Happy Birthday Ethereum & A Toast to the Future

On July 20, 2015, the Ethereum Genesis block was generated and it has already been a year.  Wow! What a ride it has been.  

My Journey of the Ethereum Train

I learned about Ethereum last summer from other Bitcoin enthusiasts at The Bitcoin Center NYC. Tbh my primary reason for going to The Bitcoin Center NYC was the free booze and free pizza.  

 Anyways, people talk about this new project with “smart contracts” for the blockchain.   Well, I had no idea what that meant at all.  But I had some spare change and decided to jump into the crowd sale.  I mean who knows, maybe it will be big one day in like ten years, I thought.  

I get my wallet.json and I am like “shit”.  I have no idea what to do with it, how to open it or do anything.  

Well, I will just keep it safe and figure it out some other time.  The summer ends, school starts and I stop going to The Bitcoin Center NYC.  Too busy even for free food and drink.  

Christmas, New Year passes.  In March of 2016, I start having some pocket money and wanted to buy more Bitcoins.  Well, it turns out The Bitcoin Center NYC had moved from Wall Street and stopped having their live-market exchange.  I heard good things about Coinbase so I make my first purchase of bitcoin via the internet.  With this bitcoin, I wanted to start trading other altcoins so I sign up for Poloniex.  

Wow! It seemed like Ethereum was doing very well.  10 dollars one day.  A couple days later 15.  Now I was curious about my Ether stash.  At that point, I was not even sure how many ETH I had.  To by delight, myetherwallet.com made it easy for me to check my balance.  Luckily, I had remembered my password.   

I was excited with my return on investment.  I mean I was making 10% on my Robinhood stocks and this was orders of magnitude larger.  If only I had invested more in the crowdsale. LOL!! 

I continued to follow Ethereum the next couple of months.  I learn about DAOs and everyone was excited about invest it those.  The DigixDAO crowd sale came and I like many others missed out.  Well, I wasn’t going to miss the next one.  The DAO came along and I invested a small portion of my ether holdings.  It was the first transaction out of my wallet up to that point.  

Cool. I get these DAO tokens and a quarter of billion dollars is raised by the DAO crowd sale.  Ethereum reached ATH of 22 dollars and then.

The DAO attack.  I didn’t split proposals or do any of that stuff, simply because I didn’t know how to.  So I wait it out.  Soft fork consensus is reached and then DDOS attack vector is found.  So soft fork canceled and hark fork time.  The hard fork consensus was reached.  Yes, it was reached.  (There is no debate about that).  And now the whole fiasco with the ETH and ETC.  I will wait this one out just like every other problem Ethereum has preserved against.  

For me, this year has been a fun ride.  I have felt the love of the Ethereum Reddit community.  I have learned from the blog post of Ethereum contributors.  I have seen the passion of the Ethereum developers.  I am so optimistic about the future of Ethereum, its DAPPs and its DAOs.   

Happy Birthday Ethereum!    

Here's a toast to Vitalik and all the other Ethereum developers and contributors.

 I look forward to the launch of Metropolis, the first payout from DigixDao, and new exciting DAOs. A toast to another year of development and growth. HODL and to the moon.