The Seed of My Blockchain Passion: 10 Years Later
Today it’s 10 years since the seed of my blockchain passion was planted. At this time I heard about Bitcoin already the second time. The first time was a year or two before but my first thought was that this is some kind of a pyramid scheme. So I ignore it.
Well, the second time I bought it. I remember like it was yesterday how hard was to understand what is Bitcoin and how it works. How mining works. I decided to buy some. I was skeptical but on the other side lucky that Bitstamp already exists. The company founders were from the same country as I, so I automatically have a higher trust. I created an account and sent the first deposit to Bitstamp. It was 25 USD. But you know 1 BTC was 90 USD back then.
With BTC in my pocket, I started researching what can I do with them. I discovered Silk Road, the dark web marketplace that allowed users to buy and sell things anonymously using Bitcoin. I didn’t purchase anything on Silk Road, but it was fascinating to see how Bitcoin could be used for transactions outside of our traditional financial system.
BTW 2 years later I bought cigars. This was my first BTC payment. They cost me 0.3760 BTC (≈80 USD). I still HODLing some of them :)
Next thing was the Bitcoin Core wallet. This is the official wallet of the Bitcoin protocol. Each time when I opened the Bitcoin wallet, I needed to wait for the blockchain to sync. Sometimes it takes hours even days, to synch. It depends on the internet speed and the number of blocks that was needed to be synched. It was frustrating because I didn’t see my Bitcoin balance immediately but at the end there always been there.
After spending some time building up my knowledge and understanding of Bitcoin and blockchain technology, I began to feel more and more excited about the possibilities that it offered. One area that particularly interested me was Bitcoin mining — the process of adding new transactions to the blockchain and earning Bitcoin rewards in return. There wasn’t much information available online about the process. While there were some resources available, they were often difficult to understand, particularly for beginners like myself.
I was spending hours reading over forums and articles, trying to make understanding in Bitcoin mining. Some times it was a frustrating experience and progress was slow. The more I learned, the more convinced I became that mining was something that I wanted to try for myself. I gathered together some of my close friends, I educated/hyped them so we bought graphics cards and other necessary components to set up the mining rig.
Because Bitcoin mining became expensive and difficult to profit from with our equipment we quickly realized that it wasn’t sustainable for us to continue mining Bitcoin, so we began to look for alternative cryptocurrencies to mine instead. We started exploring other cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, Mintcoin, and Zeitcoin, among others. These were newer, less-established cryptocurrencies that had lower difficulty to entry and were easier to mine with our equipment. I also bought some small ASIC miner to mine other SHA-256 coins, like Peercoin, with much greater efficiency and profitability.
I didn’t become a Bitcoin millionaire, but I’m proud of the hard work and dedication that I put into cryptocurrencies and blockchain space. It wasn’t always easy, and I had to face a lot of challenges and scams along the way. But the knowledge and experience I built stayed with me and inform my understanding of the blockchain technology.
When Ethereum introduced smart contracts, it’s opened up a whole new world of possibilities for decentralized applications and services. As someone who was already deeply involved in the industry, I was fascinated by the potential of smart contracts.
As a software engineer I decided to start my career toward the blockchain so I began building blockchain based applications. My experience in researching, mining and investing gave me a good perspective about the industry, and I was able to leverage that knowledge to start developing innovative solutions. Of course, building products in the Web3 space comes with a lot of challenges. The industry is still young and there are many obstacles.
If I look over the past decade, I’m excited to see how much changed. From the initial skepticism and confusion to today’s acceptance and use. It’s clear that blockchain technology is here to stay.
I’m proud i’m an early adopter of this technology, and I’m excited to see what the next decade will bring. I will be a part of it!
