Hello everyone!
My name is Mark. I strangely first heard of bitcoin only in 2017, right before the bull-run that really took off that summer. The incredible price pumps led me to try and understand what was happening, and like most, I came across videos from Andreas Antonopoulos and other thought leaders, of which Ivan is probably part of. It was mostly Andreas who made me realize all of this wasn’t a giant Ponzi scheme as one might at first suspect, but something truly revolutionary.
I felt stupid watching prices skyrocket, while waiting to buy during a correction which never seemed to come. We finally made our first bitcoin purchase in the spring of 2018 after a giant correction when we hoped the price was on its way to bottoming. Hindsight is of course 20-20, but most projects we dollar cost-averaged into that year melted away, especially those in what Ivan calls exotic assets.
In early 2019, almost exactly when bitcoin finally bottomed, we bought mining equipment which was mostly being liquidated at that time. I felt confident hosting the miners with a Russian company as my wife had ties with the owner. Unfortunately, in the early summer, all miners were stolen in what now seems to have been an exit scam. I spent most of the rest of that summer visiting Siberia and meeting with different companies, along with seeking legal assistance.
As of today, the situation with this company is going through the Russian court system, although it is likely we won’t recover much, if anything, as this company is simply operating using a different legal name, and probably has transferred most of its assets. We do have a few miners with the largest mining facility I visited in Siberia though, and so far the level of professionalism isn’t comparable. I can help if anyone is interested in this field, although I honestly would recommend staying away from it at the present moment for many reasons (lack of legal clarity in Russia, high mining difficulty and ROIs for miners well beyond the halving etc.)
Over these last two years, I’ve learned so much thanks to books like The bitcoin standard by Ammous, or subscription to newsletters like the Dollar / Crypto vigilante. Although I haven’t been able to make the complete conversion to bitcoin maximalism, I really do think decentralised private currencies will actually save lives (and probably already are in places like Venezuela) in a crazy world of global monetary inflation and negative interest rates. I’ve been a fan of Ron Paul since 2007 and am very sympathetic to the Austrian school of Economics.
In 2020 it’s time to take the next step and dive a little deeper in the inner-workings of this fascinating technology.
If you liked this introduction, smash that heart! 
