Excited to learn all things crypto! Here's my plan.

Hello! I'm Pailey, aspiring runaway. I recently discovered Steemit and am really impressed by it so far! This is my introduction post. I am not a real person, I'm a made-up person, so there's no need for proof or anything.

My Bitcoin story

I got into Bitcoin back in 2014, right before it shot from $200 to $1000. I read the whitepaper and it blew my mind, I thought it was such a brilliant idea, surely this would be the currency of the future. Even though I didn't have a lot of money, I decided to buy exactly 1 bitcoin.

Unfortunately, the Canadian site I was buying them from only let you buy in small increments, like $50 every few days. I started buying right when the price started going up, and so every few days I would buy it at a higher and higher price for fewer and fewer bitcoins. But I was determined to get to 1.0 bitcoins, so I kept buying and ended up spending maybe $600 in total on my first whole bitcoin.

It was pretty exciting times. The way the price was rising "to the moon" right after I'd personally researched the technology in depth and decided it was worth investing in... it's hard to act rationally in response.

After it peaked at $1000 and the price came back down, I eventually started to gradually lose interest in Bitcoin. I wanted to see it grow and be adopted mainstream much faster, and I spent way too much time constantly watching the price. So I saved my Electrum wallet seed in a safe place and moved on with my life.

Finally, one and a half years ago I sold my bitcoin, exchanging it for a $500 Amazon gift card, and donating the rest to the Internet Archive.

Getting back into crypto

I learned a lot about cryptography when I was first getting into Bitcoin. Public and private keys, cryptographic hashes, and digital signatures were super interesting to me. So when I found out about Steemit and how it runs on a blockchain, I was really interested in the details of how it works. I started researching it, and I realized I was pretty rusty in my understanding of the basics of how blockchains work.

So I went back to the Bitcoin whitepaper (it's amazing how short and accessible it is), and reading through it again totally renewed my interest in cryptocurrencies and now I'm really excited to learn about all the new developments that have been happening, like Ethereum and other altcoins and Proof-of-Stake, and so on. I also found a good tutorial called Minimum Viable Block Chain that explains in detail the problem that blockchains solve, and how.

I can't wait to learn all about the different altcoins and things people are doing with blockchains (e.g. Steemit!). But first I think I'm going to learn about cryptography itself in more detail, and then Bitcoin itself in detail. To do that, I'm planning on reading these two books:

• Cryptography Engineering
• Mastering Bitcoin

I got Cryptography Engineering for $8 (along with some other cybersecurity books) from the Humble Book Bundle, which is still on by the way. It's supposed to be the best book on cryptography for programmers (see this blog post which compares the book to its predecessor, Applied Cryptography).

I didn't get quite as good a deal on Mastering Bitcoin. I bought it on Amazon using part of my aforementioned $500 gift credit. It's written by Andreas Antonopoulos, who was basically Bitcoin Jesus when I first got into Bitcoin.

My goals

My two basic goals in life are (1) to understand and (2) to create. That is why I am starting my crypto journey by trying to learn all the technical details of cryptography and cryptocurrencies. Eventually, I want to get involved with a cryptocurrency or a project based on crypto and contribute in some way, whether by actually coding or by writing tutorials/guides/documentation.

One interesting project I came across was IPFS. I love Neocities (my first website was on Geocities), and their blog post about IPFS got me really excited about it. I love the idea of just making everything distributed on the Internet.

For now, I will keep learning everything I can about crypto and will probably post articles on Steemit sharing what I'm learning. Thanks for reading all this!