I paid 30 BTC for a t-shirt. Hello, #steemit. I guess this is my #introduceyourself.

Gosh. Where to start? I suppose by defining myself.

My name is Patrick. To the vast majority of the world I'm just some guy. But... I've been married to a beautiful woman (@byn) for 24 years, and together we've had five kids who have all become people that I don't just love because they're my children. I actually like them as human beings. I suppose that defines success in the parenting world, right? My joy in life comes from being more than 'just some guy' to my family and friends.

Byn is definitely my better half, and she is the single most valuable asset I have in navigating this thing we call #life. Without her I'm a boat without a rudder, and in my opinion far too many men on this planet have either forgotten or lost sight of the fact that the woman in their life helps them to be more than they could be on their own. We're meant to be teamed in pairs (not necessarily a man and a woman). Losing sight of that means that you're losing sight of the mission.

That's the core of who I am, and it is what I consider to be the reason for my existence.

I suppose the next step in introducing myself should be defining why I'm here. Or rather, how I arrived here, to #steemit, in particular. This is likely to become a bit 'techy.' Don't let the 'techy' bit turn you away. I'm betting that you'll find this interesting, regardless of who you are, 'techy' or not. You see, in addition to being a dedicated husband and father I'm also the quintessential geek. Or nerd. Whichever term you prefer. I accept both.

I come from a very unique place in time. I and others my age represent the very first generation of humans who have had access to personal computers in their home for as long as they can remember. My first computer was a Commodore VIC20, and at the age of seven I wrote my first program in the BASIC programming language, a written text interface where programs were stored as text files to be run on the DOS operating system.

There are very few people on the planet who started on computers at that early of an age and at that early of a point in time. It doesn't make me unique, but it does put me in a relatively rarefied subset of humanity.

Also, my Mother was an English teacher. I still use the Oxford comma. Get over it. It's the right way to write.

The next decade of my life subjected me to the whirlwind explosion of the personal computing world, and as I learned new computer skills and continuously upgraded my computer hardware mass adoption by the public was slowly coming to be a reality. I went from a VIC20 to a Commodore64, added floppy drives, and ultimately an acoustic coupler that you physically docked your land line rotary dial phone into in order to participate in online bulletin boards to share code and programming ideas. WAAAAAAAAY pre-Internet. Pre dial-up.

As the rate of progression in the computing industry accelerated, so did the rate of communication between computers. My own evolution kept pace with the bleeding edge of the wave, until in 1998 I found myself working for a small company delivering fiber optic Internet services direct to homes and businesses. Consider that this was at a time when about 90% of the population in the United States still used dial up Internet services, and about half of them were using AOL. Remember AOL? "You've Got Mail?"

The standard 'high speed' connection at the time was an ISDN line running at 128Kbps. If you were REALLY lucky, and lived within 7,250 feet of your telephone company's closest DSL node (DSLAM), you might have been able to buy synchronous DSL Internet service at 256Kbps. It was really expensive. Like, hundreds of dollars a month expensive. Cable Internet didn't even exist.

In the middle of all this, I was delivering fiber optic services straight to people's homes at 1.44MB/s. By today's standards that's slow as snot, but at the time it put us on the cutting edge of technology.

In 1998 I came across a proposal on a dark corner of the infant Internet by a guy named Wei Dai where he put forth the idea of a digital currency called 'b-money'. Shortly after that a man named Nick Szabo built on that framework and issued a digital currency called Bit-gold, which was the first digital currency that implemented a 'Proof of Work' concept. The groundwork laid in these days is what has ultimately evolved today into Bitcoin and eventually spawned all the other 1,000+ cryptocurrencies being traded in the new digital economy.

I'm getting ahead of myself. And yes, I've actually had personal conversations with Mr. Szabo. He wouldn't remember it, as it was ages ago, but I was there. At the very genesis of crypto.

I gradually migrated away from the programming side of computers and focused on the application end of the computer revolution. In 2000 I opened one of the very first VoIP companies to ever exist and I was offering flat rate $25 a month long distance calling anywhere in the USA at a time when the big telcos were still trying to get people's attention by offering long distance calls at 13 cents per minute instead of 15. Yes, you young'uns... calling long distance used to cost real money :)

By 2002 Cable Internet had become a reality and I helped companies integrate high speed data connections into their evolving networks.

By the time 2009 rolled around I was implementing smart home technology into people's daily lives, and they could run all the systems of their home from a smart phone, including lights, entertainment systems, heating and cooling, and even small appliances.

Meanwhile, computing technology had evolved at an exponential rate. In 2010, the smart phone in my pocket was somewhere around four quadrillion times more powerful than that VIC20 computer that I wrote my first program on in my parent's basement. Four QUADRILLION. Trust me. I did the math.

In 2010 I came across a new digital currency called 'BitCoin' in a white paper written by a guy named 'Satoshi Nakamoto.' After a little bit of research I discovered that this was something that a small community of people was working together on, and that there were even some transactions being made outside of the traditional financial infrastructure.

Intrigued by concept, I actually purchased 30 BitCoin from a random person on the Internet for $10.00 US. I then proved the market concept by using that 30 BitCoin to purchase a FarSide T-shirt. It had a picture of two guys, in the middle of the desert, next to a camel. One of the guys was looking in the other guy's eye and the text below the cartoon said, "Yep. You got something in your eye. Might be sand."

30 BTC for a t-shirt. I wish I still had that shirt. I'd frame it and put it on my wall to remind me of what is possible in this world. That shirt was ultimately either donated to Salvation Army or sold at a garage sale. It humors me to think that there is a person out there wearing my old FarSide t-shirt that was paid for with the equivalent of a half a MILLION dollars in today's valuation.

I remember thinking to myself at the time, “Hey self. This might be a thing someday. You should buy $100 worth of Bitcoin and see what it's worth in five or ten years.” I even found some Bitcoin that I could buy. At $0.31 each it seemed pretty darn expensive to me. My hundred dollars would only buy me roughly 325 Bitcoins. $100 was a lot of money to our family at that time, so ultimately I decided not to buy that Bitcoin.

At this point we should just fast forward about seven years. In the interim I've been an entrepreneur. I've traveled the US in a converted greyhound bus for three years with my family. We've produced and directed theatrical productions, run a successful YouTube channel, and traveled the Caribbean on a sailboat for over a year. We tend to get around.

In July of this year, we hung up the sailing vagabond life and hit land again for the foreseeable future. We of course didn't own a car. Who needs a car when you live on a sailboat? So task one was to buy a car. I hired an UBER driver to take me to a car lot, and along the way we talked. Turns out that he was doing UBER as a side job. His primary profession that he was in the process of growing? Bitcoin mining. And not just Bitcoin. Turns out that while I was gone from society in the Caribbean that a whole slew of other cryptos had come along. When I asked him if Bitcoin was still around, he said, "Man, where have you been? Bitcoin is worth $2,480 as of this morning."

That was enough for me.

I decided then an there that I wouldn't let this opportunity pass me by a second time.

Fast forward again.

I've now been actively trading cryptocurrencies full time for four months. I've managed to grow my initial investment by about 1,200% in that time. That's a pretty good rate of return, and it's now my full time occupation.

Along the way, I found #STEEM and the underlying #steemit infrastructure. I immediately knew it was something that @byn would be extremely well suited for, so I turned her onto it pronto. I think that eventually I'll be a valuable contributor to steemit as well. It's taken me some time to find my legs here, and I think I'm ready to contribute.

In the coming days, weeks, and months you can expect posts from me about cryptocurrencies in general. Investment strategies, my thoughts on specific cryptos, ramblings about the macro forces at work, and an occasional tidbit in the creative sphere.

I hope to be a valuable addition to the #steemit community. Feel free to ask questions in the comments. Otherwise, thanks for having me. It's nice to be here, on the cusp of technological evolution, where I'm most comfortable!