Attorney, gambler, businessman, and soon to be former steem-ian

It occurs to me that ive never written a proper introduction post... I guess this is as good a time as any, since im about to leave.

My name is Jason. Understanding systems, and how complicated things work together, is my talent. Im not going to post a picture of myself. I had some stalking and harassment issues, and i don't want to add to that. Also, there are a lot of people that might target me if they recognized who i was from my description and could put a face to a name... Overall, its just a bad idea. I actually had to re-activate my FB account just to sign up.

That said, i assure you that I am a hot, 20-something female with breasts of extraordinary quality and size. Just kidding. Im a 40 year old guy (with man boobs of extraordinary quality and size)... im ugly as sin, so you really don't want a picture. Im not kidding. i actually have to roofie myself before i beat off.

but for eye candy, here's a pic of my dog Yoshi, and a model i met at the D.

Here's the long and short of my story. Everyone always told me what a good lawyer I'd make. I was a precise thinker, intelligent, and a fantastic debater. I wanted to be a criminal lawyer. I wanted to defend people in court. Even before i started my undergrad degree, i knew what i wanted to be.

In 2002, as an undergrad at WVU, i discovered online poker. It was just starting to be a big fad back then, and I got in at the bottom floor as both a player and an advertiser/affiliate. I made enough money so that i could eventually quit my part time job and put myself through school just playing poker.

I got my BA. I got 176 on the LSATS. I got into law school at ASU. I graduated law school (the sandra day oconnor school of law at ASU), got a job, and realized the practice of law was the worst. You know the part in The Wall, during ABITW2, when all the kids in the horrified face masks are marching toward the meat grinder. That's what it felt like to me... and yeah, I get that that's already an analogy for a different institution, so its a little tired... but thats what it felt like to me. An assembly line for human misery.

Its kind of rough -- when you work really hard to get something, and you then you have to admit yourself that it isnt what you wanted. I think a normal person... someone more well adjusted than I am, would have learned to love it, or at least learned not to hate it. Or at least learned to hate it but deal with the hate some other way than walking away.

I decided to quit the practice of law after less than a year, and return to poker. I had long since realized that i was a good poker player.... very good. But i would never be great. I was in the top 1%, with no hope of being the top 1% of the top 1%. I lacked a certain type of instinct. Even as a good-but-not-great player, i managed to keep the bills mostly paid and even did pretty well. What kept me from being great? I had the intellect, and the analytical ability. I had even, with great practice, learned to turn off my instinct for adaptive learning. But there was a part of me. A corner that was too adverse to risk in certain situations. I tended to be too protective of my gains. I would push an edge so far, then stop. IDK why. Like flopsy, i was just made like that.

I moved to beautiful las vegas, so that i could split my time between live and online poker. I rented a nice condo a few blocks from the strip and lived a good life. I still live in the vegas area today, in a suburb called Summerlin.

Now, at the time, the legal status of online poker in the US was... complicated. This was mostly during the time between the passage of the "Unlawful internet gaming act" in 2007 and Black Friday in 2011. During most of this time, it was hard to get money on to the major poker sites and even harder to get it out. Like i said, though. I understand systems. I was able to figure out methods to help people get money on and off. I made a lot of underground connections to help me move money. As time went on, i started moving more and more money for more and more people. It eventually started to make me more than actually playing did.

During this time period, the two main online poker sites were pokerstars and full tilt poker. On april 15th 2011, people going to those sites saw this

Unless you were there... unless you played a lot of online poker and had come to think about these sites like bluechip parts of your daily life, i can't really explain the feeling that this evoked. Steemit's too new, but imagine if you tried to log on to twitter or facebook or coinbase and saw that. Except imagine if most of your friends had most of their net worth on facebook and twitter. Thats when i realized that "holy fuck, theyre everywhere".... thats when i started to believe that the real meaning of freedom in the US was the freedom that the government allows you to have.

As an interesting bit of trivia to these dates, I have always suspected that Satoshi Nakamoto came from the online poker world. His first post came days before the UIGEA rule solidification in november 2008. Just based on what I've read, it seems as though he started work in summer of 2008, which was when Epassporte, the last bastion of easy cash liquidity for US poker players, went down. And more importantly, his last public post came just a couple weeks after Black Friday.

BY the time black friday happened, bitcoin was already a thing. But it would be years before i (or most other people int he industry) learned about it. If adoption had come a bit faster, it could probably have saved online poker. At that time, you were stuck using liberty reserve and lol webmoney. The were both insanely complicated and difficult to turn back and forth to real money. Thats what kills me... BTC was like a year too late to save online poker.

Black Friday was a complete disaster for most US poker players, but it was a complete windfall for me. I set up a business allowing people to play online poker from the US through VPN's. I made a ton of money, and a ton of overseas connections. After about a year, in 2012, i sold the my business to an investor (for a huge sum) and walked away. At the time, i had about 250 clients paying me around 300 a month for access. About 95% of that was profit.

It was shortly after that, in the summer of 2012 with my pockets running over that i discovered bitcion. I put almost 40K in bitcoin when it cost around $6 per coin. I cashed out at just over $900 a coin, for a total profit of over $5M.

I wish.

A year or so later, when the price went up to 140-something then quickly back down into the 70s, i decided it was too unstable. Fun is fun, but done is done. I was done. I sold about half my coin at 70-something a coin and the other half at around 90-something a few weeks later. I felt like the "natural price" for a bitcoin was $10, and that any increase beyond that was simply a bubble. My intention was to buy back in if it looked like a major trough was in effect. More the fool I was, i guess. WHat can i say... it was the same adversity to risk that hindered me when a played poker...
this is when i sold:

and this is the long view like 6 months later

BTC had come too late to save online poker, but i realized its potential... what it could do for people who needed to get money in and out of the country. I still had a lot of offshore contacts from my days getting poker players set up, so I started to make some inquiries. I would eventually start a law firm specializing in setting up foriegn corporations to do business in the US. You know all those hoverboards that got pulled off the market because they were exploding? I was the guy that got most of them into the country and on store shelves. I know i know it wasnt my finest hour... but tbh most of them were OK. Its just a couple of bad apples.

In a lot of ways this new practice was kind of a synthesis for me. A coming together of all my parts. I don't know if im the type of person who could ever really like love his job... but i provide a service that most can't, im in high demand, and i get to set my own hours... thats something i guess. And even though im a name partner in the firm, at this point i barely handle any clients myself... most of my contribution is from the customers i've brought in and the connections i have. There are other people that handle the day to day of things.

Right before Jul 4th, i heard about steemit and steem. It was the first thing i had heard about in a long time that i really thought was interesting, that i thought really had a potential to have an impack on the world.

I decided to buy about 15K worth at $40 cents. I got about 2/3 of my initial investment out at around 4.55, for a profit of just under 100K. My last 5500 steem I had planned to sell at $2 or $10, whichever came first. Im feeling at this point like im just gonna dump it now, and move on. Its turned out to be a huge disappointment. Thats actually pretty rare for me. I can usually cut through the chaff and see things for what they

TOday i woke up and found that everything I post was targeted by downvote bots, most likely controlled by the whale running wang. I also found trading was once again suspended on bittrex. The front page is innundated with posts about how the huge disparity in voting is a good thing, voted up by those who benefit form it. No, i don't expect to make a lot of money with my posts, but it just seems pretty shitty to me that being honest, not being a mindless cheerleeder, targets you for attack. Because i questioned the powers that be? Is that really a system that you think will appeal to people.

Originally, i saw something with real potential. I actually had a website set up to buy and sell steem, and to send and recieve PM's that I was going to host on my own dime. Now, I just see 90 different things that make this look like a scam.
You can tell that the market is reacting to the scammy front page, the low quality posts, and the serious issues with the currency. The price is in a controlled slide now (and its been there since the hack), but you can see it moving towards free fall.

On the bright side, its not everyday that you make 100K from something that turns out to be a huge disappointment. Maybe it sounds crazy that i though ti would get so much more out of steem. Basically, im down on the whole thing. Someone talk me outta giving up on this.

(this is about half what i got selling off my first batch of steem. the rest is in btc still)