Here’s my Monero story:
https://github.com/Extropians/Extropy/blob/master/Extropy-10_1_Winter-Spring-1992.pdf

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Too bad I arrived way too late for that world: I read it 30 years after it was written.
The good thing (if you can call it that) is that by then the surrender was already obvious: Bitcoin and the rest of crypto had been gradually surrendered one “reasonable” compromise at a time. Custodial for safety, KYC for security, convenience for everything else. Slowly boiling frog: even most ideological cypherpunks didn’t seem to notice until the water was too hot.

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But to an outsider who had just discovered it, all crypto looked like just gambling and/or an institutional get-rish-fast asset. Zero initial cypherpunks' spirit left.
Monero was the first thing that still felt to me like that Extropy article.

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In 1986 I arrived in New York with a pistol and a cowboy hat and was disappointed to discover
that the west had already been won.
My first after school job was building the railways and that had inspired me to become an intellectual so I studied medicine and began to work as a specialist of sorts, but I quickly
realized my heart was not in it.

Hospital care was about giving very sick people a long term addiction to powerful drugs thatbcured one symptom in return for many side affects and disability.
I had an expensive education, high debt and growing disillusionment with big health, the government, the police and the general state of our lives of quiet desperation in economic enslavement.

One day I threw my pager out a top story window of the hospital. I was immediately issued a new one. It beeped 12 times in 2 minutes so I flushed it down the toilet and went home to sit in a dark room.
My throughbred race horse had also been molested at this time giving me more than one reason for melancholy, but it isn't about that right now.

In searching yahoo for what's next I stumbled upon "bitcoin" which interested me. In my free time, which little I had, I was already reading a lot of anarchist writing, self sovereignty,
unorthodox lifestyles, financial systems and alternatives to statist regulated highly controlled life.

At that time I couldn't buy the bitcorn but I later began to stack. Decentralized tech appealed and
once I had an unstable income working for myself I sporadically stacked more.

I read cypherpunk, lunarpunk, solarpunk, any punk and applied many of the digital ideas to my
real world life.

I discovered monero very early because I had used it to buy my btc and found the transaction
experience using monero terrible. Yes, monero was my first coin and a sign of things to come..
The more I read the more I actually liked XMR, the rock the fanta branding, the community, the
ethos and I began to add a little every now and then, maybe around $70?

What got me bigger into Monero was whenI tried to pay someone with btc, but didn't when I realized that would give them the ability to see how many coins I had and I didn't like that.

It wasn't long, despite some reservations, that I concluded the active development and the
privacy were forming a large moat between bitcoin and monero and I was a monero guy.

I got into all of this almost by accident. Back in high school, I was annoyed by the "Activate Windows" watermark and the general feeling that Windows was watching everything I did on my own laptop. That annoyance made me look for alternatives, and I'd only ever heard the word "Linux" in passing before that.

Once I actually looked into it, the phrase "completely free and the source code is fully open" genuinely amazed me. The idea that anyone could open the code and see exactly what it does, and use it however they wanted, felt like a different way of thinking about software entirely. I picked a distro, followed a YouTube tutorial, and installed it on my laptop.

That was the domino that started everything. Linux led me to open source in general, and open source, to me, was really just another word for privacy: nothing hidden, nothing running behind your back. That need for privacy pushed me (already leaning libertarian) further into anarcho-capitalism.

I was hanging around small ancap circles on Twitter when I saw someone mention Monero. I already knew Bitcoin existed, but only in passing, I'd never really looked into it. This person was talking about Monero's untraceability and fungibility, the fact that a coin can't get "tainted" the way it can with Bitcoin, and something about that just clicked for me. I started digging into how it actually worked.

Somewhere in that research I learned Monero's mining algorithm was CPU-friendly, so I ended up pool mining from my own computer at home. First real thing I did with what I mined was buy a gift card and use it on Steam.

That gift card was a small thing, but what really hit me was the feeling of having real, solid money that actually meant something, and that no one could touch. These days, instead of just using Monero, I try to build tools around it.

friend is deep into crypto. monero too. he actually uses it not just talks. the kind of stuff i think is better not to name here. for me it is the only one that feels real. everything else looks like it already got a government stamp. monero is the only rebel.

I was young and poor so I decided to start carding, after a relative told me about TOR network I found some platforms and bought my first credit card numbers with monero.
Thought in this kind of business privacy was mandatory, so I got deep into Linux networking and anything privacy related.
After a few years I dropped it because it's stressing never knowing how close the law is to you, but I stay very involved in XMR and all privacy stuff.

If you were victim of carding don't hate, you have been refunding by your bank after a few calls. These parasites will adjust the loss of carding by increasing some fees somewhere by micro percent.

I heard about bitcoin back in like 2013 when i was in highschool. I downloaded a full node and was disappointed to figure out that I could not mine from my laptop to make any because I didn't really have any disposable income at that time. I would not have even thought to try to acquire it from another person peer-to-peer on a forum at this point in my life. So I just kind of gave up on it as something interesting, but not something I could really play with.

I was in my school economics class later on and my teacher brought up an article from a newspaper about it. I want to say it was like Yahoo Finance or something. And my first thought was that thing still exists and hasn't been shut down by the government because I didn't understand the whole decentralization thing at the time.

I actually then got some and started using it to buy gift cards for things on an old site called gyft and thought it was really neat.

However, I was mainly always interested in Bitcoin as a replacement to the financial system once I figured out and understood the decentralization and that it could not be shut down and so when fees went absolutely mad in 2017 because of the block size wars and I could no longer use it to purchase items with using gift cards so I thought it was a cool experiment that had just failed and gave up on it until like 2022.

By that time I was very much into the privacy lifestyle and had done things like delete all of my big tech social media accounts and was running lineage OS on my phone with no Google Play services, etc. And I was using ProtonMail and had stopped using my Gmail, but I still had it at the time even though I never logged into it.

I guess maybe either something came up in the news about Bitcoin, or I heard about Bitcoin some other way again, and was like, oh yeah, I remember that was a neat experiment that failed, but there's got to be a privacy currency. And when I found that, I found Monero.

No whitepaper moment. I did start with BTC in 2014 so I had an introduction via that. By the time I was paying attention, Monero was just the coin that didn't publish the ledger. Then when COVID happened I went all in.

How I actually started was the computers. I already had Ryzen boxes in the house. RandomX is a CPU thing, so I pointed them at it instead of buying through a ramp and hoping the privacy survived the on-ramp. Mining came first. I'd mined BTC a bit but it was getting out of touch already with GPU and other tech. Moneros concepts spoke to me. A local node came because I got tired of some stranger's node being the one that tells me what's confirmed.

Why this one: the amounts are hidden, and a spend doesn't draw a line back to you by default. I don't want privacy as a setting I have to remember to turn on.

The rest of the daily stuff is boring on purpose.

• Real-life mail and docs live on Proton, not the free Google inbox.
• The house has a DNS filter. It does not live on the PC I actually use. That machine sleeps, reboots, and gets tinkered with. Dinner shouldn't depend on it.
• uBlock in the browser. Different layer from the house filter.
• Disk encryption, and backups that aren't just "I copied the folder once."
• Phone isn't logged into the whole Google life. VPN when I remember. A VPN is not anonymity.
• I run my own node for the chain view. A remote node can be wrong on purpose.
• I don't paste seeds, bank stuff, or medical paperwork into a chatbot. That's a bigger leak than a missing adblocker.

I'm not trying to disappear. Private enough that the house isn't a tracking buffet. The monastery version of this hobby burns people out, and then they go back to the defaults.

I got into crypto w/ wireless depin/dewi projects, Helium LoRaWan specifically. They had their own chain, then they migrated over to Solana.

I was surprised all of those chains were public by default, that was odd to me, thought private by default should've been the norm. I literally searched something like "most widely used, best private chain" and found Monero. You might say I discovered Monero from first principles.

I'll actually tip replies after monday, so I don't risk qualifying for weekly rewards this week.