My brother introduced me to bitcoin/blockchain in 2011. I read about the technology and potential use cases, it definitely seemed interesting and bleeding edge. At the time I was fresh out of college with very little money, so I saw it as something I would keep a watchful eye on. My brother on the other hand was diving in the deep end from the start and began getting into GPU mining (we were gamers afterall).

I had a couple of extra ‘decent’ graphics cards lying around so I enlisted his help getting me up and running. He walked me through wallets, exchanges, alt coins, mining pools, tuning the cards, etc. We were off to the races, turning electricity into coins of unpredictable value. I was mining BTC, LTC, ETH, dogecoin, matrixcoin, earthcoin, and several others that I don’t remember the names of. I also lived in an apartment where the rent covered utility costs so I kept those GPUs burning 24/7, why not!

Things were going well… depending on the coin, I accumulated 10s, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of coins. I even built a couple of similar GPU mining rigs for some close friends (ran/managed them at the apartment too for a small fee).

And then I learned a very valuable lesson that will stay with me for the rest of my life… Don’t leave your crypto in an exchange!!. My brother and I were both impacted by this Cryptsy heist. I try not to think about it too much anymore but it hurts a little worse as time goes on (like a lingering DoT with infinite duration). I like to tell myself that I would have dumped a ton of the stash around 5 - 10 percent of today’s value anyway. It seems to help =|

(more updates coming)