So... I kinda suck as a writer. I'll just start there.

you deserve to know what you're getting into..

I was pretty bright student, teachers always loved me, especially my English teachers. I was one of a few of the boys that read for enjoyment and liked to flex my vocabulary, which worked well to convince my earlier English teachers I was capable of writing, and worked well to assure me that just using big words properly could masquerade as competence. I mean, my mother was a journalist, it's in the blood! - right?

In high school, one of my English teacher's set me straight on a literary analysis essay, rather bluntly stating that my essay was just "verbal diarrhea". I was obviously incensed. I took my essay to my mother (the journalist) and asked her opinion, and she fully agreed with ... what was her name... Mrs... Sproule! Humbling, to say the least. Lol, still even now I'll never like Mrs. Sproule! I still remember her stupid face! Funny what sticks with you.

Nowadays, I spend most of my days dashing out emails too long for my corporate colleagues and especially my boss to read, and trust me I've been working hard to edit myself down. I just tend to write in a stream-of-consciousness style, and by nature I tend to be somewhat, verbose, let's say.

And that's the preamble!

The Introduction

Nah, seriously though, consider this my introduction.

I'm a computer engineer, I work for a Canadian telco on networks and computing clusters, systems architecture, datacenters, ya know, "tech stuff". I'm an avid reader, political junky (but let's not... unless you want to!), musician since I was a kid - piano, clarinet, percussionist, drum kit, guitar and more "professionally" in that I get paid (very poorly) to play sometimes, a bassist. Spend way to much idle time on useless video games on my phone, which I'm ashamed to say aren't even P2E. Less so recently, but used to really get into FPS games.

I'm a father, and a husband. And though she'll probably never read this - crypto makes her eyes glaze over - shout out to my wife, who I've been with since we were teenagers, I wouldn't be where and who I am without her.

m3sh? What's up with that? Well, as a lover of metal music, the all-time best possible metal band is hands down Meshuggah. Apply a bit of leet-speak to it and shorten it down and you have a nice interwebs handle that I use basically everywhere and have for years.

The Journey

I've been involved in crypto like a love-hate, on-again off-again abusive relationship, since a close friend at our mutual mothercorp started talking to me about bitcoin mining back in 2011.

Not shitting. We actually ended up spending some of that bitcoin we mined at the time on 1st-gen Butterfly Labs ASIC miners that failed to deliver in time before the network difficulty began to rocket into the stratosphere. That was early bitcoin, when it first mooned to $900 and crashed back to $50. We had at one point 25 BTC from mining. This didn't last forever as the profitability of mining became very difficult to maintain back then for just using spare gaming video cards, thus it petered out and we just let our holdings sit.

We, my friend and I, kept our remaining 13 or so BTC on an old exchange originally called BTC-E. It was a non-KYC exchange out of Russia, second in volume back then to MT. Gox. Shady? Of course! Got FBI raided (money laundering, related ironically to Mt. Gox hack) that had it shut down for a time, but it re-launched somehow. Before the bull run of 2017-18 up to $19K BTC, in fact.. I remember the bright-eyed joy and self-assurance my holdings were worth $140K, man crypto was gonna change my life. Maybe I'd dabble in trading, I'm a smart guy, I'll figure it out!

I never moved the blasted bitcoin (now also litecoin and ethereum and bitcoin cash) from the exchange wallet. Thought multiple times "I should get a ledger", but all I can plead is laziness and procrastination. 3 months after the 2017/2018 bubble burst BTC back down to $3K and I had considerably waned in my day-to-day interest, the exchange now re-constituted as wex.nz if memory serves, stopped BTC first and then all crypto withdrawals, and roughly a week later the site basically disappeared with the central exchange master wallet and everyone's holdings. Nobody has been made whole, and we never will be.

This kind of killed my interest for a while. I would gloomily look at BTC slowly recovering and consolidating then moving back up and to the right. Gritted my teeth during the 2020 through 2021 run up to the recent ATHs. Rolled my eyes at the seeming inanity of whatever the fuck these NFT things were.

But I couldn't stay away. That same good friend - we both lost on that exchange exit scam - had become quite interested in deFi and urged me to get back into this crazy world.

The Outlook

So, a long story finally short - I got back in.

Perhaps I'll write separately about some of the protocols I like, but in any case, I'm back at it. Through the journey of Telegram groups and Discord grinding, AMAs, DYOR, scammer DMs, exploits and rugs, I found the Myria project from a buddy shilling free NFTs via the Sigil event. From there to PsyberX and it's relation to Hive, and the rest, as they say...

I like passing the time with smart people and like-minded individuals and I'm searching for that same passive income golden goose that I suspect many of us are. DeFi, GameFi, metaverse stuff, web3 more generally, and the reality that we're still very early in the adoption curve means there is incredible opportunity. I hope to be privileged enough to succeed modestly in riding some of that wave while maybe even finding games I truly enjoy, and always building that network of trusted friends I can ride-or-die with.

The collective knowledge of all of the wonderful people you can meet in the crypto space is how I know WAGMI, well, at least some of us. And always remember.... NEVER SHARE YOUR SEED PHRASE :)