I used to have a sweet job...

I was making $350 a day in the oil & gas business. It was a pretty sweet gig. Oil companies would contract us to find out who owns the mineral rights under properties in their "buy area" so they can then lease them to drill for oil and gas. I would do so by examining the records in court houses across Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and North Dakota. The money sure was nice, as it afforded me a sweet car (see above) and a decently sized bank account for my age (I was 18 - 20 at the time.) However, I eventually got tired of being on the road all the time, and living in hotels in very small towns with no friends and nothing to do. I decided it was time for a change. Then I got a call from a friend...

A change of pace...

Some of my friends said they were moving out to Vail, Colorado, and they invited me to join them in their adventure. I jumped at the opportunity, as I was already certain that I needed a change of pace, and on my way to Colorado I went. We rented a house in a town outside of Vail called Red Cliff, which is a very small mountain town (population 200) at an even higher elevation than Vail. The road to and from Red Cliff into Vail is sketchy as hell, especially during the winter, and I saw my life flash before my eyes at least once. I switched out my RX-8 for a Jeep Wrangler and explored the mountains during the summer (see above), and I was constantly snowboarding (at least 60 days each winter.) I had a lot of friends, and when I wasn't playing in the mountains we spent most of our time partying with no worries in the world. I worked shitty jobs renting skis and snowboards during the winter, and as a landscaping laborer during the summers- but I was very happy. I miss Colorado...

Then I met a girl...

Since I was living in a ski town in Colorado, there are always a lot of foreign workers that would come and stay for the winter each year. I met a pretty Brazilian girl named Carol, and we quickly fell in love. We spent the whole winter together. When I stayed at her place we would be staying with her 10 (no joke) Brazilian roommates in a 3 bedroom apartment. Her roommates were all girls too, so that was an interesting experience to say the least... my roommates (all single and not getting laid) were jealous to say the least. Carol went back to Brazil after the winter was over, and because I was blinded by love, I let Carol convince me that I should move back home to Texas and finish school. We spent 3 years in a mostly long distance relationship. She would visit me for a month a year in the USA, or I would visit her for a month in Brazil. However, the long distance relationship was hard on both of us, and it all came to an end when she tried to convince me to quit smoking marijuana. Since I was a teenager, I have always felt the laws surrounding marijuana were unjust and that it was much safer to partake in than alcohol. I had already realized that allowing her to convince me to leave a place that I loved was a mistake, and I was not going to let her convince me to give up another thing I loved. All good things must come to an end...

Then I learned about Bitcoin...

The above picture may or may not of been a plant I grew at one point. ;) ... I quickly found out college wasn't for me. It wasn't that I'm not smart enough. I was smarter than almost everyone I went to college with, and have been tested as having an IQ of 140, but I've always had a lot of trouble applying myself to school because it is so boring to me! I then went back to my position as a Landman in the oil and gas industry. Finding marijuana when you work on the road with no friends or family is challenging. In 2012, I was browsing Google News one night when I saw an article about how people were buying drugs on the internet using TOR and Bitcoin. This article was about Silk Road. I thought it seemed crazy and too good to be true, but I looked into it anyways because I am a very curious person. After more research I eventually became convinced that it was real, and I eventually figured out that it was indeed real when a quarter ounce of high grade marijuana was delivered to my hotel room via USPS. I instantly deduced that Bitcoin was a very powerful technology, and that it would become very valuable one day. Not only that, but I had always leaned libertarian and Bitcoin aligned with my political ideals perfectly. Then I got into mining...

Then I started mining Bitcoins....

Dead set on setting up a Bitcoin mine, I quit my job the next month after learning about Bitcoin. At the time I started get into Bitcoin, Bitcoin's value was around $10 or $15 and it was still profitable to mine Bitcoins on GPUs. I had saved up some money from my Landman job, and I bought approximately 1000 Bitcoins for $10,000. I am more of a risk prone kind of guy, and I was certain they would go up in value at some point, so I figured why not. I was also a geek and I wanted to mine Bitcoins rather than buy and hodl them. I loved the idea of making money with GPUs mining away 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. I spent almost all of my Bitcoins buying up used mining equipment. I converted my dryer outlet and my oven outlet with an adapter that went to a PDU specifically to mine Bitcoins (and eventually Litecoins when Bitcoin ASICs came out.) I eventually had 10 mining rigs with 4 GPUs each running in a 2 bedroom duplex. I was even mining on my desktop computer too. It was noisy to say the least... I can almost still hear the fans buzzing. The mining rig room that was ran off of the dryer outlet was my dog Buddy's favorite room (see above.) At the time it was just me and him, and he was my best friend. Then I minted the second physical Litecoin's in existence...

See part 2 here: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@coinhoarder/am-i-going-through-an-early-mid-life-crisis-you-be-the-judge-part-2