The short story of an IT pro turned full-time crypto facilitator! - crowetic's story - short version!

Hello STEEM and steemit.com users!

I would like to do a little ‘intro’ to who I am, what I’m doing now, and explain some past situations so that people have a bit more ‘light’ on the subjects that I’ve received questions about.
First off, I’ll explain about myself and who I am…

INTRO

My name is Jason Crowe, I’ve been in IT for 16+ years. I am 31 years old, and am now full-time crypto-only income. I went full-time crypto about 2 years ago.
I was systems admin for my county, I used to work at multiple different local IT providers. I have always been interested in new hardware and new tech.

MY CRYPTO BEGINNING

I found BTC in 2013 right around the time that Gox died. Immediately, I became interested in the idea of ‘mining’. Being able to literally MINT money with a computer? That sounds like a dream come true for someone like me!

So, I started figuring out how to do this so-called ‘mining’… Quickly realizing that at the time BTC was already WAY beyond being able to be mined on ‘normal computers’. Specialized mining hardware was just getting big, Butterfly labs and such, hitting the scene (and soon after, un-hitting the scene, lol…)

Once I realized the fact that mining BTC was outside the realm of possibility for me at the current time… I started looking into ‘alt coins’, apparently BTC had spawned babies!

I found a coin called ‘Primecoin’, and found it particularly interesting for a few reasons… one, it was still CPU mineable, which was a huge plus for me. Two, it was actually valuable in scientific terms, because it was crunching prime numbers on its blockchain! So, I started mining it with the single 4-core CPU that I had at the time…

I started the miner, then after a few weeks, started paying attention to other things, and pretty much forgot that I was mining the coin… but… I left the miner running.

When I finally came back into the crypto ‘scene’ a month or two later… and checked my balance… I realized that I had over 2000 USD worth of coin! From a single 4-core CPU in a couple months!? This is incredible!

That started my journey into mining.

I started renting servers in Amazon cloud, and various other places, to continue mining XPM on CPU, then, inevitably for most algos, XPM’s algo became GPU-mineable. At this point, I had been talking to my father about these ‘magic internet coins’, and he became interested, and also a friend of mine… So, we decided to build a miner for GPU mining.

I put together my first 5-card GPU rig early 2014, and started mining whatever I could. Of course, because I loved XPM, I started mining that first. Then realized that there were many other coins, and new ones coming every day that could be mined with my GPUs.

Slowly but surely I worked my single rig into about 20 GPUs, all mining various coins. I loved it, and the concept of building the rigs, keeping them cool, finding lowest power costs, tweaking them to get more and use less power… all so much fun!

THE ASIC CRAZE

Then, everything changed… BTC price was way low, so much skepticism, drug busts, silkroad busts, etc etc… is BTC dead? The coin dropped to 300 USD and lower, and all mining wasn’t really making much more than power costs, if you were lucky… My GPUs were seeming more useful to play video games than to mine…

So, I started looking into ASIC miners… and right around this time, the first Scrypt ASICs for LTC (I think it was the only Scrypt coin at the time) were coming out… I decided to pick up some ‘Gridseed’ ASIC miners. Little tiny miners that supposedly would give me a super solid hashrate…

I bought the Gridseeds when they first came out, for an absurd price… and thus entered myself into the ASIC RACE!
I decided that my ASICs were doing better than my GPUs, so I sold all my GPU gear, and picked up more ASICs, I ended up with 14 AntMiner S3s and my 5 Gridseeds.

I quickly learned, that ASICs were VERY short-lived in their life span (especially at that time…) and my farm basically got me ROI plus maybe 25% before I sold the ASICs again…

BURST – HDD MINING!?

At the same time as I was selling my ASICs and wondering what I was going to do next, I ran across a bitcointalk post about a coin called BURST that had just been released, literally the same day a few hours before…

I was really excited by the possibility of mining with something that was so low-power… I mean, HDDs only take 5w of power! How incredible this idea of HDD mining!

I jumped on the coin day one, and mined my first solo block at block 700.

The BURST ANN, was the first place that I really started ‘getting involved’ with the community on the forums… and when BURST first started, the community was GREAT! They were all helpful, looking forward, and trying to make things better. It was fantastic!

About 2 months after release, I think, I helped put together the ‘BURST core team’, a team of community members that were looking to do good things for the coin. We helped get PR out there, helped get services made, etc etc.

Everything was going well, until the day that our ‘PR fund’ account was stolen by one of the other founding members of the team. The day before we were supposed to launch a VERY important PR announcement about BURST being the first to have Smart Contracts fully functioning (a full year before ETH was even a functioning project) and the first to do a fully decentralized cross-chain transfer with another coin (QORA).

Unfortunately, due to the theft, this information never really ‘got out’, and no one ever really knew that BURST was a world-first on all of these things and more…

After that theft, I went dark on crypto for a while, focused on my real life…

BURST – TIME TO STEP UP

When I decided to come back and check up on how things were doing with BURST, after I had started my computer company, and got things going well enough there… What I found was appalling… BURST was almost dead! It seems not many things were done in my absence…

There was some development going on, but only on a wallet wrapper for Windows, and some mining and plotting software, few other tools, etc… but nothing was getting out there in a proper way, so not many people knew…

At this point, I decided to approach the community, and ask them if they would be alright with me taking a more ‘leadership’ type position in the coin… At the time, I didn’t have near the connections I do now, and all I really had was ambition and the will to make things happen… Also of course, I type quickly, have good grammar, and always was 100% behind BURST and telling as many people as I could about it, and what I loved about it.

After I asked the community if they would be cool with me doing a more leadership role, they agreed with it, and I did. There were a couple people who were against it, but the overwhelming majority was for it.

So I formed a new team, brought new coders in, built a place for them to communicate, and started moving forward.
At the time, BURST was at about 10 satoshi, and in threat of being delisted from all 3 exchanges it was listed on…

MOVING FORWARD

I took BURST and made it my baby, I proclaimed all of its features from the mountain tops. Made the pool that I had helped build at the very beginning, into the world’s largest pool, based an asset on top of its fees, and paid out the asset holders with them, even though I was paying the service fees out of my pocket with money from my day job.
I essentially built the first REAL BURST asset.

I did a LOT of work for BURST, dedicated a lot of time to it.

I kept building up my infrastructure, mining, and promoting BURST, and all things it can do, got many PR docs done, did everything I could. Didn’t make much at all from it, it was more something I did just because I thought BURST had great tech, and would be a very long term and solid project if worked correctly, and I wanted to help make that happen!

Everything was going well, community growing at a nice pace, and new devs coming on board, etc…

Things were looking quite good for the long-term project I thought it would be!

THE MARKETING NEEDS – MY MISTAKE

BURST was doing alright, but volume and interest was low, it simply needed more reach, more people looking at it, etc… So, I called upon someone that I used to think of as a friend back then, as he had pulled the wool over my eyes and convinced me he was a good person… (which I later found out was a HUGE lie…) Adam Guerbuez… AKA Mr Scam… Wait, oh yea, he doesn’t actually go by that name, that’s just MY name for him… but I’m sure you’ve all heard of him.

He, after me mentioning BURST to him for over a year and a half… finally agreed to help me get the coin out to more people. (At the time, I had assumed that he actually had a following of a bunch of legit people, but I found out that wasn’t true either, and it ended up becoming a massive mess for BURST…)

I got AG involved, as a marketer… he was supposed to ONLY be a marketer… but I found out that wasn’t what his true intention was… he wanted to take BURST over, and make it into yet another of his various scams he had done in the past (and convinced me otherwise with his con man ways.)

Instead, what AG did, was cause a rift in the community, allowing him to take over 50% of the community and move to a new forum. At the time, I agreed with certain reasons for leaving the burst-team.us forums, so I decided to help start BurstNation forums/BURST hub with him and his lackie, I mean… his ‘tech’, ‘focus’.

BURSTNATION – THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR BURSTCOIN

So, focus, Adam, and I decided to start BurstNation, and bring as many of the community with us there as possible… unfortunately, since I had a lot of clout with the community, I managed to get a LARGE portion of the community to come to the new location with us…

The forums started out really well, solid community, people happy, etc… That all changed FAST.

During the time of the beginning of BurstNation, I was focused on building my assets, and making the mining operation much larger. I had already gotten multiple base level investors and was building about 80k USD in mining hardware.

Since I wasn’t paying a ton of attention to the forums, I didn’t notice right away, that things had gone downhill FAST… There was censorship, blatant lies from AG and focus, attacks on people without merit, and basically a nazi-like leadership, down to the leader actually being known in the past to be a neo-nazi (something I didn’t know about until later.)

BurstNation quickly became a heavily modded, heavily censored cesspool… The more I saw of this, the more I realized that I had made a very big mistake getting involved with AG.

THE END OF CROWETIC AND AG CO-OPERATION

I realized too much that I didn’t like about BurstNation, and what Adam and Focus were doing… Things were getting really difficult to be around, and I was getting tired of it. I stopped hanging around them much at all, to which they complained DAILY, saying that I should be around more, and they missed me and whatever else…

(The reason for this I found out later, is that they had planned a scam from the very beginning, had been recording EVERY conversation we ever had, in voice, text, everything… They had planned to make ME the fall man for their final exit scam. But I didn’t know this at this time in the story… so I’ll continue…)

The day finally came, when I knew for sure that I couldn’t be around the bullshit any longer. I started seeing what the overall ‘plan’ was with BurstNation, and I really realy didn’t like it. That same day… AG came to me and coerced me into doing a video ‘apologizing’ for trying to stop the massive pump that destroyed the BURST AE, and started the beginning of the end, of BURST itself…

After doing that video, and feeling extremely shitty about myself for letting myself get coerced into it (under threat of defamation, and ‘slandering me all over the internet’ as AG put it…) I had finally had enough.

I posted my ‘crowetic’s apology letter’ in which I called out AG for being a total nazi piece of shit, and explained to everyone that I was sorry for ever bringing him in, and most of all, for letting myself become a pawn in his scam game.

(This couldn’t have come soon enough, as I found the final piece of the puzzle letting me know for sure that he WAS planning on using me for his exit scam.)

CROWETIC LEAVES BURST COMPLETELY

Shortly after posting my apology letter, and leaving BurstNation, going back to burst-team forums… I had been doing a lot of thinking. Putting together information that I had learned over the last 3 years working with BURST, and seeing what the REAL goals of AG and Focus were…

It all was looking quite bad…

BURST wasn’t the solid coin I thought it was, and the more devs I had look into it, the more I realized this. The base level platform wasn’t solid, and the algo was completely flawed…

This wasn’t the place I wanted to run my assets, anymore.

I had tried MANY things to fix the problems… had devs try to fix the algo, then completely try to re-write it… but nothing worked.

I tried to convince people of the underlying flaws with the algo, and the core of the coin, network stability, etc… but no one wanted to make fundamental changes.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that BURST was going to die, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it, aside from a total rebuild (which I would have done, but after the slander that started coming once I left AG, threats on myself and my family, public doxxing of myself and friends, etc… and a personal attack on my fiancée multiple times… I simply didn’t have the will to continue working for BURST anymore.)

So, I made the decision to walk.

The problem, was that AG had paid multiple trolls which he called ‘his army’ to slander me, make up all sorts of lies, and perpetuate these lies to everyone within BURST. So, of course, many people, not having dealt with me in the past, believed him.

I had had enough.

I posted my buyback and exit post, telling everyone who held my assets to reach out to me in my newly created Discord channel, or sell into the buyback walls I had posted (of course, that incited much dismay, as the buyback prices weren’t what people were happy with. However, all they had to do, was talk to me personally, and that would have been resolved, but they didn’t, they of course, being paid trolls, continued to talk shit, lie, and go on and on about things that simply weren’t true.)
Anyone who has further questions about this, feel free to reach out to me in private, and I can explain anything you’d like to know.

Every one of my assets, aside from the most recent, had already made at least 200% ROI, if not MUCH more, so people who actually realized this and thought about it, had no issue. The trolls, of course, had issue with any and everything.
The assets last day of trading on BURST, is today, July 25th, 2017. Anyone who holds my assets still, please reach out to me in my Discord channel, and we can talk.

TODAY – WHAT I AM DOING NOW

Over the last 4 years I have made some GREAT friends, connections, and helped with many awesome projects, etc.
My passion is to bring good tech to the people, to be the ‘face’ of a great project, and to watch it cross the globe. I care little for money, but of course, it is a necessary evil, so it is what it is.

With some of the great people I’ve met in ADSactly, they’ve appointed me ‘community leader’, and given me the reins on a few things, which I’m more than happy to help with, as I think a decentralized distributed community helping each other is the perfect thing for crypto communities.

So basically, I’m here to help. :)

Any and all good solid legitimate projects, I will help in any way I can.

Also recently became involved with a new coin called SIGT (Signatum) which is a total fair no IPO no premine no dev fund release, and a totally new GPU algo called Skunkhash Raptor, with a built in balancer, that gives even smaller miners a chance even when the network hashrate is huge.

The coin is not even a week old, I’ve helped it get listed on cryptopia, and the network hashrate already reached over 1TH! With massive miner support. The community is helpful and excited, and it’s a really refreshing place to be after all the nonsense I had to deal with recently.

With SIGT and ADSactly, and what I was already involved with, rebuilding and re-birthing the custom java coin called QORA… I think I’m pretty set with things to work on, and I’m back to being happy with what I’m doing, and feeling like my skills are being used properly, and I can do the most amount of helping that I can with as many people as possible.

I think there is a really really solid future coming for ADSactly community, SIGT, and QORA, and I invite everyone here to come along for the ride!

I’m also quite happy with OpenLedger, and the people involved, they’ve been very helpful, and I’ve learned the platform and the more I learn of it the more I love it, and I plan to hopefully make it the main exchange for any project that I’m involved with in the future.

THE END AND THE BEGINNING!

Anyway… I Think I’ll end this here, but thank you all for taking the time to read my little brief explanation of what I’ve done and what I can do, and feel free to reach out to me if you need anything, or would like more information on anything I’m doing, or would like to help, or whatever! I don’t turn anyone down unless they’re just not good people. Having money doesn’t matter, it’s the PASSION and will to SUCCEED with whatever you do, that matters.

I’ve learned a lot over these last 4 years, about who to work with, what to do, what people in crypto expect, and what things are good and what aren’t. I look forward to putting my skills to the test with ADSactly, QORA, and SIGT for now, and many many other things in the future.

I am calling myself ‘Facilitator of Digital Disruption’, because well… that’s what I’m doing! I look forward to massive disruption with every good person here in crypto!

Thanks everyone! Thanks STEEMit, and I’ll catch ya all on the flip side!

Much love to all true crypto and decentralization fanatics! Let's change the way the world works!

-crowetic (cr0wetic on steemit since I messed up my first account. Lol…)
Facilitator of Digital Disruption
ADSactly, QORA, and Signatum projects (currently ;))