Thinking back to back when

It was 4-something in the morning. A tweet thread question by Hive account@documentinghive asked simply, "How did you find #Hive?" The hamster wheel in my chipmunk brain started to twitch. Hmm. "How did I get into it?" Let's turn back the clock (and melt it a bit).

I remembered when it was, Summer of 2017, and where I was, on a semi-holiday. But, I couldn't remember the impetus for me actually going and setting up an account.

Since starting to follow Bitcoin, I suppose I've slowly fallen into a hobby - cryptocurrency. By that I don't mean dabbling in cryptos (I don't), but I mean following the whole cryptocurrency space.

And, it's funny, I don't recall where I was when I first heard "Bitcoin." I do recall exactly where I was when I heard about Bitcoin and it clicked. It was an NPR episode about buying lunch with BTC (transcript of audio here) that turned the lightbulb on in my head. Looking back at that article, I now see that it was then gloriously blind to containing so many of the ideas that still dramatize and plague cryptocurrencies:

• the stigma "only drug dealers, pervs, and gun runners use it"
• the idea that "you can't actually use bitcoin"
• people still don't understand what "decentralized" means
• centralized exchanges get hacked or melt down, then and now
• people do foolish things with lots of money, then and now

I'd never noticed this exchange before, but with the FTX fallout going on currently, this jumped out to me in the transcript...

GOLDSTEIN: We sit in Bruce Wagner's office where he has two computers. He has me go to this website mybitcoin to set up an account. But when I go there it shows an enormous account balance. It turns out the person who sat there before me forgot to log out.

WAGNER: Someone else was using that computer.

GOLDSTEIN: So whoever this person is has a lot of bitcoins.

KESTENBAUM: Twenty five thousand bitcoins, worth $426,000 dollars.

WAGNER: Yeah.

_{Source: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/138673630}

So, somebody had 2,500 BTC on a centralized exchange, while using someone else's computer, didn't log out, and left his BTC sitting there in a hot wallet for the next person to come along and click "Send" to BTC address 1dke93...

That's the equivalent now of leaving $42 billion in a paper sack on the sidewalk of Times Square and expecting it'll still be there in a few months. And, that's $42 billion in today's current FTX-fallout bear market prices. Wow.

Back to the story

Since getting the crypto bug, I wanted learn and hear more. There was little media about it. If I ever heard a story about Bitcoin, or read one, it was exciting that, "Bitcoin made the news!" Wow, how things have changed. Now, "Bitcoin and crypto is the news."

One thing that unfortunately seems to not have changed is that, every every dang time Bitcoin leads the news cycle, it's a bad story. It's a hack, or a crime scheme, or a rug pull, or a royal foul up. That part of the cryptocurrency story simply has not changed yet. How about a story on how Hive is doing real, tangible things that help people? Like this water project or like this one.

Yearning for more info and to learn, I started listening to podcasts and interviews. One thing in particular I've noticed is the obligatory first question on doggone near every cryptocurrency interview I've ever heard. It is this:

"So, would you tell us how you first heard about cryptocurrency?"

Random side note: when did we start beginning nearly every question or every statement with the word, "So..."

Is it to buy time to think? Is it to offer a word to sound like we're paying attention? Is it to break the convo and just talk about something else. Is it just a conjunction to keep the conversation going, like how Canadians say, "Eh?"...a brilliant grunt of a devise to turn-a-statement-into-a-question and therefore to beg a listener to keep the conversation going.

"Eh?" is grease to the gears of dialogue.

Pay attention to folks starting out with "So...", it'll start to bother you how often it happens, eh?

So, when I read the tweet this morning I realized that I couldn't recall what got me into Hive, called Steemit back then, eh?

No doubt it was a podcast that made mention of Steemit and first put the idea into my chipmunk brain.

I went to Hiveblocks and looked at the start of my account. Ah yes, I recall. Steemit user Hive account@oregonpop was running a contest by investing in altcoins. Vertcoin, one that I still like, got my attention. I didn't win, but a week later, I did win something called Swarm City, whatever that is. Doesn't matter, my comment was:

Thanks for doing two things: (1) you got me to look at some cryptos that I never paid much attention to...there are so, so many, and (2) you got me to look at steemit.

Source: @oregonpop/week-5-swarm-city-swt-usd100-a-week-on-low-cap-coins-free-swt

This got me to digging around in Steemit and starting to slowly learn. One thing I remember that he wrote is that he spent a little money to buy some SP (now Hive Power or HP). I recall wondering, "Why would you do that?" I didn't understand how things worked at all. But, I was starting to learn. Just now, I checked and sadly Hive account@oregonpop seems to have dropped off the landscape...hasn't posted since 2018. That happens in the crypto space unfortunately.

It's so ironic, the very next week, oregonpop's featured altcoin was LBRY. (I didn't know they'd been around since then.) And, with the SEC outcome this week against LBRY, so ironic.

Wrap up

Just to fast forward and wrap this up, I floundered hard on Steemit for a couple of years. I was very off-and-on, in-and-out. Around November/December of 2019, I revisited and started back in. Not sure why, but this chain is one that I just kept coming back to. Then, when the fork went down and Hive came up, it just felt right. Such community, such crypto-purism. Eh?