Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire

by Dan Conway

  As I’m prone to do, I became obsessed. In 2015, I wrote fifty-six pieces, more than sixty thousand words, with 125,000 views. I overdid it. I wrote in the morning, I wrote at night, I wrote on vacation. In fact, Eileen and the kids still joke about how I skipped our last dinner on the last night of one of our family vacations because I was making a final edit to a blog post I was particularly proud of, titled “You Probably Have Low Testosterone.”

  My pieces became increasingly edgy. They were picked up by Business Insider, Fatherly.com, Cuepoint and a number of other publications. Craig Newmark of Craigslist recommended my story “Silicon Valley Wealth and My Crappy Car.” One of Dick Cheney’s daughters started following me. Yeah, I was a big deal. Finally, writing and finding an audience scratched my itch for prominence, and it was also a hell of a lot of fun.

  While researching one of my blogs, I came across a trove of data about how people are unhappy in corporate America.

  I started writing blogs about modern work. My first big hit was “Career Transitions: Crafting Your Medium Humble-Brag”—a sendup of the wealthy, entitled tech bros I envied. I was eating dinner the night after I posted it when I looked at my phone, and I suddenly had more than a hundred new Twitter followers. Medium staff had recommended my piece. Thirty-five thousand people had read it, and, for a time, it was the top story on the platform. I’d hit a nerve.

  I started to think of myself as a unique thinker and maybe even a visionary. That is how temporal my self-worth was. I’d gone from the lowest lows to the highest highs in self-regard over the course of a couple of years. That was a good thing, in some respects. Maybe it was the “resiliency” that is the topic du jour in psychology circles at the time of this writing. But it isn’t exactly the Gary Cooper school of manhood. That would be someone who could slowly, strategically, direct his (or her) own actions toward a goal, never holding themselves in particularly high or low regard. I, on the other hand, gravitated to the poles. Flip Side insisted on glory and usually tripped me up if I was close to achieving it. A man with illusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex, as we say in recovery circles.

  After a twelve-step meeting one night, I shared my Medium obsession with my sponsor. I told him about the number of clicks, the glowing comments, the increasing number of followers.

  “I think I’m onto something. This could be huge.”

  He handed me a stale cookie from the table and said, “Take it easy.”

  I knew what he meant. I ate the cookie, but I was still hungry to do something big to overcome the chip on my shoulder. Flip Side had lied when he promised everything would be ok when I was on drugs and booze. Once clean and sober, I thought I could vanquish him. But he was still screwing up my livelihood. Now he was driving me to write a lot because he wanted the recognition. He was my weakness and also the engine that kept me going. He was like a conjoined twin I couldn’t cut out. I needed us to be aligned.

  Chapter Twelve

  Retirement Porn

  I cooled off on Medium, even as my writing ambitions grew. One of my son’s friends told him his dad thought I was a show-off. He was right. I was posting a lot of material and encouraging friends to Share widely! I also began to think about social media company financials. After Medium secured a big funding round, presumably in preparation for an eventual IPO, a friend sarcastically asked, “How much of that money are you getting?”

  He had a point. All of the content I was contributing to Medium made me feel good, but it benefited their bottom line, not mine. Just like with Facebook, YouTube (Google), and the other social media companies, the users were also the products. The platforms owned all of the revenue while everyone else got a pat on the back and social media attention. I kept writing, but I also kept searching. I was looking for something that could give us financial security and ultimately enough money for deliverance, whatever that was.

  One day, in late 2015, while searching for a widget article, I came across something about Bitcoin. I remembered that the price of bitcoin had been high a couple of years before. Back then I had thought it was a joke. But now that the price had fallen, a question entered my mind: What if it goes up again?

  For the next few nights, I read about Bitcoin.

  “Bitcoin is dead,” the Weekly Standard, among many others, announced.

  But most stories included quotes from people who still believed in it. They said it wasn’t dead.

  They said it could never die.

  I visited the online crypto communities.

  True believers persisted. Some claimed to be economists and investment experts. A popular sentiment was that a single bitcoin, about $400 as I read, would be worth $50,000 in the not-so-distant future. They were certain. Their primary rationale was that only twenty-one million would ever be created. For those keeping score, that’s zero inflation for eternity. Once everyone realized it was the best store of value ever invented, the price would skyrocket.

  No central banker could change the supply of bitcoin, thereby instantly diluting the value of everyone’s stake. If these people from Reddit and other Internet message boards were to be believed, no central entity had any control over Bitcoin. It was decentralized. It was run by thousands of disconnected computers all over the world. I couldn’t think of anything else like it.

  The philosophy underpinning cryptocurrency wasn’t what excited me initially. It was greed, or in polite company, “financial planning.” I’ve always been drawn to the big score, for better or worse. In the same way that I can’t help going for broke trying to get a laugh, I can’t play it safe at the casino. I have a hard time wagering less than a hundred dollars a hand when I play blackjack. The stories about bitcoin millionaires intrigued me, to say the least. It dawned on me that if you played crypto right, you wouldn’t need to worry about compound interest and Father Time.

  I gobbled up stories about people who made fortunes buying Bitcoin at a dollar. An investment of $1,500 in 2009 was worth $600,000 in late 2015, despite the steep drop in price in 2014. Whoa. If I’d invested back then, Danny would be enrolled in those expensive guitar lessons.

  This was retirement porn, pure and simple, and I became an addict, even though the barrier to actually investing was high. Buying crypto was not something a person in my situation did. Not with three kids, a big mortgage, no nest egg, a shaky career, and an unpredictable flow of income from his wife’s business. We’d staked our claim to a moderately comfortable retirement on our 401(k)s experiencing the miracle of compound interest over the next twenty years. Or, more implausibly, my becoming an officer at Acme or landing a C-level executive role at a promising startup. Those were our moonshots.

  But it was a hell of a lot of fun to hang out on the r/BitcoinMarkets subreddit and hear the subversive get-rich-quick kids yak it up. During the day, I attended lobbying meetings with sharply dressed representatives of big finance. They were masters of banking policy who cuddled up to every elected official serving on the committees of jurisdiction over their industry. They wielded a war chest to win friends and influence people. Acme often joined the big banks to lobby for shared policy goals through organizations like the United States Chamber of Commerce. Our companies spoke the same language, nurtured the same dreams. We were going to innovate for consumers like you wouldn’t believe, as soon as the regulators removed our consumer-protection shackles.

  At night, I began bandying words with a ragtag group of crypto anarchists, Ph.D.’s, Wall Street cast-offs plying their dark arts in crypto trading, and other dreamers, lost souls, snake-oil salesmen, and visionaries who didn’t ask anyone’s permission to do anything. It felt good. This community was alive. It was electric. They all wanted to upend traditional finance, which they saw as catering to the entrenched 1 percent and deserving blame for the 2008 financial crisis. They intended to get rich doing it.

  I decided to go to a cryptocurrency meetup in Palo Alto. As I prowled University Avenue looking for a parking space, I felt like I was on a secret mission. I arrive
d at the building and walked right in. No one was doling out name tags at the front door.

  There were about thirty people in the room, and it looked like the meeting was about to get started. Folks were making their way from the pizza and refreshments table toward the seating area. Good timing, since I didn’t know anyone. Bad timing, because there were only two sad pieces of plain cheese pizza left. I poured myself a Sprite and, with my pizza, settled into a seat in the back.

  The speaker had a thick German accent, but that wasn’t the primary language barrier. His presentation seemed to be entirely composed of numbers. The opening line was something like, “Thank you for coming to the Bitcoin Filigraphic Exponenting Microdanting discussion. Let me start by saying 43%21, but of course, I mean 99946!”

  Everyone laughed, because this was apparently a joke about numbers.

  What they were discussing was completely beyond my comprehension, allowing me to study the crowd instead. I’d never seen a bigger cast of misfits, freaks, and iconoclasts in my life.

  The guy next to me had a long gray beard and army boots. One row over, three Chinese women who all looked thirteen were twirling their pens in tandem. One row in front of me to the right was a sweaty man who didn’t blink and asked way too many questions.

  When the post-presentation discussion was winding down, I decided to make a quick exit. I couldn’t imagine trying to start a conversation with someone in this room.They all seemed enraptured by the presentation. I wasn’t about to grab one and say, “I like Bitcoin. Do you?”

  As I drove back up 101, toward home, I wasn’t feeling deflated, though I hadn’t understood anything in the presentation. I was struck by the vibe in the room, the attention this full house of Bitcoin enthusiasts had for the discussion. I’d been to dozens of tech presentations in my life, but I’d never felt that kind of energy, except for maybe a Steve Jobs keynote. But his were more about the Hollywood atmosphere than the underlying technology.

  Although the crowd was mainly white males, it was also more diverse than I had thought it would be. There were a lot of older people in attendance. Some were dressed in preppy gear while others were bohemian-looking, borderline homeless in appearance. I’d find out later that crypto early adopters ran the gamut philosophically. Some were Ayn Rand libertarians, and others were hard-left believers in a universal basic income.

  I was struck by the differences between crypto culture and the corporate world I was used to. At Acme, I was encouraged to retweet all philanthropy propaganda with a host of research-tested hashtags like #ACMEGIVES, #SOULOFACME and #ACMEASSISTS. Crypto Reddit, Twitter, and message boards were sophomoric, exuberant and completely off the reservation. One woman’s email signature was delicious sacrilege to a widget man who’d hosted a dozen safety rallies. It read, Written while operating a widget.

  The more I learned, the more my mind was blown. No one knew who Satoshi was? Bitcoin couldn’t be shut down by anyone? Billions of dollars were at stake? This was something out of a far-fetched spy novel that I couldn’t put down. But it was all real. I’d seen the people, I’d joined the online gatherings and now, in my spare time, I was soaking it all in at a cellular level, starting to think through what it meant for me.

  I started to question what I considered disruptive. The innovations we were talking about at Acme suddenly seemed like boring iterations of existing technology. Pre-IPO companies I’d previously dreamed of joining, like Pinterest, were simply new advertising platforms. Apple announced a new iPhone with a better camera and more glass on the front. Was this supposed to give me a hard-on?

  I could relate to the famous quote by early Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher. He said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” But now a decentralized digital currency existed without permission from financial institutions or governments. It could be a game-changer for the unbanked. It could create new industries across the world. And, as I would learn, it represented a potential threat to the idea that a centrally-controlled corporation like Acme was the best way to organize economic activity.

  ***

  Back in the real world, things were getting more interesting at work in a bad way. We were working on a new deregulation effort in California. We were having problems, and it was going to be a tough one.

  California leadership wasn’t happy with my ideas on how we should run the campaign. They pursued a common tactic when faced with a difficult situation. They brought in high-powered consultants. The consultants put together plans, and they were brilliant. Brilliant for them. They were chock-full of recycled tactics, all of which my team would need to actually implement. Outside of meetings with California leadership, the consultants were mainly absent. They liked the bright lights but shied away from the actual work. I couldn’t stand the sight of them, but I had to look at them a lot, unfortunately.

  With the return of dark times at work, and with no drugs or booze as a distraction, I dove deeper into my research on blockchain.

  This is when I learned about Ethereum, a new blockchain with its own cryptocurrency called ether. They said Ethereum was the world computer, with the potential to do to corporations what Bitcoin could do to banks—knock the shit out of them. That caught my attention.

  Institutions in the real world seemed to be already grappling with the implications. I came across a blockchain report by the European Parliament that described how momentum could shift toward decentralization at a granular level: “Each time we use a distributed ledger we participate in a shift of power from central authorities to non-hierarchical and peer-to-peer structures.”

  Wow. As I sat on the curb on Burlingame Avenue one Saturday eating ice cream while the kids finished their piano lessons, I cycled through memories of the various ways I’d screwed up my career. Flip Side had diminished my value by flubbing something in my various workplaces. There was no doubt that I had major flaws, but the corporate environment magnified them.

  Could this crazy thing actually make it easier and more enjoyable for people like me with uneven personalities to succeed? Where someone could do the work and make a contribution, but on their own terms, without the need to play the corporate game?

  I loved the idea of digital money with Bitcoin, but what Ethereum was promising was altogether more mind-blowing.

  Whereas Bitcoin was billed as a new kind of money, ETH was a new kind of fuel. To use the Ethereum blockchain, one needed to pay a small amount of ETH. All of the decentralized applications (dApps) and organizations being dreamed up would require ETH to run, theoretically driving the price up.

  By 2016, Bitcoin had existed for seven years and had a sizeable infrastructure behind it. Now ETH was coming up. The price of one ETH was about three dollars when I discovered it, having already risen by 300 percent over the previous six months. The aggregate value of all ETH was about $400 million, significantly less than Bitcoin’s $12 billion market cap, based on a single bitcoin price of $380. It seemed to me that ETH could be even more valuable than Bitcoin one day.

  But I still didn’t own any. Every time I started to think about buying ETH, I had the same feeling I had when I went to Pill Hill. I’d dodged that bullet. Was I really going to do something that might be just as crazy, even though it seemed to make so much sense?

  Ever since my addiction period, when I forgot to pay the bills for a few months, Eileen had been in charge of our day-to-day finances. She handled our checkbook, but I managed our family investments and retirement accounts.

  While I envied the casual rich in our neighborhood—those financially comfortable through trust funds or stock options—my first priority was to maintain my family’s standard of living. Eileen earned a good income as a PR consultant, but my salary, benefits, and annual allotment of restricted Acme stock were what kept us in Burlingame, paid for speech therapy for my daughter, funded summer camps for all three kids and allowed us to keep up with the Joneses, albeit at a lower level. I still drove my beat-up old Volvo. We definitely
weren’t poor by any stretch, but we certainly weren’t in a position to throw money around.

  I also recognized that no matter how much I wanted to dream of crypto riches, it was a form of escape. The five twelve-step meetings I attended each week made it easy for me to recognize the similarities between addiction and the mania I was developing. But this felt different. While Flip Side, the addict and escape artist, was super fired up, so was my rational side.

  Our nest egg consisted of our 401(k)s and IRAs, which were now worth more than half a million dollars combined. Anything that disrupted our steady retirement contributions would delay our retirement, not to mention threaten our ability to pay for three college educations.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about how much money we might make if we took the plunge and bought some ETH. At the same time, I couldn’t get an image out of my mind of a man standing in front of the infamous Mt. Gox after it was hacked and drained of $50 million in bitcoin in 2013. He was holding a sign that read, WHERE IS OUR MONEY? It’d been picked up by the wire services and appeared in newspapers and websites around the world. The guy had a fair complexion, no tattoos, and a forlorn expression. He looked a lot like me. He had obviously lost more than he could afford to lose.

  I knew if I bought crypto, I’d be flirting with financial disaster. Neither Eileen nor I had ever been poor, or close to it. We were living relatively high on the hog, and our kids’ upbringing was privileged by any definition. Yet we still constantly felt stretched emotionally, financially, and even physically. I couldn’t imagine adding poverty to the mix. I couldn’t imagine how poor families did it. Not being able to buy your kids birthday presents? Moving from apartment to apartment? There were millions of families like that in the U.S. right then. I didn’t want to join them.

  And then, in spring 2016, as if a generous upper-middle-class goddess had reached down and blessed us, our financial picture suddenly improved. We received the first windfall of our lives. My mother gave us $50,000 when she sold her home and moved into a retirement community. I’d recently cashed out some restricted stock that had finally vested. And Eileen earned a small lump sum when the startup she had briefly worked for was acquired by Microsoft. Her job was eliminated, but we were able to pocket the money because she picked up consulting clients right away. It was $100,000 total. We’d never had anything outside of our retirement accounts. With my work problems starting up again, this money eased our minds. If I lost my job, we’d be able to survive for some time without having to relocate. We decided we wouldn’t touch it.