Hello, Steemit!

Since I've been keeping a low profile lately compared to my blogging days, I guess I should write an introduction.

I was lucky enough to grow up in Silicon Valley. I graduated high school right at the beginning of the Dot-Com boom, so after a brief flirtation with community college with vague plans to transfer to a four year school, I dropped out to work for one of the first nationwide ISPs, Netcom. After working in technical support and then network operations, I did consulting for several years, mostly around Solaris, Linux, and networking. Eventually I started programming full time after having done it as a hobby since grade school, but then I got pulled back a little bit toward the operational side with SRE and then SRE management roles at Linden Lab, Facebook, and now Google. If you care, you can see the nitty-gritty details of my professional background on my Linkedin profile.

On the politics, cryptocurrency, and writing side of things, I used to write for a community blog called Catallarchy, now The Distributed Republic. After Facebook and other centralized platforms killed community blogs, I started a personal blog on Tumblr, where I even wrote Bitcoin's first ever obituary according to 99bitcoins.com. If you know of an earlier one, please let them know, because it's embarrassing! At least I'd changed my mind on Bitcoin by the time the second obituary was written.

I've been interested in cryptocurrencies since before Bitcoin existed, but I had thought a cryptocurrency had to be something like Chaumian e-cash (backed by physical gold or silver, of course) or perhaps a decentralized version of RipplePay. The key insight that had to be pointed out to me by a friend is that the ability to exchange an asset securely online without a trusted third party actually qualifies as a form of intrinsic value. In other words, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are "backed" by their network. Not really worse than fiat currencies, since the ability of governments to tax ends up being mostly offset by the fact that they abuse their power to create new money out of thin air as much as they can get away with and often more.

The idea that economics was boring and useless was drilled into my head by my high school economics teacher. But then a friend loaned me Milton & Rose Friedman's Free to Choose, Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, Callahan's Economics for Real People, and most importantly David D. Friedman's Machinery of Freedom in the early 2000s. I was already a libertarian by that time after a neverending series of disappointments from the two mainstream political parties, but it wasn't until I learned a bit more about economics that I could really reason or argue coherently for a libertarian position. These days I'd categorize myself more as a voluntaryist or crypto-anarchist.

My goal with this blog is to start expanding my network beyond my circle of (fantastic) Facebook friends and hopefully learn and share knowledge on a better platform than Facebook. I also want to learn by doing: Steemit is a new platform implementing a new paradigm in an emerging space, and I am really excited to see where it goes.