How I (finally) got into crypto, 50 years on
My first experience with crypto(graphy) came when I was coming to the end of my primary school years and my subscription to the World Of Wonder weekly magazine.
I don’t have any copies to hand, but I do remember the extraordinary (and illustrated) story of Chinese ‘coders’ thousands of years ago who would have their bald head daubed with temporary ink that would be covered when their hair grew back.
Then they would travel to wherever, the ink bearing a message that the recipient would read after the messenger’s head was shaved at journey’s end.
Memory is, of course, subjective and a personal bargain with the past, so I have non-total recall of why such messages were created, but presumably it was to do with money or war, such were the pursuits of the day, all of which seems depressingly familiar.
But it must have been worth it for such a long transaction to complete. The Chinese, however, have always thought long-term. When Chairman Mao was asked for his opinion of the French Revolution, he replied that it was ‘too soon’ to know.
There was no more crypto(graphy) for decades until I read The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, the infinitely more interesting, authentic and well-written precursor to the execrable The Da Vinci Code.
This was my introduction to the world’s first bankers, the Knights Templar and the European mysteries of crypto(graphy) where traders could travel between cities such as Venice and Siena with codes that only the Knights Templar could decipher at either end of the journey… and hand over money or FUNGIBLE tokens.
The story was so compelling that we even named a privacy DeFi organisation Sienna Network on the back of that story, but that’s another story and one that is too self-reverential to be mentioned here. I just did? Oh, you’re right. Sorry about that.
So, after much digression, when did I first get interested in what is now known as crypto without the ‘graphy’?
Well, it took quite a time. I used to work for a Brighton games company 12 years ago and I was familiar with Bitcoin, but I just associated it with the mad nerds who worked there and who never had a newspaper to borrow when I skived in the toilet.
As a lunchtime adopter to technology, as opposed to an early one, I was never quick on the new technology uptake and as a young parent more concerned with the mortgage, there was never enough time to register ‘Bitcoin-As-A-Thing’ especially when I took a job in London.
Life weaved wicked and wonderful ways until in 2017 I took a terrifying flight with some friends to the wonderful Lambay Island off the coast of Dublin that was trying to brand itself as a tech retreat.
A friend of mine on the flight had been before for a ‘crypto weekend’ and he said that he had that lightbulb moment when he was there and passed it on to me as a form of osmosis.
I knew I had missed the Bitcoin-boat, so I looked at the next best thing and even a latecomer like me could see the potential with Ethereum because things could be built on it, unlike Bitcoin.
So, I tinkered, mostly terrified by all the private and public keys, wishing that I could just tattoo them on my head with Indian ink and only access them when I shaved my head.
An absolute neophyte, but I was quick to layman-learn and before long I had notched up stupidly high profits, which I even cashed in a couple of times because otherwise it just didn’t seem real.
Then the inevitable mistake of the newcomer. Hackers stole 163 Ethereum from my cold wallet and took them to the Binance exchange, where they stayed for two weeks even though I told Binance what had happened and Binance refused to block the transaction.
Not exactly what I thought ‘blockchain’ was meant to represent.
Three years on and I’m still trying to get it back because the £25K that was stolen is now worth £450K. No surprises that I walked away from crypto at that point believing it to be a nest of vipers and scammers with risible security.
But under lockdown I set up a crypto podcast with two smart people and interviewed some of the biggest names in crypto and realised that things had moved on and some very smart and intellectual people were now involved, not just lucky nerds. Sorry, nerds, but you know what I mean.
I went back in, believing Bitcoin and Ethereum to be at ridiculously low prices and it came to pass that I was back in substantial profit again and Coinbase as an exchange appeared to be much more sophisticated in comparison to Binance’s.
So that’s why I’m back 50 years later, intrigued by protocols, cross-commutation platforms, DeFi and privacy, although less so by the NFTs, the bloody metaverses and Web3.
Five decades is a long time to not really be interested in something, but getting into crypto in the 1970s seems like a good-enough reason to come back to it.
I don’t think I’m going anywhere soon. ‘The World of Wonder’ is no longer a kids’ magazine, it’s real life… and I’ve grown to love it.