I started my journey into the Cryptocurrency World my junior year of high school in 2012 when I first read about the potential of Bitcoin to eradicate the need for banks who took advantage of millions and then were subsequently bailed out by governments instead of reformed. As an angsty teenage libertarian, this was a dream come true; a real threat to the source of oppressive governments worldwide, fiat currency issued by central banks. In an attempt to be a good member of the bitcoin community, and to make a little money, armed with my Linux machine running on an AMD A10 APU, I started to mining on my Linux machine. I was excited. However, as I started college and after the hype bubble and crash of 2013, I had doubts about whether Bitcoin was here to stay or just a hyped up internet fad that would be relegated to the internet archives like Flappy Bird.
Thankfully, Bitcoin has been, in the words of Andreas Antonopoulos, "the zombie currency" that keeps coming back even after exchange hacks, bad publicity related to its use for illicit purposes, and recently scalability concerns. To my joy, other cryptocurrencies and platforms, such as Ethereum, have emerged with new innovations on the original Bitcoin idea and many intelligent and motivated people from all over the world working on them. I slowly began to realize the truly immense potential of cryptocurrency beyond a means of value transfer as a protocol like TCP upon which all the fantastic applications could be built that haven't even been imagined yet, similar to unrealized potential of the internet in the early 1990's.
This space excites me from both a technical and social perspective, and I have never been more optimistic about the future of cryptocurrency to transform society as rapidly and radically as the world wide web. Starting this year, I will begin giving back to the internet community that has posted a mind-boggling number of resources from which I have learned over the years. I am forever indebted to the global community of the internet, as I could not have absorbed such a breadth and depth of information reading books on my own or even at University.
I am about to start the final semester of my undergraduate computer science degree at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where I have grown tremendously both socially and intellectually, but it is in no way the end of my time learning as I intend to consistently read, program, travel, meet new people, explore new ideas, and improve myself.
On Steemit, I intend to post about my reflections on my readings, my responses to events both in the cryptocurrency community and the larger world, and miscellaneous musings and self-improvement techniques I'm exploring. That well may change, but I intend to post on a weekly basis to start off. My goals for posting are to both help readers learn something new or gain a fresh perspective, and to improve my communication skills, so bear with me :)
Wishing you all the best in 2017 and beyond as we continue to grow both as individuals and as a community.
-Anthony