by Dan Conway
This was also the only time I fully let myself fathom what I’d done, how much of our future I’d bet on this thing that I’d only recently discovered. Going into debt by $200,000 was an absolutely reckless, insane thing to do. Even on r/EthTrader, filled with Pollyannas and true believers, I’d never heard of anyone going this big. Not even close. And in my real life, I hadn’t ever heard of anyone, anywhere, who’d done something so crazy. I was a massive outlier. At most times, this just made me excited. But as we settled into our dinner routine, Eileen a bit quieter than usual, there was now an edge to my excitement.
Chapter Nineteen
A New Year
A few days after Christmas 2016, Eileen and the kids headed to North Andover, Massachusetts, to visit her family for a week. That was impeccable timing, because I was able to attend the Blockchain Fintech Summit down the road in San Jose on January 3, 2017, without any normal-person obligations. The Summit was vaguely sponsored by the Chinese government, which was interested in crypto and had recently been showing up everywhere.
I had trouble sleeping those first days of 2017. I couldn’t pull myself off crypto Twitter, r/EthTrader and Coindesk until late into the evening. I’d pop up a few hours later, wanting to get back online.
I parked my banged-up minivan with the dented passenger door on the roof parking lot of the San Jose Convention Center and sprinted fifty yards through the heaviest rainstorm I could remember. This was the first of three “atmospheric rivers” to drench Northern California that month. If these insane rains were an omen, I didn’t know if I was doomed or blessed. I was now so immersed in the crypto world that I was flipping like a weather vane with speculation about the future, both hopeful and skeptical.
There in the distance, talking to a crowd of Chinese provincial bureaucrats, was a kindred spirit and one of my heroes, Andrew Keys, the chief evangelist of ConsenSys in Brooklyn. I’d heard him interviewed on a bunch of podcasts. I was a big fan of his company.
For an ETH freak like me, ConsenSys was the hippest, edgiest, most profoundly cool company in the world. They called themselves an Ethereum Production Studio, and they ran the company as a holacracy, meaning it was structured as a flat organization, unlike a traditional corporation. Its founder, Joseph Lubin, was an early disciple of Ethereum and a mentor to Vitalik on the business side. He was a co-founder who helped Vitalik get the word out and attract developers to Ethereum after it launched in 2015.
As a professional prophet, Keys traveled the world, extolling the virtues of Ethereum. Now I was with him as he talked to this group of squares in suits and ties. He was sweating and effusive, sharing the gospel, telling them how Ethereum would change everything, doling out proof points like a street-corner preacher: warehouses full of developers in the Philippines, a major recording artist interested in the Ethereum-based music dApp Ujo, big corporations quietly turning to Ethereum in an effort to become more flat. Halle—fucking—lujah. This was my dream scenario for this conference. I didn’t want to hear about Guangdong Province’s leadership in some bullshit state-sponsored attempt by the Chinese government to monopolize blockchain. I wanted to hear how fully decentralized Ethereum was going to take over the world.
Finally Andrew had to leave, but before he did, I got my two minutes. I confessed my story, how I’d left Acme, how I was committed to Ethereum, how my mission was to do PR for crypto projects and advance decentralization. And could he arrange an interview at ConsenSys for me to be considered for work as a PR consultant? “Yes, brother,” he said. “I’ll hook you up.”
I met other brothers and sisters that day. We were members of the crypto diaspora. We spoke in shorthand about our mental condition, investments, and plans to somehow work in crypto full time. At lunch I sat down with a group of Indian tech guys, and we just bonded and blathered on. We’d all glimpsed something that most other people hadn’t seen, and we were comfortable speaking about it in each other’s presence.
Finding crypto isn’t like joining a new company and sending a polite little fart of an update to your LinkedIn connections. It is a civil disturbance. It is a whole new belief system. That’s why asking someone when they went down the rabbit hole is like asking them when they found God. It is a full religious conversion, not a lateral move.
Once the seed germinates, Ethereum in particular doesn’t let you go. Before long, it is impossible to get excited about anything in the traditional economy. The Ethereum Vampire Effect (EVE) is real. Once you get it, all you want to do is suck the blood out of every centralized entity that crosses your path.
Magical thinking aside, I still had to make money in the traditional economy, and that meant revisiting the ghosts of my Acme execution in the form of the public relations firm Acme set me up with to secure my departure. Even though I wanted to say goodbye to the world of lobbyists and public relations-types who’d rejected me, I still had to pay the bills. Revenue from BitGo, my one crypto client, wasn’t enough. Plus, we now had to buy our own health insurance, which cost $2,400 per month. And, of course, there were the extravagant family vacations I’d agreed to in return for being allowed to put everything we had, plus $200,000 of debt, into ETH. The monthly payment on that debt ensured I wouldn’t forget.
I needed this Acme-assisted account for the money, even though it provided an unpleasant glimpse of my miserable future if crypto didn’t turn out to be a viable career path. I reported to two people during my service, initially a woman who was smart and considered me an ally in firm dynamics, which I had no interest in. Then, when she left, an ambitious mid-level man on the rise who had little regard for me, not necessarily because he was an asshole, but because I was of no consequence. A forty-five-year-old corporate cast-off was of little use to an ambitious up-and-comer. I know, I’m a bitter old man. Maybe I’m ageist because I don’t want to be reporting to someone twenty years younger than me. But I don’t want to.
After editing a simple document for one of their clients several times in an attempt to manage competing visions of the project, I knew the dystopia that awaited if crypto dried up. We’d lose our investment and my crypto clients. Then I’d become a resume-carrying member of the Weird Old Fuckers Club I pitied back at Acme. I’d have to learn to brownnose junior staffers and get used to being kicked around by younger animals who didn’t respect freaky old silverbacks who never made alpha.
So to say I was excited about my upcoming video interview with ConsenSys would be an understatement. I wanted another big-name crypto client, and I wanted something squarely in the Ethereum world. I also needed the money.
Andrew was true to his word and hooked me up with someone at ConsenSys HQ. We agreed on a time for a video conference.
Like pretty much everyone in my professional world, it seemed, this person was in their mid-twenties. I found a local newspaper clip of them starring on their high school lacrosse team around the same time I became concerned my pee stream was weakening. But hey, crypto transcended barriers. A person’s passion for it was more important than age, I thought.
I got myself all dolled up in a collared shirt and sat on our upstairs couch with the blue-painted wall as background, waiting for our video conference. The agreed-upon time came and went. I still sat there, now with a forlorn look on my face. Poor old bastard.
I emailed them. They referenced some confusion about the time. Ok, shit happens. I’m sure they were busy. The important thing was that we ended up connecting. We set a new time, and, like Groundhog Day, I was ready to flash my prettiest smile in my best collared shirt, sitting on the couch in front of the perfect blue background. This time, they joined as scheduled. Briefly.
As our likenesses came into focus, we took a look at each other. Then we said hello. I was just about to launch into my spiel when they said, “Oh, shoot, I just realized that I have another appointment I need to be at. Dan, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to reschedule.”
I stared on, the hurt eyes of a man picked last at kickball by his own brother. “No problem.”<
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I was outraged and crushed. I wondered if I was fooling myself that I could make a living in crypto. Was I delusional? Since I’d won BitGo as a client, I’d been optimistic. But maybe it was a fluke. A troubling possibility I tried not to think about.
As January turned to February 2017, life continued with its normal pace and family obligations. Each day was a routine mix of making snacks, driving the kids to after-school activities and sports practices and paying bills. Lots of bills. There were tutors, speech therapists, new winter coats, and dental visits with no insurance, to name a few.
When I told Eileen that we needed to be careful with spending, she assured me that we were spending the bare minimum. I didn’t have the will to fight about it, especially since I didn’t want to shine a light on the fact that our ETH was still significantly underwater. Plus the blood oath I had sworn, which allowed me to gamble our entire future in the first place, restricted me from complaining about the high cost of our upcoming trips. Like the drunk and the girl in Leaving Las Vegas, we’d get along fine as long as neither of us acknowledged the elephant in the room: we were on our way to financial ruin.
Chapter Twenty
Spring Fever
The first stop in our Kamikaze Live While You Can World Tour was Puerto Vallarta during the February 2017 school break. Unfortunately, we picked a terrible resort in a beautiful location. The food was decorative yet disgusting. A typical dish was a radish filled with mayonnaise-y sauce, wrapped in a wilted piece of spinach, poked with a toothpick. A whole platter full. Right next to stew meat labeled “filet mignon.”
The sun was getting to me, so I left the pool and went back to the room for a break. I was trying to stay away from my phone, because the price of ETH was depressing, and I could easily lose several hours on r/EthTrader if I wasn’t careful. But I couldn’t help myself—I never could—so I checked.
ETH was going up. My crypto app animated the price in real time. Sell orders were quickly gobbled up by buy orders, which made the price flash green rather than red. What had previously been a red flame of hell was now lighting up like a Christmas tree. This was amazing. I kept watching, and it kept going up, passing $13.50 on February 25th.
Just like that, our investment had gone from being way down to up $60,000. I pulled myself away from my phone and briskly walked back to the pool. Eileen asked me where I’d been. I told her that our ETH investment was in the black, and we’d made enough money to pay for our vacations (not quite, but I wanted to make a point).
The rest of that trip was a blur of disgusting food, sunburns, and ETH ascending. Every time I checked my phone, the price was higher. The restaurants didn’t have good WiFi, so I didn’t bring my phone to dinner. Invariably, when we got back to the room a couple of hours later, we were up thousands of dollars.
For months, I’d tried to convince myself that the crashing ETH price was only a paper loss and that the flashing red numbers on my phone weren’t important, even though they represented the verdict on the biggest bet of my life. I had been telling myself that we were in the long game, even if that was only partially true. Now that momentum was turning in my favor, at least for the time being, cognitive dissonance made it hard to believe it was real. Deep down, I’d had the strongest conviction I’d ever had that ETH would pay off, but watching it rise like a phoenix before my eyes was like seeing Santa Claus in the flesh.
The r/EthTrader boards were starting to pop. Every hour, it seemed, a hundred new people joined. These were noobs who were hoping to jump on right before the rocket ship took off. We welcomed them—we welcomed everybody—and we noticed that the trolls had gone away. The short sellers and haters who piled on the FUD in a bear market disappeared in a puff of black smoke the moment the price went up.
I couldn’t fully participate in the delirium because I was still in Mexico. But I was keeping close tabs. Eileen quickly decided she didn’t give a shit about this magic money if it meant the rest of our family vacation focused around me relating snippets of something Vitalik said or a prediction of future riches based on the analysis of a fellow r/EthTrader.
I’d volunteer to go to the gift shop and buy the bottled water. I’d offer to go down to the lobby and make dinner reservations for our next disgusting meal. It usually took me longer than expected, though, because I’d buy a pack of Marlboro Reds. I don’t smoke. I’d have a cigarette while walking around that crappy resort with the million-dollar views. I couldn’t help feeling like I was in a Polo ad, that this might be my life if the price kept rising like I thought it would. I’d be in linen and thousand-dollar shades, rich as hell.
On our last day, I ordered fajitas from a self-service buffet. The handles of the spoons used to scoop raw ingredients were sticky with chicken juice. I woke up at two a.m., foaming at the mouth like a dying animal. I couldn’t stop puking. It was so bad that I took a taxi into downtown Puerto Vallarta in the middle of the night to buy Dramamine. None of it mattered. I distinctly remember trying not to puke, looking down at my phone and watching ETH surpass $14, a big psychological barrier at the time. We were up $75,000. My body was sick, but my soul was dancing. What I thought would happen with Ethereum might just be happening.
Ironically, the catalyst for this price rise was a sudden interest in Ethereum from corporations, governments, and other centralized institutions. Back in New York, they’d announced a new organization, spearheaded by Ethereum veterans, called the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. There were thirty-five initial members, including some of the largest corporations in the world: Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, and British Petroleum. Over a day-long webcast conference at the J.P. Morgan office, they expressed their belief in Ethereum and sketched out working groups to aid development and interoperability with private chains. This is the thing Andrew Keys had hinted at in San Jose. The markets were responding. Blockchain might actually work, and Ethereum might actually be the winning platform.
There was a flurry of mainstream press. Most articles were similar to the one in Fortune (“Big Business Giants from J.P. Morgan to Microsoft are Getting Behind Ethereum”), which described how corporations were starting to recognize the cost savings and efficiencies Ethereum made possible. But it wasn’t punk rock. They intended to take the guts of the blockchain and discard its decentralized soul. This would allow them to retain control and set the rules, creating private chains. While these private chains might someday be connected to the uncurated public Ethereum chain, my feeling then and now is that they are underestimating the power of this movement. Corporations aren’t going to be able to control the path of disruption when blockchain really takes off. They are going to be extremely uncomfortable at some point in the future. But at that moment, God bless them, their interest was legitimizing Ethereum in a big way.
Our taxi arrived at the Puerto Vallarta airport, and a hot blast of air hit me as I opened the door and prepared for the travel ordeal ahead. I willed myself to check the price, even though I felt like I might pass out. ETH was at $15.50. We were up more than $100,000.
It scared me that this might just be the beginning. We had so much invested that even a small rise was big money. There was a pit in my stomach that told me something much bigger could happen, and it might change our lives. Was I ready for that? Was this real? Was this investment going to alter space and time, like in Back to the Future?
This wasn’t supposed to be happening to me. And while it made me nervous, it felt so damn good. But it was new territory, and I needed a new way to cope. The mental tools I’d used to grit my way through my career, and also since betting big on crypto after losing my job—self-deprecation, an ability to grind, and a burning resentment at the man—were inadequate for helping me process this new feeling.
Flip Side would usually sabotage me at this point, even though he sent me down this path. He ruled through impulse fuck-ups. But now the die was cast, and he was unable to stop it.
As I suffered in line while we waited to get on the plane home from Mexico, ETH kept goin
g. It was a beautiful girl who’d fallen in love with me. When I rubbed my eyes, her sweet smile was always there to greet me. I was sick as a dog, extremely dehydrated. I refused to talk to airport personnel or anyone in line. A group of nice older ladies next to us were all jazzed up about their trip. They struck up a conversation with Eileen as we waited for customs. I avoided them all until I needed to hand something to Eileen. The ladies were shocked and disgusted. They whispered, “He’s with you?”
I was sick. I didn’t want to puke, and I didn’t know if I could survive my headache with all of the delays on each end of international travel. But I was also shedding something on that flight. That failed professional was saying goodbye—at least for awhile—because all evidence, for the time being, pointed to my having made a very good move.
When I finally recovered a few days later, ETH hadn’t slowed down. On March 4, 2017, as I lay on the couch drinking Gatorade and binge-watching Narcos on Netflix, I was feeling damned good.
On March 11, ETH passed $20. We were up more than $200,000.
This was life-changing. If ETH just held, we’d be ok. I kept playing with the idea of having that amount of money at my disposal. It could pay for college for at least one, maybe two of the kids. If everything just stopped right there and I cashed out, I’d consider this the greatest professional thing I’d ever done.
But that wasn’t the goal. We were going all the way, wherever that led.