Bitcoin introduced me to a new world.
I was involved in Cryptocurrency when I was a sophomore at Fudan. I bought my first bitcoin at the price around $80 at 2013. And the reason of this purchase is because I agree with the philosophy behind Bitcoin, a distributed monetary system, or more.
Just a few months later, the world went crazy about Bitcoin, the price soared and it was traded at over $1200. Only lottery could beat this is kind of return at that time. I also got excited just like everyone else. I started to read more articles about it. That winter I was an auditing intern at KPMG with my friends. I hadn’t had enough time to implement my thought until Spring Festival (Chinese New Year).
I bought 3 GPUs (first MSI R7850 as a test, then MSI R9 280X and Sapphire R9 290) and started my “mining career”. I designed my own mining rig and worked very hard to tune my system for best efficiency (speed, ratio of computation effort and power consumption). That’s when I started to understand electronics. I dealt with all kinds of problems like power issues, electromagnetic interference issues, thermal issues and how to make the hardware run in the way that I want them to. I also spend some time solving several networking problems. I became a Linux user since then.
My small rig was mainly mining Litecoin, because mining bitcoin with GPU is no longer profitable due to the appearance of dedicated ASIC and FPGA mining machine. Despite my effort, I still shut it down just after 50 days of operation because the computational effort of the entire mining pool increased exponentially and specific mining chip for Litecoin also appeared on the market. So, it is not a successful investment in terms of money, but I learned a lot from it.
I was pursuing my bachelor degree in finance when I was doing all this. I watched the markets go up and down in a crazy way. Based on a distributed system with zero regulation, the market is 100% wild. I thought about the possibility of market manipulation and read a lot about all kinds of conspiracy. And then I started to think about the Internet, the network itself, especially distributed network struture like P2P. I believe if we can truly exploit the benefits of distributed network, it will be the next culmination of information technology and an important step of human evolution.
The creation (or creator(s)) of Bitcoin is still a myth to us. This brilliant guy (or group) is not willing to show himself/herself, which is very interesting. However, one thing that I get from this is: There are some guys, who are so knowledgeable and have so much wisdom, that they actually possess “super-natural” power in the digital world.
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