I don’t know how fast word gets around SN. It has to do with how nimbly you traverse all these different territories but anyway, I’m refining my resume right now because I want to switch jobs.
This got me thinking. @siggy47 has organised a contest that got Stackers to share about how they got involved with Bitcoin in the first place. What happens in a Bitcoiner’s journey after that? What are the key highlights in your journey?
So, here’s my BTC resume:
June 2021 - Registered an account with Hodlnaut, a Singapore CEX. An article I wrote to promote it gained traction and I got about 15 referees. This means that I received Bitcoin as weekly commission from them.
August 2021 - Decided to give Cointiply - the best BTC faucet a go. Have been using it ever since.
August 2022 - Lost all the BTC I earned as commission because I naively thought Hodlnaut borne the Singapore brand and was trustworthy. Little did I know that it invested heavily into LUNA - and with its collapse and the ensuing contagion, went bankrupt.
Late 2022 - The small amount I left on Gemini Earn (mainly my Cointiply faucet earnings) vapourised into thin air when Genesis ran into money issues. Yes, I made the same mistake twice! Don’t be like Sensei. Not your keys, not your coins has become my mantra ever since.
December 2022 - Made my foray into SN.
January - November 2023 - Tried out myriad apps to stack sats. sMiles, Apollo, Vestly, Cowdle, Litstak, you name it, I tried it. Posted intermittently on SN because I was trying to assimilate into the culture here.
December 2023 - The launch of ~territories motivated me to post more here because my lack of BTC-related knowledge was no longer a hindrance haha. Along the way, I became keen on acquiring the BTC Standard. Purchased my first gift card from Bitrefill.
Jan - March 2024 - Continued to buy gift cards from Bitrefill.
April 2024 - Climbed one step up the Bitcoin Standard by paying my insurance bill and utility bill with the sats I won from March’s Million Sats Madness. Even though it doesn’t seem that Bitwage will venture into the Asian market any time soon, I am making more of an effort to replace fiat with sats. Who knows, I might be able to pay most of my bills with sats if I persevere hard enough?
Well, it was fun recounting my journey, even though some parts weee embarrassing. But hey, mistakes give us the opportunity to grow.
1065 sats \ 2 replies \ @Murch 15 Apr
Rediscovered Bitcoin the third or so time and actually read the Whitepaper. Realized that it might actually work.
Spring 2013 – Bought ice-cream for two with bitcoins.
Summer 2013 – Lost 0.2 bitcoin by accidentally uninstalling a wallet app when my phone’s disk was full.
June 2013 – Made account on Bitcoin Stack Exchange. I went on to ask 185 questions and write 1,722 answers which have accumulated some 5m reads since.
March 2014 – Became a moderator on Bitcoin Stack Exchange editing over 6,500 posts, deleting and closing about as many.
May 2014 – Attended Bitcoin2014 in Amsterdam meeting a bunch of the active devs and spent 0.4 BTC on a Bitcoin pin that I don’t even know where it is now.
September 2014 – Opened my first PR to Bitcoin Core to make a small coin selection improvement. It later got reverted when a senior contributor noticed that the UTXO set had started growing faster and partially attributed it to the change I made.
Summer 2016 – Wrote my Master’s thesis on Coin Selection which went on to be cited by 10 papers and is still being read occasionally.
October 2016 – Traveled to Milan to give a talk at Scaling Bitcoin.
April 2017 – Became a fulltime bitcoiner when I started working at BitGo on the backend, leading the project to implement segwit support and a bunch of other wallet features. Significantly reduced the overall blockspace footprint of BitGo customers. At times over 10% of all Bitcoin transactions were being built using my coin selection implementation.
June 2017 – Responded to Jonald Fyookball’s lightning fud piece within a couple hours.
Februar 2018 – Wrote Excited for Schnorr signatures giving an overview of my current understanding of the idea for Taproot.
Oct 2020 – Started working at Chaincode Labs to work on Bitcoin fulltime.
2021 – Started co-hosting the monthly New York Bitcoin developer meetup.
July 2022 – Started co-hosting to the Optech Recap Podcast, I’ve since recorded 80 episodes.
Other than, I have since spoken at a number of conferences and meetups, appeared on a number of other podcasts, e.g. Chaincode podcast (as guest and co-host), Stephan Livera, Noded, Honigdachs, Bitcoin im Turm, 21, and Nodesignal, written a bunch of blog posts, reviewed a bunch of pull requests in Bitcoin Core and other projects, even implemented a few pull requests myself.
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Impressive.
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This was so fun to read! I was most struck by the legacy you left behind on Bitcoin Stack Exchange. I wonder if I would become someone like you on Stacker News haha
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149 sats \ 1 reply \ @nym 15 Apr
Glad you hung in there and learned a lesson about self-custody. Almost everyone does that at first, whether it was through Mt. Gox or a more recent incident.
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Thanks for the comforting words xP
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Sensei we all have a beginning, it is normal to make mistakes, I remember having used Cointiply too, luckily I only lost a little Bitcoin having exchanged some BTC for shitcoins and in a scam called crypto.win where I lost about 100,000 sats, I have been in the ecosystem since 2019, and luckily I have always been a fan of privacy and security, so from the first moment I sent my Bitcoin to a wallet in which I had control of my private keys.
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Indeed mistakes are opportunities for us to do better in future. Hope you GWS!
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