Or maybe you were one of those guys (and yes, it's still mostly guys), who was always a little different, with a headstrong attitude and an independent streak a mile wide. For me it was a number of things over time, which caused me to finally make the break.
I've shared with you all the account of my blog posts being copied on Blogger as one of the reasons I found my way here, but that was just the coup de gr芒ce to arrest the fact that my work was being used to benefit someone else. There were other things at play as well.
Growing up, I was always a little different due to a handicap I had as a child, which took me ten years to overcome. Kids can be cruel, and anything that makes you stand out meant it was open season on me as far as they were concerned. This helped charge a strong inner fortitude, and sharpen my native-born moral values, while knowing that I was willing to build the knowledge and put in the work in order to succeed in life.
I was reading recently about events which changed America, such as the murder of JFK, which ended an era of innocence where the people still had complete faith in government. But there were others, including the conflagration of the MOVE buildings in Philadelphia in the 1980's, where the city bombed its own people. The assault on the Branch Davidian "compound" in 1993 (actually Mt. Carmel Center and church), which many may not realize was an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventist church.
Going all the way back to events involving The Church of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and the 2008 hoax-call-based raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas, there seemed to a desire on the part of the government to stamp out the attempts of any group to live in a self-reliant manner. Drugs and children were an at-times legitimate excuse used for the raids which broke up these enterprises.
It brings me back to the time when I got my own place and after living there for awhile, decided to move. I called the electric company and told them to turn off the power, as they were notorious for leaving it on after someone moved out, then continuing to charge their account after a new person had already moved in.
The woman wanted to know why, and responded that a person couldn't live without the "services" of their power company. She demanded to know where I was moving to, which was a place where I didn't need an account for their "services" at all.
Of course I refused to tell her, as it was none of her concern. It was surprising that they wanted to track you even after your account was closed, and there was no reason to be in contact with them. A manager told me that the only way to close an account with the electric company, was to have it suspended (in writing), then stop paying on it for 90 days. They wanted to make it as difficult as possible to leave.
Remember how hard it was to cancel an AOL account? That's what this was like. Talking with the municipality confirmed all of this, and left me incredulous that here were so many hoops to jump through in order to end ties with the parasitic power company.
Just prior to the dawn of the blockchain, there was another sense of a complete loss of control. Creating content on a platform where it could easily be copied and stolen, with more hoop-jumping necessary in order to get anything done about it. I shared the account of my blog posts being swiped, and just how hard it was to combat that. This was yet another reason I embraced the arrival of the blockchain, as I saw the utility in joining an empowered community of like-minded people.
As I sat there late-nights in front of my computer back in 2010, it was obvious to me that cryptocurrency would change the world. I envisioned Bitcoin being just the first of many possible tokens. The vision of communities forming around their own self-created tokens was something I could see at the very start, and which we now have on Hive. More and more decentralization was on the horizon as well. The first thing I said was" "OMG, this is going to be HUGE!" there was no convincing necessary.
I feel freer here, unshackled, more creative than ever before. I remember talking with the manager of my small hometown bank years ago, about KYC and all of the bureaucracy that could be bypassed by someone in Africa transacting on a mobile phone.
Crypto is a solution for the unbanked and many others. I see the blockchain as a crypto-liquid that pools together and creates channels to move around any obstacle, always tracing the path of least resistance while making its way to a decentralized ocean. Freedom, Community, Ownership, Empowerment. That's why I'm here.
What about you?
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