Hi Internet People!
My name is Ashe and I'd like to introduce myself. This is a pretty long post, but I wanted people to know who I am and what I'm passionate about before I continue with my blog series on the "Life of a Liberty Entrepreneur".
If you want to catch up on part 1 & 2, here ya go:
Part 1 - Life of a Liberty Entrepreneur - I'm traveling the world!
Part 2 - Life of a Liberty Entrepreneur - Be proud to be an Entrepreneur!
(FYI - I've been around the Steem community for about a year now. You can see that I took some time off, but I'm all Powered-Up and ready to add value again)
Ready? Let's dive in!
When I Found the Internet
The Interwebs and I became familiar w/ each other in 1995 with AOL 2.5 on an AST i486 desktop computer (pic below) with Windows 3.1 with 2MB of RAM. I spent hours on that thing and thought that AOL was the entire internet.
Let's skip forward a few years...
It's now 1999 and I'm a senior in high school and a buddy told me about this new music platform called "Napster". I couldn't believe it. I'd already started ripping and burning CDs as a side hustle, but now you're telling me that I don't even need to find the CD to get the song?
I was actually one of the first users on Napster and remember the yellow ASCII banner which told us that we'd reached 100 simultaneous users. Before you ask, the first MP3 that I downloaded was Madonna - Ray of Light (it had 30 seeders and only took ~30min to download in my 56k modem).
College and Fast Internet
So I went to NC State in 2000 for Computer and Electrical Engineering. Way to much work, but I made it w/ both BS degrees.
I was way more interested in having fast internet for the first time ever. All of a sudden MP3s took 3sec to download and music videos started popping up on Scour, Limewire, Gnutella network, Kazaa, BearShare, Scour, Edonkey, etc. I was on them all and had a library of 100's of music videos and 1000's of MP3s before Youtube existed.
This should take you back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_file_sharing
I also couldn't believe Windows XP and it's built-in "remote desktop" feature. Just amazing. My digital world was really starting to open up now.
And who can forget about setting and checking ppl's AIM away messages?!? Thought I was so cool w/ my AIM names "WolfpackEngineer" and "AbsolutNCState". notsocool
Ron Paul, Mises and Euro Pacific Bank
Let's skip a few more years. It's 2011 and I was deep in to Libertarian theory and small government. The USD and I were no longer friends and Gold/Silver were the future.
I was very active in Ron Paul's 2008 campaign and started learning about personal freedom. I was determined that the banking system just needed to be changed from the inside and fractional reserve banking was the problem.
One day while listening to the Peter Schiff radio show, he mentioned that he was starting an offshore bank and was looking for a young, energetic team to help. I was tired of working in a software shop and decided to apply...I got the job and was the FIRST private banker at Euro Pacific Bank. We were a 100% reserve bank and I was going to help bring the Gold Standard back to the world from WITHIN the international banking system.
(this is where you can laugh)
After quitting my engineering job, I sold all of my stuff and moved to St. Vincent and the Grenadines for a commission-only position at EuroPacBank.
The bank was very young (but so was I at 29yo), I had no idea the lack of organization, framework and systems. It was literally nothing but a banking license and 30k non-US leads from Peter Schiff's ancient lead pool. All the wind in my face didn't faze me, I worked 14 hours/day trying to change the world.
Bitcoin, Colored-coins and Blockchain
In Late 2011, I heard of Bitcoin. I can't remember how, but was such a Gold-bug that it didn't really phase me. I was, however, interested in the concept of "colored-coins" which was a digitally tokenized representation of the physical world (like a gold-backed crypto-coin). I wasn't bought in, and kept working towards bring precious metals in to people's perspective.
It wasn't until I moved to Panama in 2013 that I truly understood and appreciated Bitcoin. Then, like many of you, I was up all night reading and studying this incredible new technology.
I couldn't believe it. Bitcoin was a combination of everything I was passionate about.
- Nerdy and programmable
- Money and Finance
- Independence from the fraction banking industry
- Permissionless
- Open Source
- Secure
- Online community (like Napster was, kinda)
- Not government fiat and controlled
- ...AND now I had experience in the international banking world which absolutely sucked, was slow and expensive and customers ALWAYS had issues and problems.
I was hooked for life.
Liberty Entrepreneurs Podcast
Eventually, I came to the epiphany that trying to change the banking system (and government for that matter) was so far outside of my control that it no longer deserved any time. From my own experience, I noticed that ENTREPRENEURSHIP had created the majority of the freedom in my own personal life. I created the podcast to start a conversation about this topic since there weren't many people in my direct life that had the perspective.
12-month Round the World Trip
This catches us up to the current day. I've resigned my position as Head of Business Development at EuroPacBank and now only work for myself as a digital entrepreneur. I'm still young in my entrepreneurial journey (I'm now 35yo) but I feel the creative energy of the marketplace within me. I understand how building a business helps solve pains and problems for everyday people and how creating win/win scenarios creates value in society.
I won't go on about my Virtual Assistant business, but you can listen to Season 1 - How to Work With a Virtual Assistant if you want to learn more.
www.LibertyEntrepreneurs.com/season1
Here's a picture of my Virtual Team! (all in the Philippines)
I'm now traveling the world for 12 straight months while visiting 12 awesome cities and traveling with 50 other people (whom I'd never met before the trip).
Going international again...
Here's the crew that I'm traveling with!
Here's my basic itinerary: www.remoteyear.com/itinerary-earhart
I'm currently in Split, Croatia until the end of June.
Conclusion
My goal is to keep spreading the perspective of BUILDING FREEDOM. I hope to accomplish that with these posts. I'm not here to sell you anything. I'm passionate about individual freedom.
I call this lifestyle being a Liberty Entrepreneur. How are you going to build your freedom? How can I help you? How can you help me?
Nobody builds alone. We can do this. Freedom is ours. Freedom is popular. Let's Build Freedom together.
In Liberty,
Ashe