My Crypto Origin Story

By Ian Carleton

I first remember talking about bitcoin around 2011-2012. It had been in the news, the story of the week, the latest enigma of the digital frontier. I myself was not a man probing the digital frontier though. My online experience at the time was more consisting of my Facebook newsfeed and Angry Birds. I of course wished that I had been ahead of the curve, and newly wealthy, but I was not.

Bitcoin remained on my radar going forward but I did not concern myself with it beyond surface level until 2017. In 2017 bitcoin was back in the headlines not just as a story of the week, but as front page viral news evolving through the second half of the year. I followed along, month after month thinking I was too late and not buying in, finally watching it top out at an all time high around $20,000 in December. As it slid back in the first months of 2018, I finally got in.  

I had studied economics as a minor in my first bachelor’s degree. I was drawn to economics as it occurred to me as a philosophical study that had real world application. As I saw it, to understand money was to understand how the world REALLY worked. (The fact of my being born in Manhattan and raised in its suburbs I’m sure significantly informed that worldview.) The mechanics of microeconomics and Keynesian theory didn’t capture me, but the social theories of the institutionalists and Austrian school did, as did the history of economic thought. Early economic theory was always tied to questions of morality and ethics, but those were at best fringe concerns in contemporary study. And none of that material, old or new, touched on the prospect of a digital currency one day arising through public cooperation, outside any central authority…

Now enter Bitcoin… a new world currency. A new world currency!?!? I can still hardly think of a bolder concept. The philosophical implications of a currency managed via an open network of direct peer-to-peer transactions, on a public ledger, without any central authority – it is truly revolutionary. While many people saw bitcoin as simply another chance mutation out of the tech world, my understanding of bitcoin filtered partly through a broader historic, socioeconomic context.

One aspect of Bitcoin that stood out to me early on was the finite coin limit of 21 million – a bulwark against inflation. I remember my mom telling me as a kid she could get a slice of pizza and soda for $0.25 (circa 1960s). While when I was a kid you’d pay $2 at least (1990s), and nowadays $4 would be a good deal. Even at 10 years old I could understand expensive pizza was a critical issue, and inflation was bullshit.

A few years later, with a deeper understanding of inflation, an econ professor in college mentioned how much he’d admired the German Bundesbank (Germany’s central bank) for how it had tempered inflation so deftly after the end of Bretton Woods in the 1970s and through subsequent oil shocks. That thought stuck with me. Apparently, in the 1970s the Bundesbank adopted an (at the time) radical policy of publicly announcing their monetary expansion targets (inflation rates) as the world adapted to the new system of floating exchange rates. It was a policy of transparency. Bitcoin’s public ledger takes transparency to another level. And as an inflation hedge Bitcoin can’t be beat. Today about 850 coins are mined a day, the next halvening will occur in 2 years, and the last bitcoin won’t be mined until around 2140. And those are parameters not open to negotiation. So, no I don’t think it’s a scam.

Hesitancy toward cryptocurrencies and blockchain people often qualify by saying: “I just don’t understand it...” But most people don’t understand how microwaves or Tylenol works either and don’t object. In brief: It’s a network that collects and shares the data of all occurring bitcoin transactions (a public ledger). Computers around the world compete to process that data (mining) and be the first to solve for its hash (akin to solving a mathematical proof,) and in doing so complete the next “block” on the blockchain. The first to do so receives a miners reward. That newly completed block picks up where the last block left off on the ledger, which sits at the end of, and in agreement to, all the other blocks that preceeded it since bitcoin’s inception in 2009. A long chain of blocks. A blockchain.

Technologically it is complex, but conceptually bitcoin is simple. The current monetary system on the other hand… between the treasury, the federal reserve and federal open market committee, a federal budget that hasn’t been balanced in +20 years, quantitative easing, and a collusive and oligopic relationship between Wall Street and lobbyists and politicians… To put it gently it’s not sustainable. To put it strongly it is rigged and unjust.

So I got started in crypto in 2018. The same way of so many people… through the wide gates of Coinbase. I’ve since become familiar with so many more exchanges, wallets, coins, companies, apps, consensus protocols, newsgroups, podcasters and personalities, etc, etc. And everyday there’s more happening and evolving. As DeFi (decentralized finance) continues to grow and take hold, having a working knowledge of Bitcoin and the crypto domain will be necessary for any responsible consumer looking to build financial security in their future. I truly believe that. Bitcoin is in its 13th year now believe it or not, and the world is already changed.

Author Bio

Ian Carleton is a lifelong writer and songwriter. He’s been working as a Bone Marrow Transplant RN in NYC the last 5 years. A more technologically proficient friend once described him as a Luddite, but he is making strides against that now. Engaged in the crypto world and HODL’ing since 2018, Ian plans to write more critically on crypto projects and news, and to build a second career in the crypto space.