My Bitcoin Cash Journey: Chapter 2

[continued from Chapter 1]

On November 11, 2017, I went out to dinner with my family to celebrate my birthday. By the end of the night, I was sitting alone in my living room, logged onto Bittrex, learning first hand what it means to panic buy and sell.

I don't want to bore you with trading stories, of all my stupid mistakes and the huge gainz I coulda had, but I'll just say in all my years of gambling, I've never experienced anything like that night. There was so much volume on the exchange that it kept freezing. When it wasn't freezing, I watched the trades in real time like I was looking at the matrix. Numbers just kept refreshing on the screen in waves. BTC was crashing while BCH kept rising. People said it was Roger selling his coins. People said he had 300,000 BTC. I've heard it was the Koreans riding a whale's coattails. But like I said, there's really no point talking about that now.

What I do want to highlight is that on that night, BCH/BTC reached an all time high of roughly .43 and nobody knew what the hell was happening. Was BTC going to die? Was BCH going to take the crown? When BCH flipped Ethereum to briefly take the #2 position on Coinmarketcap, Vitalik Buterin himself tweeted congratulations to Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, and Amaury Sechet. It wasn't a snarky tweet. He was congratulating them, seriously.

I remember the following Monday, I was walking out of my office building for lunch when I overheard a random stranger outside telling his friend about exactly what I'd gone through two nights before. I almost wanted to jump in and say I'd had the same experience, but I didn't.

During that time everybody seemed to be talking about bitcoin. Every function I attended, there would always be at least one or two people that would bring it up. Inevitably some no coiner would jump in and ask if it was too late to buy. Nobody knew.

That same weekend, the below video was streamed and suddenly people started talking about something called Operation Dragonslayer:

The man being interviewed is Rob Danielson, co-founder of Rocketr and creator of tipprbot. If you look closely, you'll see on the whiteboard behind him the following:

11/8 - Cancel segwit 2x

11/13 - BCH DAA HF

11/16 - Fork(Fake??) "Segwit 2x"

11/24 - Slush joins BCH

11/25 - Operation dragonslayer

???? - Segwit compatible ASIC boost

BTC = BCH

People started talking about this on Twitter and Reddit. People were paying money to read posts on a site called Yours.org with details about Operation Dragonslayer. Though the flippening had failed, it was rumored that it was just a practice run. Operation Dragonslayer was the real thing. But in reality it was all just a clever joke made up by Rob and his friends. I know this because he told me.

Speaking of Yours.org, I need to mention that it played a big part in my Bitcoin Cash journey. It was the end of November when I signed up for an account. I was wanting to learn more about Bitcoin Cash, and I had discovered these articles posted there. But the posts were hidden behind paywalls so I had to send a little BCH from my exchange account to my Yours.org account. Up to that point, the only other bitcoin transactions I'd ever made was from my exchange to a paper wallet, then back to the exchange. Since paper wallets are inert, and deposits to my exchange required six confirmations, it wasn't until that deposit into Yours that I first understood why they call it magic internet money.

When I saw my BCH instantly appear as my account suddenly went from $0.00 to $5.00, I was blown away. It was bitcoin as it was meant to be, instant transactions with low fees, and I finally understood what gave bitcoin value.

It was exciting discovering something new. I tried to tell other people about Bitcoin Cash and Yours.org but no one was interested. Everyone I talked to thought Bitcoin Cash was a scam. Or they argued that when institutional money came in, they would only be buying BTC, not BCH. Predictably, the conversations in late 2017 were always about price, nothing else.

Looking back, at that point I was just another moonboy, except I had chosen BCH as my rocket ship of choice rather than BTC. All I cared about was making money, and looking like a genius for seeing what others did not. I wanted to be right, to be able to say to everyone else, I told you so. When Coinbase listed BCH at the end of December, I thought it was the moment I'd been waiting for as BCH reached its all time USD high of $4,000. But the moment was shortlived as the entire cryptocurrency market started to crash right after.

Around that time is when I first started to participate in the Bitcoin Cash community. I revived an old Twitter account I never used, started posting articles on Yours.org, and in late January 2018, I created a Reddit account.

I remember watching every presentation of the Satoshi's Vision conference in March of 2018. I'd be up in the early morning hours watching the live streams coming out of Tokyo. I even wrote an article on Yours.org summarizing what I thought were the best ones. (Don’t bother looking for it now. I deleted all my Yours.org posts after they went BSV.)

To be honest, I probably only understood a fraction of what I watched. But I still found it fascinating. I signed up for a Discord account and started chatting with people in the Bitcoin Cash Association (formerly the Bitcoin Cash Foundation) channel. I had tons of questions, but there were plenty of people there to answer them for me. There was a penguin named zquestz, another penguin named acidsploit, a whale named checksum0, a cat named wecx, and this green QR code that went by the name of imaginary_username.

to be continued...