Bitcoin 0.8 circa 2013, just like nearly every PoS project forked from Bitcoin. And the proper way to build this new trustless economy was to build a platform where pieces can be added by other dev teams, governance mechanisms can be applied and other cryptocurrencies can be allowed to interact with.

There was no way in hell all of that was going to be easy to apply to an old codebase. And good luck getting other development teams excited to build anything on top of it.

We decided to abandon the Shadow codebase, blockchain and history in order to build a more powerful privacy platform, built on the latest Bitcoin codebase; the most hardened, secure and developed codebase in the space.

“Stepping Up My Game”

Believe me when I tell you that all of us developing the Particl pivot plans had to swallow — force down in some cases — that pill. I’m sure it wasn’t a test I had just passed, but during these planning meetings I was asked to join the Particl transition team and head up Communications for the new project.

And can you guess what my first official assignment was in the crypto space? To serve up a healthy dose of water for that pill everyone was going to be asked to swallow.

“Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.” — Mary Kay Ash

Thank you, I guess? Turns out it was one of the best decisions of my life!

And I think the Particl team has done a damn fine job with our community’s generosity to build the first decentralized privacy platform that will welcome cryptocurrency users from other projects to participate in a cryptoagnostic, privacy marketplace.

Particl: 2017 Year In Review

“Full-Time Crypto”

It’s now 2018 and for the better part of 1 year I’ve definitely NOT been semi-retired.

• I’ve been working 1 full-time job as a real life architect.
• I’ve been working 1 part-time (30+ hrs/week) job as Head of Communications for Particl.io
• I still invest in blockchain projects that are creating freedom tools; “convenient and untraceable, liberated from the oversight of governments and banks” — Benjamin Wallace
• And surprise, surprise, I play the resident “Bitcoin Guru” in my circle of influence — although I’m sure that’s a commonality I share with many of you readers.

We’ve had an explosive year of growth in Particl and entire cryptocurrency space. Many of you are jumping into early retirement, changing your career path, enjoying financial freedom or even cutting ties (as much as possible) with fiat monies forever.

Today I’m proud to say I am also going full-time crypto! And this time I really mean it!

I officially retired from my architecture practice to focus on Particl full-time. I can focus on expanding our team, growing our community and being family man again. We have lots of growth to prepare for in our community and among other cryptocurrency projects as the Particl Marketplace gets released to the public and other currency users have a private, trustless way to buy and sell with their own coins, without markups, censorship or unnecessary 3rd party fees.

Summary

I approached this article as an opportunity to share my insights as a cryptocurrency trader, bystander, volunteer and team leader. I’ve seen a lifetime of lessons and experiences in the short, 6+ years my eyes were opened to the realization that, a coin and a blockchain, could change the world.

I love hearing stories of financial freedom, career changes to pursue passions and early retirement to spend more time with the people that mean the most. Crypto has brought all three to me and I’m excited about the work we’re doing at Particl. My day job just got 1000% cooler 😎

This year we will see many trends (platform, atomic swaps, agnosticism, privacy, decentralization) and I think Particl is positioned very well to contribute in all these areas for the common good of the entire space.

Remember that there’s no substitute for doing your own research. It’s not all about making money. We’re constantly getting closer to a more private, decentralized future, and away from any and all reliance on fiat.

That will be the day!

“Full-Time Crypto” was originally published in Decentralize Today on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.