by Dan Conway
I calmly left the bank. Now Sansome Street was chaotic. A siren bounced off the buildings and into my face. A homeless man screamed at a bird. A group of German tourists wearing dark socks crammed the sidewalk. I called Eileen, and she picked right up.
“Hi! Yes, I’ve been meaning to tell you about this! I want to put some money into Ethereum, the thing I’ve been reading about and watching videos about for the last few months.”
Eileen had walked by the family room once and found me watching a video of Vitalik speaking on the big screen, when I’d normally I’d be watching Homeland or Game of Thrones. That perplexed her. She had stopped in her tracks and stared at the TV and then at me. “Who is that?” she said as she pointed to his face and haunting eyes, frozen in pause.
“It’s the inventor of the new technology I am interested in.”
This was odd. Since when did I ever watch videos about the inventor of a new technology? She was half-awake, though, and probably thought that if she asked any more questions, I’d talk her ear off about some new obsession. She moved on.
I was careful not to mention that the technology was cryptocurrency, because I knew she could’ve easily said, “Well, just as long as you don’t invest in it,” a throwaway comment that would’ve been problematic.
But now the cat was out of the bag, and there was no salvaging my wire transfer.
“I can’t believe you would do this,” she said.
“Ok, I’ll stop the wire, and we can talk about it tonight.”
She was clearly shocked and scared, and rightly so. I’d gone off the deep end before, but at least there were movies, books, and support groups to deal with alcoholism and drug addiction. Was I now a gambling addict? Was I joining a cult? What support was there for families dealing with this type of situation? And hadn’t we decided we weren’t going to touch our $100,000 security blanket?
I walked back into the bank.
“George, I’m going to need to pause that wire. I need to finalize a few things on my end.”
“Sure, no problem, Mr. Conway,” he said.
My eyebrows were arched, and I slinked out of the bank and back to my workspace. The rest of that day sucked.
I’d clearly breached the trust of our marriage. I realized how crazy my actions appeared, and I wished I had tried to convince her before making the plunge.
But I fully believed this was a good financial move, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’d been the best media pitcher at the various PR firms where I’d worked because I did my homework and fully committed to learning the ins and outs of the thing I was pitching. All of the skeptics who wouldn’t invest in cryptocurrency reminded me of the PR people who would only do cursory research, then quickly come to the conclusion that what they were pitching was bullshit. They wouldn’t get any results. I’d done my homework and believed this was real.
I knew that if I mentioned my desire to go all-in on ETH at my twelve-step meeting, it would be identified as mania, an attempt at escape. Flip Side did want a big score, a shortcut, a reckless attempt to save us, damn the consequences. But I felt in my bones that this was a winning lottery ticket. And I had identified it before most people on the planet.
By March 2016, one ETH was worth $13, a 1,300 percent rise over the previous six months. I was convinced that this was the beginning of an historic climb, like bitcoin in 2013, when one coin skyrocketed from $21 to $1,200 in less than a year. Crypto is crazy like that.
Eileen and I planned to talk after the kids went to bed. With so much hanging in the balance, family dinner that evening was excruciating. I picked over my chicken, rice, and baby carrots. We talked about Annie’s extra-credit spelling project in great detail.
After dinner, I straightened up the living room while Eileen took the kids upstairs, read them stories and put them to bed. At 9:00 p.m., about twelve hours after she received the text alert from Wells Fargo, she walked back downstairs and sat down on the couch next to me.
“What’s up?” she asked. This was an unpromising start to the conversation.
“Ok, let me just explain what I’m thinking. The way things are going, we won’t be able to retire until we are sixty-five.”
My mind always started there when thinking about our finances.
“Ok,” she said. “I know that.”
I think she suddenly remembered how much she didn’t like to talk about finances. She wanted to put the kibosh on the investment, but she’d have to suffer through this first.
“Hey, Ei, just let me go through it, please.”
She nodded.
“In the worst-case scenario, we’d lose all $100,000. We might have to start pulling from our equity line if things got dire. But the interest rates are low, and we’d have ten years to repay it.”
We’d recently clawed back a Wells Fargo $500,000 line of credit on our home.
“At the end of ten years, we could refinance our house and pay off our line of credit. I’d be working full-time, even if it’s not at Acme. Don’t forget, we have at least $1 million in equity in our home.”
This home equity was always our last safety net, and it was a good one. It’d be hard to tap and might require us to move if we needed the money in the wrong economic climate. But it was there if we needed it.
“In the worse-case scenario, we’d still be able to retire at sixty-five and pay for the kids to go to college. We might have to sell the house when we are seventy and use that money to live as a final safety net, but probably not, if we keep working to sixty-five.”
“I don’t want to move, Dan. That’s not something we should count on.”
“I’m not saying that. It’s our doomsday plan.”
She didn’t look convinced. We had both been sitting on the couch. I stood up and pulled up a chair in front of her. I tried to pivot the discussion to the upside.
“Marc Andreessen says that cutting-edge technology always feels cultish and dangerous at first. That’s where crypto is right now. That’s when you have to invest to make the big bucks, before others are willing to do so.”
She didn’t look inspired, but at least I had her attention.
“It’s perfectly possible that our money could grow by a factor of ten, a 1,000 percent return or more. That’s what happened with Bitcoin in 2013. People made a killing! I know it’s going to happen with ETH. I can feel it, and I’ve researched it to death.”
Her face softened.
“Bottom line is that losing all $100,000 would hurt, but it wouldn’t kill us. But that’s not going to happen. The upside is insanely great. If I’m right about Ethereum, if the developers I see at the meetups are right, we’ll make a lot of money. We might even be able to retire early! Travel the world with the kids.”
She didn’t seem angry anymore, but her focus was shifting to the things she still needed to get done before going to bed.
“Ok, listen, I’ve got to work on an abstract for a client. I can’t talk about this anymore. Can you unload the dishwasher?”
“Of course,” I said. I opened the door, and a hot blast of steam hit my face. “I’ll only do this if you agree.”
Then the normal insanity of family life took over, and I feared I’d never be able to buy my ETH.
In the days following our conversation, I tried to be as nice as possible to Eileen in order to improve my chances. I hoped to be more successful than she had been years before, when she tried to convince me to agree to a fourth child. For months, she stayed up past two a.m. doing the laundry, cleaning the house, and finishing her client work. She wanted me to think that everything was running so smoothly around the house, why not add another kid? Instead, she nearly had a nervous breakdown. Late one night, she confided in me that she likely had multiple sclerosis and that she’d be dead soon. As a result, she’d bought Danny a five hundred dollar train set for Christmas even though we didn’t have the money, he was three, and I wasn’t the type of dad who could assemble it. It turned out she was just sleep deprived.
&nb
sp; A week after our discussion about ETH, I was at the gym working with my trainer. I was pulling him all over the place as usual, which still attracted stares. I received a text from Eileen. It said:
Here is the deal. You can invest the money how you choose, IF you agree to the following family trips over the next eighteen months…
Puerto Vallarta
Hawaii (Disney Aulani)
Italy
Disney Cruise
Costa Rica
Plus, the kids and I would like to go to Disneyland every year from now on.
My price is these trips. Take it or leave it.
This chick was crazier than me. Spending all of our money on a speculative investment and taking these expensive trips of a lifetime? Insane. I had a habit of vetoing every extravagant-sounding vacation. But I would’ve bought a rocket to Mars if it meant I could buy ETH.
Done!!! Thank you, you won’t be sorry!
I put the phone down and yelled “YES!” which startled both the corporate types sneaking a lunchtime workout and my trainer, who was still attached to me.
Within two days, our $100,000 was transformed into 6,993 magical ETH at an average price of $14. And Eileen had booked all her trips.
Chapter Fifteen
Going Rogue
At the office, I walked a little slower, I talked a little lower. I was quietly smug for reasons only I was aware of. I’d done something big, something bold.
While everyone yammered on in our Monday morning meeting, I studied each face. Their presentations were more cogent and impressive than mine. But these corporate sharks didn’t seem so scary anymore. None of them had the guts to do what I had done.
Howie, the lead consultant, spoke.
“Dan, I think you need to start a green energy communications plan ASAP to counter all of the flack we are receiving from the environmentalists.”
Prince Charming nodded. “Yes, Dan, please make that a priority.”
Previously, my head would’ve exploded. We’d been trying to do this for a year, but it had proven impossible. Too many divisions were involved, and none of them was willing to collaborate. Now Howie had teed it up and gotten Prince Charming to assign it to me in front of everyone. Even if the project was possible, it would take at least a hundred hours to get it done. Time we didn’t have. Howie wasn’t even offering to help. If we pulled it off, he’d get the credit. If we didn’t, I’d be blamed.
True, Howie had taken a shot at me. But as a crypto revolutionary, I was starting to feel a little bit like Neo in The Matrix. I could see the bullet in slow motion. I recognized the danger, but it didn’t concern me. I was starting to feel removed from it all. “Sure, Howie, we’ll get right on that.”
Trouble emerged on other fronts.
I’d ruffled feathers with the people who created Acme’s national philanthropy programs. These particular adversaries were at headquarters, hanging out at the water cooler with the leaders of the company. That was a major advantage employees at every headquarters enjoyed over those at a regional office. They knew it, and didn’t hesitate to crush threats to their authority.
I have no evidence, but I suspect that my next hiccup was due to enemies I’d created in Red State. I received a call that someone had made an anonymous complaint to the Acme ethics hotline about a story I’d posted on Medium about an ill-fated drunken alumni cruise during my drinking days. The caller took umbrage that I had tweeted something about an Acme philanthropic effort the day before tweeting this story.
Ok. The alumni cruise story was provocative. Maybe it was a mistake to push that out to my Twitter feed (which, of course, stated All tweets are my own). But I found it hard to believe that a random stranger made this connection, found Acme’s ethics hotline and called to complain. It felt like an inside job.
I was required to meet with an Acme ethics representative in person. I received a slap on the wrist. I also had to endure a painful call with an Acme executive from Red State. He tried to put my digression in context and told me that he advised his daughter not to post things on the Web, and also his wife, who got quite angry about national politics. Ok. I agreed to be more careful, but comparing what I considered my beautifully nuanced blog pieces to his daughter’s sexting and his wife’s angry rants about Obama was too much.
I said, “I will try to make them more private, but this is something that is important to me, and I don’t think I should be asked to stop writing them.”
He said that I should be cognizant of the company’s brand, which I represented. I countered that these blogs could be good for the company brand because they were authentic, and we knew from our polling that customers craved authenticity. Maybe an example of someone from Acme writing edgy content would persuade techies and other iconoclasts they could fit in here. Those were the people we kept saying we wanted to hire, right? He said that wasn’t the kind of authenticity they were looking for. We agreed to disagree on the most important points. I assured him that I would be more careful.
As we said goodbye, I knew that I was in real trouble. This executive was high up the chain, and he legitimately thought my blogs were vents and/or vile.
One thing you never did at Acme was challenge Red State on social issues, especially if you were from California. You could disagree on policy, approach, and objectives, but the culture of the company came from Red State. Period. Fourth Levels simply didn’t write about the things I was writing about. They’d mastered their domains, or at least appeared to, and weren’t crying out to the Internet for attention. That wouldn’t be good for their brands. It certainly hadn’t been good for mine.
But even after this setback, which would have devastated me in the past, I continued to act out.
I had never liked my coworker Bruce Fernen, a suave-looking guy who felt he was hitting his professional stride and couldn’t be stopped. I was told by an ally that he had been leaking damaging observations to my boss, which explained why a pool stick had been shoved up my ass that week.
Bruce was always very concerned about his personal brand. He once told me that he felt good about how he was progressing at Acme. To underscore the point, he said, “And my voice is deep.” I’d never heard that one before. After that, I noticed that his voice was indeed extremely deep, deeper than mine, which I noticed was quite high.
Bruce was pissing me off, and I’d had it. We were both joining a national conference call from our own offices. Dozens of Third, Fourth, and Fifth Levels from around the country would be joining this particular call. Right when the call opened up, before he could announce himself, I did it for him in falsetto, an octave higher than Michael Jackson. “This is Bruce Fernen. I’m looking forward to this call. Thank you.”
Pause.
“Thanks, Bruce,” the stupefied host from Oklahoma responded.
To the professionals out there: feel free to use this technique to make friends at work!
The Bruce Fernens of the world could take it, I thought. They didn’t seem to have much of a Flip Side. Or they were better at hiding him. They seemed to have confidence, that attribute that always eluded me. It pissed me off that the corporate culture and dynamics of this beast rewarded the Bruce Fernans of the world. I was certain he’d pass me in the pecking order. I couldn’t help but take a shot at him.
And now, with crypto running through my veins, I had my own form of confidence, in the shape of an escape hatch.
Chapter Sixteen
The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
In 1962, my parents paid $6,500 for our cabin at the Russian River. They scratched and clawed to come up with the down payment. My dad picked up a night job at Sears at the same time he was working full-time as a seventh-grade teacher and earning a master’s degree in education. My mom held to a tight household budget to make ends meet. Getting a summer place, no matter the condition, was her goal. She hated the year-round fog of Daly City, even though it was close to my dad’s job.
The river house was our family temple. Tha
t was where the Conway vibe was the strongest. My brother and cousin, both musicians, played Bob Dylan and Tom Petty songs late into the night as we all sang along. One year, a small fire started in the living area, which Maureen turned into a water fight with fire extinguishers once the fire was out. My brother even wrote a family song about the river which started with the lyric, “All I ever seem to do is work all the time.”
On Memorial Day 2016, all of the remaining original members of my family were there: me, my older brother Joey, my sister Kathleen, and my mom, who was still going strong at eighty-six. We’d always been fairly close and willing to share what was going on in our lives. Since there was no TV at the cabin and limited cell reception, it was the family venue most suited for conversation. Considering my current struggles at Acme, this would be a perfect opportunity to unburden myself and get some moral support.
I started talking, and I wouldn’t shut up. But all I could talk about was ETH.
“Listen, I have something big to tell you. I’ve discovered a new digital currency, like bitcoin. It has a cult following in the tech scene, and I think the price is going to explode upwards. This guy Vitalik Buterin who invented it is a genius. He’s only twenty-one, and he was born in Russia. He learned Mandarin in his spare time!”
And so on.
We have a family friend who—before being institutionalized—started using colors to describe the days. “Today is a red day. That means tomorrow should be orange,” he’d say. Kathleen told me later that when I explained how blockchains are based on solving little puzzles —miners competing to process blocks—she thought I might be developing schizophrenia. But as a former addict and penny stock speculator herself, she leaned in to hear everything, anyway. “What are the chances it doubles, Daniel?” she asked.
I was impressed with her immediate focus on the upside.
“It could go to zero, but I don’t think that is going to happen. Doubling is nothing. If it works, it could go up a 1,000 percent, like Bitcoin.”
