Confessions of an Almost Crypto Millionaire
A cautionary tale in the wake of the new boom
It was the late summer of 2017. I had just graduated summa cum laude with a degree in computer science and was in the middle of an internship at a robotics company. As a rather ambitious fellow, I naturally treated the latter, my first real job, with utmost seriousness. Be it the weekend or a national holiday, not to mention the regular office hours, I was sitting at my desk, training artificial neural networks and reading technical papers as if my life depended on it. I wanted to excel. I needed to prove my worth.
You see, I come from a family of modest means. My father was a construction worker, and so was his father before him. As for my mother, she invested all our funds in her venture, a laundry house, until so little was left that we had to start selling things. In retrospect, it’s perhaps our couch that I held dearest among all the vanished objects. Its absence sure turned out to be a real pain in the ass. Literally.
Despite our dire circumstances, they weren’t bitter. They didn’t blame the world for their misfortune. On the contrary, they were individualists through and through, strongly believing that a person’s fate is his, and only his, to decide. My working-class parents had always lectured me that the world works according to a…
