was a 45-year-old middle manager at a major multi-media company in San Francisco. Though I earned a respectable $150k per year, I hated the fake company culture, the bureaucracy, and the endless chains of command. Like so many others, I was looking for some kind of escape. And soon, I found one. Dan wallowing in the misery of corporate America (courtesy of Dan Conway) One early morning in mid-2015, before anyone else was in the office, I was browsing online and stumbled upon an article about Bitcoin. I’d heard about Bitcoin years earlier when I was preoccupied with climbing the corporate ladder. Back then, it seemed ludicrous to spend money — real currency that I could hold in my hands — on some digital token that existed on a public ledger in the cloud. To be frank, I thought it was complete bullshit. But that morning, I had a sudden change of heart. Bitcoin, the article read, was going through an especially rough patch. Its price, which was in a constant state of volatility, had fallen from a high of $1.2k in 2013 to $300. My mind raced: What if it goes up again? What if I put everything I had into this? I could get rich and never work another day in corporate America… A part of me recognized these thoughts as destructive mania. My addictive personality had landed me in trouble before — first with alcohol, then with harder drugs. My 12-step sponsor wasn’t going to pat me on the back and say, “Go buy That Bitcoin, Dan! Sounds like a fantastic plan!” At the same time, my wife Eileen and I were raising 3 children and had a big mortgage on our home in the Bay Area. The Great Recession had snatched away most of Eileen’s PR consulting clients. We were privileged, of course, but money was tighter than usual. Sitting in my empty office, I began to go down the crypto rabbit hole. And the more I learned, the more I was pulled in.