This is one of the more cathartic posts laying out a collection of thoughts on cryptocurrency. I was first introduced to bitcoin around 2012 while in college. I was (and still am in some ways) a terminally online hacker crawling the corners of the net so a subversive digital currency with an anonymous cypherpunk founder was right up my alley. I had an immediate use case and was a member of the original Silk Road, spending hundreds of bitcoins on cannabis and mushrooms. At the time I used localbitcoins and traded with people on forums before the first Coinbase transaction I can find in my email from December 2016. I never acquired a large stash of bitcoin despite dealing with them for several years, hindsight is 20/20. I stopped using darknet markets around 2016. At this point I was out of college and getting older so the need for illegal substances combined with the legalization of cannabis greatly reduced the need for online markets. I had heard of Ethereum but it was not until the 2018 ICO crazy that I played around with smart contracts but thankfully never participated in any ICO. At the time I thought the idea of programable money was very interesting and I thought there was a lot of potential. The consultancy I worked for at the time had several Cryptocurrency clients so I read several reports but never performed an audit myself. I remember thinking, 'wow all these companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars on my respected firm to review code, it must be important and real'. How naïve, now the only thing I remember from that era was CryptoKitties which I never participated because it was ridiculous. The hype died and several more years passed. By late 2020 I was ready to leave consulting and join an internal security team. After a grueling interview cycle I had several offers from great companies but Coinbase had all the best attributes. Top of market pay, fully remote, interesting challenges, new tech, and I would be on the new and growing 'Offensive Security' team. My only concern was that I was not a believer. I hadn't thought about crypto deeply since 2018. So I dove into the blockchain tech and tried to fool myself by saying things like Uniswap were innovative; "it's a totally decentralized exchange!". Or the idea of non-custodial lending to be your own bank thanks to defi protocols. Looking back at my reasons now, all I see is cryptocurrency financial shenanigans and degenerate gambling. Still with money signs in my eyes I joined Coinbase and consoled myself with all the good reasons I listed and leaning on that fact that is was not a blockchain job, I was still working on all software systems outside the blockchain. The security org and my team in particular were great despite the hyper-growth in all aspects of the company. A lot of smart, hardworking people kept the systems safe. The crypto and subsequent Coinbase financial implosion over 2022 killed the org, both in morale and future prospects. I tried to finish my 2 years and jumped ship at the end of the year. When you get past the price explosion I can see that there is no reason why it was so big. Everyone was waiting for it to change finance but that made little sense and was impossible from the start. For each "wave" of crypto tech (currencies, smart contracts, NFT's), I've thought to myself, "That's a cool primitive, I wonder what useful thing people will build on it" And each time, I've continued to wonder more or less indefinitely as pretty much nothing useful comes out of it. Lots of scams, speculation, and investor money, but nothing anyone used. Now in days I alternate between it's space full of scammers at worst to it's a technology looking for solution at best. Compare this with something like GPT which already has dozens of use cases, I myself pay $10 a month for copilot. My only reservation maybe something like Monero, which acts as a true digital cash like the original dream of Satoshi. I sold my small remaining crypto holdings in 2022 and exited the space permanently.