Fear and loathing on the blockchain Part One
A long time ago on a old transaction on a chain I tried mining dogecoin. I used and RMA’s an RX280 (don’t tell AMD). I mined a few hundred thousand dogecoins with a pool. Then the pool that I was using also closed and I basically got really discouraged after that. Then I wasted it on some stupid Twitch subscriptions. If I had kept all of that doge when Bitcoin I would have been able to sell it now at around $400 when bitcoin was at $20,000 and then I could afford a new video card.
I couldn’t figure out how to sell it for cash. I got the idea to mine dogecoin after some of my “friends” invested in it. One of them got a whole lot of money. Another got screwed by the collapse of MtGox. That really scared me away for awhile.
Then fast forward a few years later and I somehow wanted to get back into Bitcoin. I heard on the news that it was spiking at $5000 and was going to be at $15000 by the end of December 2017. I bought some at $5000. Then I promptly forgot about it after hitting my head on a parked Honda Fit which was mine.
Then I got confused, thought it was at the end of December 2017 and sold enough bitcoin to pay my Comcast Bill with it (no one wants to actually pay this bill anyways). Then my mom told me to buy some. (Never ever do this because that means that the institutional investors are propping up the market by shoving news on TV).
So after all of this I rewatch the beginning of Lord of War, Wolf of Wall Street and also The Big Short (these were shows on Neflix since I only have the cheapest triple play package on Comcast). Obviously when you have made such a small amount of money you should immediately buy a Trezor and forget where you put the PIN number.
After watching those movies I thought to myself “Hey lets do some blockchain consulting”. So to be buzzword compliant I sign up for the hyperledger edX. At first I do some of the labs and the questions. Then one day I say to myself “lets pas s this thing” so I did. I got a combined score of 70% (since C’s pass in MOOCS) and took the final test (which is open book). I then purchase the $99 certification which is good for 1 year.
Then I went to the blockchain Gala. Lexy gave a really good speech that was really inspiring. I also saw Disruption Joe and zoned out at that time because I was tired. I tried talking with other people to find a client and instead just talked with a bunch of capitalists and some lawyers. I left afterward with no leads but a distinct impression that getting a lawyer to do cryptocurrency taxes is expensive and a bunch of ICOs that seemed fishy. Before I left I played with the remix client on the Hotel computers.
I made my brother create a fabric instance on his AWS account. I had this idea of making a blockchain based Insurance system (and I still do). He created a fabric instance. A few weeks after that he gave a talk which he sort of messed up the live demo (rule one of live demos is to not give live demos). He did this at a Javascript meetup where he was creating an regular login flow with web3 as the backend. I really need to get a clone of his code.
After that I went to the North Shore bitcoin meetup. I always come early to these things so at the bar I ordered a water (I never drink because I find alcohol annoying and it sours my stomach). I met a bunch of people and educated the people who didn’t know what was a blockchain. Then they said that people could give lightning talks. I figured out that I should advertise my consulting services there. So I concentrated on what I was going to say next, talked really loud and with conviction and got no leads after I gave my presentation.
In part two I will tell you how I got a single lead, learned a bit about Solidity, and got a certification.
If you like this post you can donate some ethereum at my address. 0x0740c2Aa032b7F8Ff53bd169Db7654c101f4A444
Or other crypto currencies to me here .
