“Full-Time Crypto”
By: Paul Schmitzer
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Retirement, Freedom, Entrepreneurship, Bitcoin

For nearly all of us in the cryptocurrency space uttering the words “full-time crypto” means something special. For you, that phrase may mean early retirement, a change in your career path, financial freedom or even cutting ties (somewhat) with fiat monies forever.

In my case, all those reasons have made me ponder that phrase multiple times a week over the past 6+ years. Reflections on a hobby that began in 2011 and includes hundreds of deaths of my passion project, solidifies the fact that I’m “oldskool” in the cryptocoin world. Fittingly, it was one of those articles proclaiming Bitcoin’s death that drew me into the rabbit hole to start with.

Illustration: Martin Venezky

The idea of digital money — convenient and untraceable, liberated from the oversight of governments and banks — had been a hot topic since the birth of the Internet. Cypherpunks, the 1990s movement of libertarian cryptographers, dedicated themselves to the project. Yet every effort to create virtual cash had foundered. — “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” — Benjamin Wallace, WIRED

“Hooked on a Feeling”

Like many of you internet nomads, this sounded amazing. Individual Sovereignty; are you kidding me? Sign me up!

There were limited, believable use cases at this point. Only BTC moving between exchanges and sites like Silk Road or LocalBitcoins, but the promise of a future, free from even these centralized 3rd Party Bitcoin services, was more than enough to spark hope in a decentralized economy.

Things changed about 48 hours later with my first 3X bump…

“I’m in this for the Coin”

👈 For most of you in the cryptocurrency space, this is your morning, afternoon, evening and, most likely, dream life.

People in this state of euphoria contemplate “full-time crypto” life pretty regularly — retiring early, financial freedom and even changing your career path to “day trader”.

Don’t let anyone in this space squelch your new found love for chart reading or magnetism towards FOMO. It’s part of the initiation that every oldskooler worth listening to will admit to participating in when cornered.

I think something else they’ll tell you is, “it’s more than just making money.” Now if you’re listening or not is another story.

Most of the price action leading into 2013/2014 was surrounding Satoshi’s “greatest invention of all time”

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. - “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” — Satoshi Nakamoto

Little did most of us know that the “coin” was only 1/2 of the equation.

Funny how viewing things through money-tinted glasses leaves out details… like, how does this new cash system actually work? I think this is where journalists fail to see Satoshi’s vision in their death bed write-ups, and where many of us found time to learn after experiencing the gut check run-up to $1200 → $160 → $600 → $300.

“Semi-Retirement”

That’s what I called it.

We had our first girl in 2012, and we were blessed enough financially for me to leave my architecture firm and focus on our family and maintain our lifestyle via day trading cryptocurrencies. I think my quota was make 1 BTC/day trading — do that and we were good to go! Still in my late-thirties at the time, calling it a retirement sounded great (to me) but I didn’t want the raised eyebrows all my old college roommates would surely give at our family parties.

So I improvised.

I mean, who was I to spoil their joy of being neck deep in parenthood? Raising children, going to ball practices every night, eating McDonald’s in the car every meal. Spending 40+ hours a week away from the ones you loved shouldn’t be interrupted by such nonsense as retiring 15 years after just getting started.

Essentially it was a sabbatical from my “real job” as a healthcare design architect. The career path I unwittingly signed on for as a toddler building with LEGOs, refined in high-school designing cars and lost days of sleep over in college. “Living the American Dream” of paying into 5–10 years of debt and then trudging through nearly 50 years of service for someone not named “Mr. ME”.

Oh glory days!

”I’m in this for the Blockchain”

I was still playing family man and day trading cryptocurrencies in 2014 when I decided to return to my architecture firm. There really isn’t anything better than having freedom to spend the majority of your day with the people most important in your life.

My decision to return to a real job wasn’t as much a necessity as it was a strategic move. Financially we were good, but I had 2 reasons to jump back in.

First, frankly, I was bored. I missed doing design and I wasn’t really participating in the communities of any of the coins I was holding. When you aren’t involved in a hobby you say you’re passionate about you quickly lose interest. Its the Curse of the Entrepreneur; lacking focus and chasing ideas.

There weren’t hours of crypto webcasts that popped up daily in my feed to keep me entertained, only Bitcointalk.org which was good for a couple train wreck sightings a week.

Looking back at this time, I can see the tight bond of community, value and technology. We like to shill our favorite coin’s “first to” and “best at” technology but most users still don’t understand it all and deep down they only want more people to talk about their project so the price goes up.

Second, Bitcoin was in a remarkably stable price state and it was telling me it is time to accumulate (hence we needed capital), as news was beginning to surround the distributed ledger 1/2 of Satoshi’s invention; the “blockchain”.

I had already begun focusing on privacy coins before returning to the 9–5 with new projects like Darkcoin and Monero beginning development. But I really gravitated to projects that were bringing utility into the crypto space. I didn’t sign up to Bitcoin for merely another way to move money on the internet from one exchange to another, I signed up for a better this 👇

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. — “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” — Satoshi Nakamoto

To me this speaks to the power of the blockchain. The ability to create trustless models for social platforms, exchanges, marketplaces, storage and even oracles. These projects were moving past the coin and building in utility, just like the quote above taken from the first line of the Bitcoin Whitepaper introduction.

This ultimately led me to the Shadow Project which had already developed a privacy currency, ShadowCash SDC, but was now building in some utility with a decentralized marketplace. To me, this was the next step for crypto; creating a decentralized, anonymous economy!

Around this time I finally began volunteering for the first time, wherever I could help within the SDC community. It may have taken me a while to figure this out but, I had skills from real life that could actually help a team of volunteers working on an open-source project that I also believed in and invested in.

“Get off your ass and do something!”