My Bitcoin Cash Journey: Chapter 3
Fomo might have been what got me into bitcoin, but it was the technology that kept me interested. As I mentioned before, only after making my first real bitcoin transaction did I begin to understand why people were excited by what Satoshi Nakamoto created. In fact, I was so excited to share my new discovery with the world that I recorded a video showing Bitcoin Cash being sent from a Cointext wallet, to the Bitcoin.com wallet, to my Yours.org account. I was convinced that if people could see for themselves how bitcoin was supposed to work, they'd understand why it was called magic internet money to begin with. I shared the video on Youtube and Twitter, and within days had gotten thousands of views.
Despite my enthusiasm, I still knew very little about how bitcoin worked at this point in my journey. I tried to learn on my own, but not having a technical background, I found it difficult to decipher. Only after joining the BCA discord and asking many questions did it start to make more sense.
Besides getting my questions answered, the BCA discord also provided me with something else perhaps even more valuable. It gave me an opportunity to communicate with people from all around the world who shared an interest in peer to peer electronic cash. My impression of almost everyone I interacted with was positive. They were passionate, generous with their time, open-minded, and most of all, intelligent. It gave me more confidence that I was investing my energy and money into something worthwhile. Had everyone I encountered only talked to me about hodling to the moon and lambos, this would not have been the case.
Of the people I talked to in the Spring and Summer of 2018, no one answered more of my questions than the aforementioned imaginary_username. I had no idea who this person was, but he knew so much about how bitcoin worked, that it was hard not to be impressed. Naturally, I asked him what he thought the price of BCH could reach in the future, and his answer wasn't what I expected. Instead of giving me a number, he said that his investment in BCH was more for ideological reasons than anything else. I didn't get it at the time. When I invest in stocks like FB, AMZN, NFLX, etc., I could care less about their ideologies. I just want to make a healthy return on my investment, nothing more. So when he said what he did, I was a bit baffled, but more on that later.
By mid-2018, the price of BCH had tumbled from its all time high of $4,000 to $800. But I was still optimistic that things would turn around. Wanting to hear what others thought of the situation, I decided to attend my first Bitcoin Cash meetup.
Going in I had no idea what to expect. I'd never done anything like this before. In fact, over the past year, I'd been doing a lot of things I'd never thought I'd do before. My dream was to write a novel and have it published (still is), but suddenly I'd become obsessed with this thing called bitcoin. I was tweeting about it, writing articles and posting them for public consumption, including one about eatBCH that raised quite a bit of money for them at the time. For someone who is generally anti-social and introverted, I suddenly found myself in uncharted waters.
When I arrived at the meet-up venue that day, there were about a dozen people already there. They'd lined up a bunch of round bar tables so we could all sit together. I ended up sitting in an empty seat on one of the ends, and the only reason I mention this is to say that it was hard to talk to anyone unless they were sitting immediately near you.
Among those seated near me was a young Asian girl that wouldn't tell anyone her name. At first I didn't even know if she could talk, because anytime someone came around to introduce themselves, she would lift her hands and wave them in front of her as if to say, "No speak English". I had no idea what her deal was. But then I finally heard her speak in her Vietnamese accent and I was like okay, she's not a mute, which only made her more intriguing. At one point someone took a picture, and the girl got up and talked to a gentleman in a hat, who then went up to the picture taker and had them delete it.
Who is this girl? I thought.
Eventually me and the guy sitting next to me (more on him later) started talking about when we first got into Bitcoin, and the girl surprisingly joined in on the conversation. I forget exactly what she said, but she implied she'd been involved since the early days. I started peppering her with questions, but all her answers were vague or misleading. Eventually we got onto the subject of stocks, and this was where she really got my attention.
She said I needed to sell all my stocks. She went on to lay out the reasons why our economy was in big trouble. I won't get into all the details, but everything she said checked out when I looked them up on my phone. She talked about the trade war with China, the devaluation of the Yuan, the book value of tech stocks, the decline of Deutsche Bank. She also mentioned the VIX and the XIV and how HSBC and Credit Suisse got rekt because of it. She talked about the rise of adjustable rate mortgages, and how there were multiple bubbles ready to pop. Basically she painted this doomsday scenario that was so convincing I ended up selling all my stocks the following Monday. That same week Facebook and Amazon announced earnings, and over the next several months, I watched as the entire market started to tank. It has since recovered and made new highs, but for a time I thought the girl prophetic.
On the subject of Bitcoin Cash, she said she had no idea where the price was going to go, only that it appeared we were forming a huge base of a cup. She also believed there would be another chain split, and that we would have 3 different major forks, which proved to be true a few months later.
As we continued talking, I remember I kept asking her what she was going to do after the meet-up. I don't know why. I guess I just wanted to keep talking to her, like I was sure she knew things I would never know about.
"You're one of the most fascinating people I've ever met," I said at one point.
"I get that all the time," she said.
Eventually I wanted another drink so I went to the bar. When I turned back around, she was gone.
I was disappointed of course. I asked some of the folks who were still there if they knew who she was, but no one seemed to know.
The following week, I wrote an article on Yours.org describing the entire encounter. A few days later, I got a DM on reddit from a total stranger asking if I was the person who had written the article.
"I know who you met. You can find out who it is if you go digging a bit," the stranger wrote.
"Who is she?" I asked, but the person didn't want to dox her, so all they told me was to look at posts around the time of the scaling debate and I'd likely find her.
I did just that, and by some miracle I found out who she was. (And it's not the girl in the lead image. That's just a free pic from Unsplash)
The suspense is ... :) For a girl who "no speak[s] English" she spoke an awful lot :) But it's usually the case with very smart people - they don't want public attention on them.