My CryptoTravelog
How I wrapped my head around the crypto ecosystem, and how you might too
My crypto journey began a few years ago during the last market bubble around 2016–17. I was still in high school at the time, and I became enthralled with the idea of anonymized internet money (I didn’t have to be a legal adult to invest in it). Though truthfully, I just liked it when ‘number go up.’ I had used my Chromebook at the time and sat on Bitcoin faucets to accumulate a few satoshis, so sunk cost bias didn’t really grip me after the market tanked. After that period, crypto remained in my periphery for the rest of high school and into my freshman year of college.
Blockchain re-entered my life during my sophomore year of undergrad. It was when we were still in the thick of the Coronavirus pandemic, and I was looking to pick up a new hobby to distract myself from the rather depressing situation we were in. I had tinkered with laptops in the past, so my focus eventually turned to making a proper gaming PC — the kind you see on Linus Tech Tips or other YouTube channels.
In case you’re unfamiliar with PC gaming, good. It’s a terrible hobby. Parts are a colossal money sink and actually going through the process of building a machine requires an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge on hardware and software to be successful (which is a motif you will become familiar with later).
In my state of silicon-induced despair, I revisited my old muse of crypto. I don’t remember the exact moment when I realized it, but I learned that crypto mining was an extremely effective tool for making a gaming rig much less painful on my wallet. In short, whenever I wasn’t using my pc, I would have my graphics card, or GPU, mine Ethereum and later sell this crypto for USD. This process was extremely profitable for me and for many of my fellow hobbyists: My GPU, the Nvidia GTX 1660 Super, cost me $230 and I ROI’d on the card in less than three months.
This was actually one of the reasons why the computer chip shortage became so bad in 2021: the value of GPUs to miners was so high that Nvidia and other manufacturers would have to have either priced out non-miners or allow for scalpers to arbitrage the market to an equilibrium price (the latter is what ultimately happened).
But what is this Ethereum crypto coin anyways? That’s what the flanderized version of my past self would have asked. I found that Ethereum was more than just another altcoin or distributed ledger: it was a distributed computer.
But what even is a decentralized computer?
What I mean to say is that computer code can be stored and executed on the Ethereum blockchain. More simply, people could use it like a giant decentralized (albeit slow and expensive) server.
This code, called smart contracts gave birth to a new industry: Decentralized Finance. DeFi allows crypto investors to do things with their money, not just sit on it until the apocalypse or until fiat goes to zero. Or both. It became one of the first serious real-world uses for crypto and luckily it got people’s attention.
I was already in several crypto mining Discord servers at the time. Some of the more seasoned miners had familiarity with defi and started pointing me in the direction of Finematics for education on the industry. This was a pivotal moment for me; learning from Finematics was the point where I transitioned from a computer nerd that invested a little into crypto to a guy who approached crypto as a developer.
Learning about defi from this guy was incredibly difficult. This is by no means his fault, but the defi ecosystem even in its infancy was just so dense with information that I didn’t understand a single thing he said the first time around. It became a habit of mine to watch his videos on AMMs and other protocols on loop whenever I went out for exercise. It became my reprieve from online class monotony.
After a couple of months, I began to wrap my head around some defi concepts and decided to finally try my hand at using on-chain protocols. I didn’t realize until it was time to withdraw my Ether from Coinbase how risky all this investing felt. I wasn’t really worried about the volatility of my assets, I was more concerned with the lack of a safety net if I screwed up withdrawing to my defi wallet or if I used a malicious dapp.
I still carried on in the face of these risks; the exhilaration of using the tech was too great and the opportunities were too ripe for me to ignore. The first defi wallet I used was the mobile version of MyEtherWallet. Looking back, it was actually a really great tool for teaching me the semantics of defi investing. While there wasn’t support for L2s or sidechains where transactions were much cheaper, MEW provided discovery tools in the form of a list of commonly used dapps. What would have been weeks of research on what dapps to use got cut down to a few days and I was able to open up a Uniswap V2 LP position.
By the summer of 2021, I began itching for more options beyond what MEW provided and I moved my funds over to a Metamask wallet on my PC. Experimenting on Polygon and Fantom was a liberating experience for me since I could now afford to run many more transactions than I could on Ethereum mainnet. While they make concessions in security and decentralization, It was on these chains that I learned to fully leverage the power of Defi. Projects like Yearn Finance and Abracadabra now entered my financial reach.
It was at this time too that I began learning Solidity — the language used to make smart contracts on Ethereum. From browsing Reddit and crypto Twitter, I happened upon resources available on Ethereum.org, which I used to teach myself.
That ultimately brings me to the reason why I wrote this article. My journey into defi has taken me multiple years and has been facilitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. My personal curiosity and desire to understand this industry have been key driving factors in my learning. Even after spending all this time, I still only know a fraction of what actual developers in this industry know. The knowledge floor to benefit from defi is just too high for the average person on this planet. In a general sense, we as individuals simply don’t have the time to dedicate hours of our days to learning experimental tech. In practice, we often look to trusted friends and experts and adopt their habits when we accept these technologies into our lives. This phenomenon is what Robert Cialdini described as social proof. While this behavior doesn’t have a perfect track record when it comes to benefitting people, It will become the most effective tool we as developers can use in fostering the mass adoption of Defi.
Thanks for reading! This article is a test for my publishing workflow — feedback is greatly appreciated! I will explore social proof and how it applies to defi in my next article. Stay tuned✌
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