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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.
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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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 16 Apr
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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I had .3 in 2014 and sold it now I’m stacking and probably never get to that amount again lol
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